My last column of 2025 is for Ahmed Abdillahi from Rotterdam. He ran a marathon twenty-five times this year. He traveled more than 1,050 kilometers to draw attention to poverty in his city, in our country, perhaps worldwide. On hot days, on cold days. On days when it rained and blew. He ran through streets he knew. And streets he didn’t know. On December 21 he walked his last.
With an average of three and a half hours per marathon, Ahmed had almost ninety hours to think. What might he have thought about along the way? He thought of his goal as he took his first steps, I’m sure. But once you’re busy, your mind goes its own way. Your nose picks up a smell, or you hear a familiar sound. And suddenly you are thinking of your youth.
For Ahmed it was in Somalia, until he fled with his aunt and uncle at the age of 12 from the civil war that was raging there at the time. What is it like to end up in a village in Friesland, where the sun shines, but not brighter than the refrigerator light?
Did his marathons also pass through Hilligersberg? It was snowing that winter of 2009, he had just become a postal worker. He wasn’t doing well. He drank and smoked cannabis to escape reality – until the freezing cold bit his cheeks. His eyes opened in the fairytale white neighborhood. Ahmed increasingly took his bike or running shoes to discover the Netherlands. And he read. Philosophers, economists, great thinkers, to understand the world.
But maybe his bags of mail really take care of that. He comes everywhere. In the expensive flats in Rotterdam where they have no regard for a postman like him. He is a shadow there, almost invisible. In the poor neighborhoods people are waiting for him. He is sometimes the only form of social contact there.
With every step, Ahmed pleads for attention, for conversation, for mercy
If he has time he has a chat and discovers how big it is the poverty and loneliness of many in Rotterdam is real. How big the differences are. Ahmed has undoubtedly also read that it is so easy to solve this problem, not only in Rotterdam, but worldwide. The very rich only have to give so little. If the richest ten percent in the world, and that is everyone who earns more than a hundred thousand dollars annually, give twenty cents a day, the greatest need can be met, the UN recently calculated. But we refuse.
As a world, we spent 2.7 trillion euros on weapons last year, but did not want to spend just one percent of that amount on solving the worst misery. It is heartbreaking that even in the Netherlands we choose serious diseases as a target Serious Requestand not for poverty or refugees – because that is too polarizing.
It makes me so cynical. Not Ahmed. He sees the similarities throughout his city, through all the polarization. I have noticed in conversations with people that despite everything we are united, he says. A city is a sum of individuals. The same goes for a country, and for the world.
With every step this year, Ahmed advocated that: to have an eye for it. For a real conversation. For mercy. That’s why my last column of 2025 is for Ahmed Abdillahi. Think about him again in 2026.
The journalistic principles of NRC