Hi there, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and today I'm talking to chef and author Hawa Hassan about her groundbreaking book, setting a place for us. Its subtitle explains its radical scope.

Recipes and stories of displacement, resilience and community from eight countries impacted by war.

Hawa and her family fled the Somalian Civil War.

A few years later, she was sent to friends in America

and was separated from her mother and siblings who moved to Oslo.

The stories of the people she meets in her book often mirror that of her own life.

I migrated to the U.S. in 1993, November of 1993. My mother and family never made it to America.

Till today, my family has never been to America. I only have one little brother who's born in Norway that's come to New York, and he came

in 2018, just as he was getting out of high school. But my family has lived in Somalia, Kenya,

and then Oslo. Moving in 1993 means that you were very young when you moved. Yeah. I, you know, the first two years of living in America, because I assumed my family was still coming,

and that was the game plan.

Like, I went as a part of a team of six people at the time.

It was my five siblings and my mom.

So I was like, okay, the rest of my teammates are coming.

They're just waiting for sponsorship to the U.S., which never came because Black Hawk down happened, and the Clinton administration had shut it down at the time. And, you know, in hindsight, like, I don't think there's a better place than Oslo that my family could have ended up in for so many different reasons. So for the first two years, I was still very much a Somali child.

I was still trying to cook. I was still trying to clean with the people that I was living with

because I wanted to be an active participant of the group that I was living with.

What were you cooking? Well, there was an older person in the house. A woman, she did all

the cooking, but I did all the

cleaning and the chopping. Those first two years. You were sous chef. I was sous chef. I didn't know.

I was a little chef in the making, okay? But I had already been a sous chef with my mom and my brother,

and so this was like just a different version of it. But after those first two years passed and I realized no one was

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