News News Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. The Refugee-Led Coalition Creating Collective Care Before the pandemic, refugee-led community-based groups gathered for Cooking Across Generations, an intergenerational storytelling celebration of refugee families who shared memories and rituals of ancestral foods in City Heights, San Diego. Photo by Rucha Chitnis Already facing health and education gaps, refugees in San Diego banded together during the pandemic to define their own challenges and create their own solutions. May 6, 2021 Jama Ahmed Mohamed was 2 years old when his family fled the civil war in Mogadishu, Somalia, and escaped to a refugee camp in Kenya. This became his precarious home, where his family faced alienation and violence as displaced outsiders in the borderlands of two countries. “There’s this feeling of never being settled. …We would build homes, which were set on fire, and move again,” he says. “There is no childhood in a refugee camp. You grow up fast.”