Obama, Ann Nixon Cooper, Nasheed and my grandmother

I don’t know if my grandmother Hiyaladaitha, just a year short of 100, living in an impoverished island in the north of Maldives, voted in the Presidential elections in Maldives like Barack Obama’s Ann Nixon Cooper did in Atlanta.

Hiyaladhaitha did not stand for the buses in Montgomery or the hoses in Birmingham, but she was there to witness a generation of fishermen eke out an existence when their fishing boats were torpedoed by the Japanese imperialists. She along with her family and friends endured the hardships of the ‘magoofaiy’ era and saw her island’s population decimated by cholera and chigella three times. She was there to see five generations of her children overcome a myriad of challenges and multiply to 72 today. She was there when a constitution was torn down, a president was brutally beaten to death by a mob and another president who witnessed the Independence of her country derided by state sponsored public protests.

Meanwhile unbeknownst to Hiyaladhaitha, as Barack Obama said in his victory speech in Illinois, a man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, and lot of other changes happened in the world. But in her small world of less than 800 people, little has changed. Those lucky few among her 72 offspring had long migrated in search of greener pastures.

Mohamed Nasheed, elected by her second, third and fourth generation children will take his oath as the fourth President of this small country, tomorrow. One thing Hiyaladhaitha, who after a century, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, unlike Ann Nixon Cooper, does not know is if her small country can change. And as Mohamed Nasheed prepares to take charge of the highest office in the country, this third generation son of Hiyaladhaitha, who migrated from that impoverished island 29 years ago as a child, is sitting thousands of miles away from where he was born thinking about how the new President is going to shape this small country for the generations to come.