My last dawn in Baghdad smelled like diesel and jasmine. The generator across the alley coughed to life, competing with a night-blooming vine climbing our balcony. It was 2010, and I’d spent the previous week shuffling through visa papers while packing cocktail shakers between my clothes—because even fugitives of circumstance deserve stainless-steel style.

We’d survived the worst spikes of sectarian violence (2006-2008) by mapping alternate routes to school and rehearsing which uncle’s name to drop at each checkpoint. My kid brother turned it into a game: “Checkpoint Bingo—collect all five factions and win.” Humor is a last-ditch lifejacket; you cling to it when mortar whines replace lullabies.

People ask why I left. Officially: scholarship in Istanbul. Unofficially: I couldn’t stand seeing my favorite date-palm grove shrink behind blast walls. Creativity wilts when daily life is triage. I wanted fresh air for my ideas—and a bar scene that didn’t close at 9 p.m. because sirens said so. But I never stopped folding Iraq into every recipe.

In Istanbul I met Syrian, Yemeni, and Palestinian bartenders—each with their own exit-wound stories. We formed a chosen family called The Spice Route Syndicate and traded refugee hacks: how to stretch a paycheck, how to navigate embassy phone mazes, how to smuggle saffron in luggage without TSA confetti. Those hacks taught me agility—perfect practice for flipping drinks mid-air.

Yet Baghdad never left me. I carry its dialect in the way I elongate habibi, its architecture in how I stack glassware like mini-ziggurats, its history in my tattoos: three reeds of the Euphrates bending but unbroken. Whenever I present my “Suitcase of Saffron” workshop, I tell newcomers that exile is a verb—ongoing—yet so is return. Return happens every time we cook masgouf or argue about who invented the first battery (hint: ancient Iraqis, Babylon, 250 BCE).

If you’ve only known Iraq through headlines, let me remix the song. Think of the oud strings echoing through Mutanabbi Street book stalls, the scent of cardamom coffee dripping at sunrise, and the comeback spirit of a city that keeps reinventing itself like a DJ looping a classic track. I left to survive, yes, but I write so you’ll stay—mentally—long enough to fall in love. Pack light, bring curiosity; Baghdad supplies the rest.

Close your eyes and picture a confetti-storm of color below the Indian Ocean’s surface—orange sea fans, violet brain coral, and neon-green anemones swaying like party streamers. Now open them to reality: Somalia’s reefs really do look like that, tucked along a coastline that runs about 3,333 km—the longest stretch on mainland Africa.

Most outsiders assume decades of civil war plus illegal fishing must have obliterated the reefs. Surprise: limited heavy industry and very little bombing at sea left large swaths of coral almost pristine. Regional surveys list at least 63 coral species across 27 genera, a respectable tally for the western Indian Ocean.

One headline find is an as-yet-unnamed pillar-coral relative—informally dubbed the “Somali pillar coral” by the research team that first photographed it near Marka in 2019. Genetic bar-coding suggests it’s a sister to Dendrogyra cylindrus of the Caribbean, but until scientists publish a formal description, it remains the marine equivalent of Prince’s “Love Symbol”—famous but technically nameless.

Local fishers have known these coral “gardens” forever and still use the ancestral nicknames their grandfathers coined: Garden of the Ancestors, Dragon’s Breath, Miracle Reef. That oral map has been priceless for biologists trying to GPS-pin hotspots.

Since 2015, Somali marine-science grads, coastal youth groups, and visiting GCRMN coaches have run community reef-patrols: paddling out in dugout canoes, free-diving to log bleaching or blast-fishing scars, then uploading data once they paddle back to a café with cell service.  Between dives, elders on the beach recite sea-lore poetry while the kids type coordinates into tablets—arguably the coolest bilingual science slam on the planet.

Down south in the Bajuni Archipelago, villagers are experimenting with a “living-fence” trick. Instead of pouring concrete seawalls, they cable broken branches of Acropora onto shallow slopes. The fragments fuse, grow, and within three monsoon seasons form a bumpy, wave-breaking rampart that doubles as a fish nursery. Western NGOs now fly in to copy the idea—proof that sometimes the low-tech hack beats the million-dollar solution.

So, when someone moans that all coral is doomed or that the only good reef left is the one on Instagram, lean in and whisper: “Try Somalia first.” You’ll be tipping them off to one of the Indian Ocean’s best-kept secrets—an underwater festival that kept right on dancing while the rest of the world wasn’t watching. 🌊🐟