The friendship gardener
“What I am today are seeds that were planted long ago.”
Mariam Issa had two small children and was pregnant with her third when civil war forced her to flee her home in Somalia. She’d grown up listening to stories at her mother’s knee, while receiving her formal education under the shade of a mango tree, but her country had become too dangerous for her family. With her kids in tow, she exchanged tropical sub-Saharan heat for the scorching desert of Dubai, where her then husband was working. But when he lost his job, leaving the family facing homelessness, Mariam took her children to Nairobi. “That’s how I became a refugee,” she says.
Her husband didn’t
