I was born in Somalia and have one older brother and four sisters younger than me. I lost my dad in a plane crash when I was only eight years old, and that’s why my older brother and I experienced adulthood from an early age. We decided to earn money cleaning shoes and selling chewing gum in the street. On a good day I could earn up to $3 or $4, so we could pay for our family’s meal. When you’ve got another four sisters sitting there – I mean, they had to go to school – so we were the bread winners from a young age.
When I was 12 years old I was fortunate enough to be sent to Europe by my mum. She said ‘Your uncle lives there’, and he could only take one person. When I arrived there, I thought my uncle lived in London, but actually he lived in Wales. The guy at the airport told me that Wales was four or five hours from London. He put me in a taxi with some case worker and said that they couldn’t take me all the way to Wales. I ended up kicked out on the streets.
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