Forgiving is not an easy thing to do.

Maintaining my dignity is so important for me.

I think it's the human spirit inside of all of us that has an enormous capacity to survive.

Being in the dark, there's a real weight to it. It's heavy.

I swung from one place to the next, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, capitalizing on my own momentum, knowing that at some point my arms—or, more accurately, my quivering bank balance, accessed through foreign ATMs—would give out, and I’d fall to the ground.

A little goes a long way in Somalia: $5 will feed a person there for about two weeks.

Christmas was the one time of year when my brothers surfaced at home, when my parents and grandparents congregated to eat my mother's roast turkey.