you.

You ever miss someone so much – you talk to him in your dreams.? Whole conversations filled with laughter and but when you reach out – you wake up to face pitch black lonesome silence When happiness was a coin toss – without a blink I bet on tails for us! Remember how so blinded by our own secret language we forgot the world around us…we conjured dreams of an eternal utopia. The impossibility of this blissful happiness is what destroyed us Now each thought of you pierces my heart – what feels like a mini death with no funeral… Your every memory that flows through my veins – what feels a like a cancer with no cure In a haze – you once asked is it better to have and love and lost or never loved at all… my answer then is different what it is now. Now I would do anything to have never met you!

London passing, Mogadishu sun

His last moments passed in a cold London hospital remembering a childhood eating Mogadishu’s fine bananas under a tree

Holding tears back she sits in the hospital room with her husband as she remembers how they love fell in under the Mogadishu stars

Its 6 pm and the BBC Somali tune rings and he holds is wife’s hand and they listen to what they know may be his last bulletin- and sadly yet more heartbreaking turmoil from their beloved Somalia…

He remembers their beautiful white house on the Mogadishu sea front...
He remembers his beautiful wife driving her white beetle to work at the UN office where she promotes woman’s rights...

She remembers laughter filled teatime with their children amidst a red beautiful Mogadishu sunset
She remembers looking through her kitchen window as her husband walked in the gate looking handsome in his blue pilot uniform

How many wonderful brave people will not be buried in Somali soil where they belong?
How many more wonderful people will heartbroken for their homeland that gave them such amazing memories..
Oh Somalia -how many?

I am me

I am,
Organized chaos
Thoughtfully mean
Free… yet tied down
I am elegant and messy
Sometimes cheerfully melancholy
I am
A truthful exaggerator
A Hopeless hopeful
Lazy with initiative
Smart and incomprehensible
I can write but can’t spell
Funnily not amusing
Loudly quite
I am
Charmingly rude
A can of coke
A tea spoon of sugar...o.k maybe table spoon
I am passionately passive
I am kind with a hard heart
I am Somali and proud
I am a piece of African land uprooted
am the tip of the Horn.
I am British and secretly cherish it!
But most important I am what I am!

The Reflective nomad and the confused she camel

Paradoxically logically what a mess and the heavy conscience!
So it’s been a while since I’ve written and the like always I write to in the dead of the night... when all is quiet and under the stars... why is it no matter where you are in the world the night sky and stars are something that seem constant?
My last update (November) was all about hope- I broke free from London (or so it felt) and was heading to exotic Yemen and the future looked bright! My 6 page drool of optimism- was completely read by a few in its entirety...but was the promise of happy times – found in an ancient civilization...
Well- I haven’t written in a while because all that got murky – the clarity that I had then- what that moment in time represented to me...just vanished. Tonight walked along the shore and might have possibly said good bye to that little bit of idealism left inside of me- To all my cynical friend – the goats of my world and other- Hurray
Yes the penny dropped- see there is no ideal- the world is full of gross injustices- that nation of great people I write about above – have for two decades been fleeing running from bullets and mad men – to bewildering cities and prison camps- and it’s hard to explain what made a nation lose its way- loose its people- burn its land. I can’t help but feel the more blood shed the harder it is to forgive...
People are inherently selfish- there is nothing as altruism. In fact i would say the majority of humanitarian workers are guided by ambition clothed in false good! Then our work becomes more about comes about us and less about the people we are helping! Money is spent to build schools that don’t foster learning – at times they stand unused and reports are written to alter the truth!
its a business and a very badly run machine...it can even go in deficit ! world politics has local ramifications and people are the slaughtered animals that are sacrificed for the greater good that we all want- i knew all this all – yes from anthropology to development studies non to this is new- so what did i wash away with the water in my nights swim in the sea- i washed away the rose colored tinted glasses which made me think i could make a difference! See one small step- is not enough! Helping one person does not solve anything- our patronizing tent doesn’t not given someone who left his dear home life shelter-...I make shit difference and the only person I help is me ....

and sometimes...

method to madness -madness to method

they say that life teaches lessons the hard way- That what doesnt kill us makes us stronger- or a little strange. Or maybe it changes us so much that we become strangers to those that we thought we knew, thought they knew us. Whats the price of indifference? What does it take? I am beginning to see that lines are thin- walls can crack eventually tumble - and sometimes just sometimes afterall you just have to find shelter in yourself!!

fleeting dreams meet mobile cultures...

The Somalia analysis special will come soon! i am just in protracted refugee writing mode that doesn't seem to end!

i thought id dot some points and stripe some feelings!! in the stress of this Somali refugee project- i found comfort, hope and respect in those that try to understand, that write, that advocate for a cause- whether it be refugees or climate change! Recently I ve read the sad stories and understood the true meaning of the human cost in south north migration- ive shed tears in dark libraries for families that could have been mine, for people that look just like me dying in the many seas! For people that save all their money and are turned away at a border- but back to what? For an Africa they call 'mobile' and is witness the messiness to uneven side of Globalization! tears flow because i feel their pain- because i try to place myself where they are! I am soo glad i feel something- its not weakness! far from it its a source of strength ! it would be a sad reality if i didn't- because only when you feel can you truly act!! but ive understood the positive elements of their plight- how despite everything people secure livelihoods and are able send some back to the people that they left behind, the powers of transnationalism, of remittances- the people here , the people there, and where they meet- the translocal- but most of all in the power of human agency-personal decisions and the power that they have to change ones reality! For to dream in times of uncertainty and chaos - that is truly beautiful ! the media paints refugees as cunning crooks and criminals- but that is far from any reality - after all i ve seen they are you and me making sense when the world has bought them senselessness...

in this project ive understood myself... who i am more- what i think! ive understood my calling- what i want to do with myself- my time, my energy , my health, my wealth- have formed more fleeting dreams - reassembled the nomadic urge! An for me that surely that is a payment enough!!
Long live the struggle- after all there's no border in the mind!

"add that refugees also matter because they are a litmus test of how tolerant and just we are as a society, as a nation and as an international community. On a personal level, I have always been inspired by the dignity, humanity and resourcefulness that individual refugees display in the face of great
odds. Their courage has taught me to be courageous, and their ability to hope in seemingly hopeless situations gave me strength on my own road to recovery after being injured in Baghdad."