BAIDOA, Somalia — The young man is nostalgic for a time he can't even remember.
Aden Osman was 4 when the Somalian government collapsed in 1991. When he was 6, the bodies of American servicemen were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu and most of the world turned its back on his country.
That's when his childhood memories begin to grow clearer.
There was the day when he was 9 and his uncles were shot while fetching water. He had to bury them. Another time, a rival clan slaughtered the family's livestock and poisoned their well. And in a battle between warlords, he was separated from his family for five days without food.
Most of all, he remembers the running, the constant fleeing through the bush as his family sought refuge from the clan warfare that seized the country 15 years ago after the fall of strongman Mohamed Siad Barre. They prayed for enough time in one place just to grow some food.
But Aden's parents have told him about better times, before the warlords, when the country was run by something called a government. Back then, they had cattle and crops to eat. People walked the streets at night without fear, his parents said. Children went to school and there was a hospital for the sick.
These are the times Aden dreams of.
"My parents say there were no checkpoints back then," he said. "There was no random killing without reason. And if you killed someone or robbed someone, you were punished. I wish I lived then. I guess I was born in an unlucky time."
Aden is one of millions of teens coming of age with little memory of Somalia's past and few skills to build its future.
The country is in ruins. A transitional government is meeting here in Baidoa, making the latest effort to put the nation back together. But even if the lawmakers succeed, Somalia desperately needs architects, teachers and doctors. Most government buildings were reduced to rubble in the civil war. Roads are broken and airports are little more than dirt strips.
Somalis grow what food they can and import the rest from Yemen and other countries. Wells and rivers are drying up. Water, when it can be found, is often unfit to drink.
After 15 years of anarchy, fewer than one in five Somalian children has ever stepped into a classroom, and even those received only the most basic skills.
"We have lost an entire generation," said Somalian Foreign Minister Abdullahi Sheik Ismail, part of the transitional government attempting to wrest control of the country from warlords.
