It was a slow understanding that the lack of education in a country like Somalia creates these huge social problems.
Amanda Lindhout
Somalia is an important story in the world, and it needed to be told.
Somalia is very dangerous, and no one knows that better than I.
Going into Somalia, I didn't anticipate how many people's lives would be affected by it. In hindsight, I certainly wish I had taken more time to think about that, but I can't change it.
What happened to me in Somalia doesn't define me.
The same men who are placing all these outrageous restrictions on women's freedoms in southern Somalia - that type of mentality - that's what I had to deal with in captivity.
I made a vow to myself while I was a hostage that if I were lucky enough to live and to get out of Somalia, I would do something meaningful with my life - and specifically something that would be meaningful in the country where I'd lost my freedom.
Accompanied by an Australian photographer named Nigel Brennan, I'd gone to Somalia to work as a freelance journalist, on a trip that was meant to last only ten days.
Women in Somalia face almost unimaginable oppression.
A little goes a long way in Somalia: $5 will feed a person there for about two weeks.
Stateless people are hidden. During the 2011 refugee crises, it was obvious that people were fleeing Somalia and Libya - there was a lot of international attention. Statelessness goes undetected because stateless people are in legal limbo and are afraid to show up.
Antonio Guterres
I don't have much in me left for Somalia, because the country is so broken, it's not realistic to daydream about it.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I am grateful to my father for sending me to school, and that we moved from Somalia to Kenya, where I learned English.
I grew up in Somalia, in Saudi Arabia, in Ethiopia, and in Kenya. I came to Europe in 1992, when I was 22, and became a member of Parliament in Holland.
I left Somalia when I was seven years old, but I witnessed a whole year in a war.
Barkhad Abdi
I never have my CNN off, it's on the whole day. I don't want to be out of range of television. I'm constantly bombarded by information - Somalia one second, Haiti the next - I need that constant pounding. I couldn't write without television. I need to have the world in my room.
Bharati Mukherjee
The change began in Somalia, where we discovered that we were involved in an operation where there was no peace, so there was no more a peacekeeping operation because there was no peace.
Boutros Boutros-Ghali
A drone is a high-tech version of an old army and a musket. It ought to be used in Somalia to hunt bad guys, but not in America. I don't want to see it hovering over anybody's home.
Charles Krauthammer
Barack Obama commits war crimes - Somalia, Yemen. He commits war crimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to keep a spotlight on war crimes, to keep track of the innocents killed... There is a major clash.
Cornel West
I started to work on a feature-length script about pirates in Somalia, but I knew that there was something I was missing, which was that I didn't know what day-to-day life looked like and felt like in East Africa. So I decided I had to go.
Cutter Hodierne
I couldn't be happier teaming up to make the feature with a company as innovative as VICE. There is so much the world doesn't know about piracy in Somalia and the people involved, and I'm excited to be telling a story of piracy in Somalia from a different perspective.
My first assignment was 12 weeks in Afghanistan. After that, I covered the Indian election for two months. Then I got a phone call saying, 'Hey, we want you in Brazil,' and the same happened for Somalia.
What we have seen with Islamist extremism, whether it is in Mali or Somalia or Afghanistan, is that the disease is not necessarily the individual country. The disease is the Islamist extremism, and that's what we have to fight; that's the narrative that we have to beat.
When I was commander of Central Command, obviously we were very concerned about the developments in Yemen, the developments in Somalia and elsewhere, in Africa and so forth. But the al Qaeda senior leadership is under unprecedented pressure.
British intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan swelled the grievances home-grown fanatics fed off, while al Qaeda morphed and re-grouped in lawless sanctuaries from Somalia to Yemen.
My stepmom's from Somalia, my baby sister is African American, my dad was always English, I'm a white man... You may have noticed.
African history is filled with experiences of people shooting their way to power and then splintering into factions, like in Somalia and Liberia.
I think probably the scaredest I've ever been was in Somalia. I arrived there when the episode that became known as 'Black Hawk Down' was still taking place. The Americans were still pinned down under fire. And everybody else was basically going the other way, and I was the only one putting my hand up for a flight in.
I have a novel that I can write. It's about three soldiers from Somalia. Some babies have been disappearing up on 144th Street, and I speculate later on what happened to them and how they might have been got back. These guys are dead, all three, and they have a chance in the afterlife to do something they should have done when they were alive.
I want to go see Somalia because I've never been there, and I feel like I'm missing out. I want to learn that heritage; I want to learn about my culture.
There might be children in Somalia or the Arctic who have never heard of 'Hamlet' or the 'Great Gatsby.' But you can bet they know 'Tarzan.'
The long-term solution in preventing another famine in Somalia is to promote self-reliance.
I don't recognize my people anymore. I feel Somalia is lost. There is no Somalia. It is just a name.
I have big hope for the Canadian government to help Somalia with something concrete and tangible. I haven't seen that.
We women in Somalia are trying to be leaders in our community.
I was always made aware of inequality in society, that there was a class system. In Somalia, we have clan structures. My mother's family is ethnically not Somali, and so we spoke often about what it meant to be 'other' in that way.
The house I was born in in Somalia was right next to a big market. A lot of beggars or panhandlers would be in front of our house constantly, and my grandfather and grandmother would always invite them in to have food with us and have them take whatever was left over.
Life in Somalia before the civil war was beautiful. When the war happened, I was 8 years old and at that stage of understanding the world in a different way.
I was born in Somalia, which is in East Africa. My parents started with nothing: poor, poor, poor. They eloped, which was unheard of in my country, when my father was 17 and my mother was 14.
My mother was an activist; so was my father. They came from a generation of young Somalis who were actively involved in getting independence for Somalia in 1960.
Finally, I also come in recognition of the great work that has been undertaken by the NGOs and UN agencies that have been active for many years here, especially through the local staff and international staff here in Somaliland and in Somalia at large.
I think the biggest challenge for Somalia has been the sense that it is a hopeless case of incomprehensible internal conflicts and there is nothing we can do.
Our assistance in Somalia has been remarkably effective and successful, and we have helped with very small resources - a large group of people and we can now do even more.
The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.
European leaders cannot afford to be afraid. The refugee crisis is not one from which they can opt out. No magic wand will empower leaders to transport more than a million people back across the Aegean and the Bosphorus to Mosul and Aleppo, or across the Mediterranean to Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan.
The people of Somalia just do not have a voice. They are to me the most forgotten people in the world.
The only way I see the world now is through coming out of and growing up and living in Somalia. In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all - it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras.
To some extent, Rwanda became a victim of the Somalia experience.
Outside events can change a presidential campaign, a president, and the history of the nation: the Iranian hostage crisis, the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the downing of the helicopter in Mogadishu, Somalia, the suicide attack on the USS Cole, and, of course, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
An oversupply of national sentiment is not the problem in Somalia. The problem is a lack of it. The problem is an oversupply of sub-sub-clannish attitude.
