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When I was a kid and American Marines landed in Somalia
providing humanitarian assistance,
I thought of themselves as alien because of how they were.
This, just people landing from the air and also
just sort of got out of the ocean and stormed into my city
and started distributing food, water,
and kicked the Somali militias out of the streets.
And these were heavily armed, but they were not
shooting at us.
So at this moment, I realized, wow,
beyond the borders of Somalia, there's
a place out there that has these kind of people.
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Somalia's civil war begins in 1991,
and it also is one of Africa's longest, bloodiest civil war.
The story of the book in the first few chapters
clearly describes the horror, the conflict, the chaos,
the death, the trauma that came out with the war.
And then after that, the invisible
dream that I started pursuing, and that dream
was to be able to move and find where that America was.
I didn't know where America was on the map,
so I thought that they were always across the ocean
because that's how they came.
And as I grew up and learned more and I read books,
I realized that it's not only me,
but that America is the idea that everyone loves,
and America is the exceptional nation
that many people want to move and to live in.
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We live in a world that's man-made,
sort of laws and rules, and borders are one of them.
And I don't think that borders should exist at all.
Borders are dividing families and separating families
from one another.
I was not able to cross from Somalia into Kenya
through the border because the border
had been completely shut.
This has created a huge sort of chaos between the families
because the families live across borders.
I have friends that crossed into Yemen illegally.
I have friends that crossed into Sudan and then Libya
and then made it all the way to Europe.
So this movement, the population that's moving out, is constant.
It's not stopping.
And all we need is a system that sort of welcomes these people,
not really push them away.
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America has internal issues itself in terms of race,
and the election of 2016 sort of make me a little bit
disappointed.
I'm not disappointed in the idea of America.
I'm still strongly attached to it.
I still believe in it and that the American dream still
exists.
But I find myself standing on the side
of the street with a sign rallying, demonstrating,
and that's not what I expected to do.
I thought that America was a place
that everybody felt equal.
So I realized that the journey hasn't ended
and that I have to do more work to convince people
who think that refugees are a problem
that we actually are not a problem,
that I did not come here to take or to steal from America.
I came here to be part of it, to contribute and to belong to.
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