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Kitchens of Hope

Food always equals love in Sierra Leone.

Published June 16, 2025

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Emilia Olabisi Fatmata Smith. Photo: Tom Wallace

Today we’re bringing you an excerpt from KITCHENS OF HOPE: Immigrants Share Stories of Resilience and Recipes from Home, by Linda S. Svitak, Christin Jaye Eaton, and Lee Svitak Dean. This book  brings together recipes and memories from immigrants to America who came from more than thirty countries and from vastly varied circumstances. Structured around the contributors’ personal stories of their journeys, it reflects community, resilience, opportunity, justice, hope, and celebration.

Emilia Olabisi Fatmata Smith grew up in Sierra Leone, a country in West Africa on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. She spent her early years in two small rural villages, and then moved with her father and stepmother to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, when she was about six years old. Her early life was disrupted when her father went to the United States in 1989 for medical care, joining her uncle who already was in Minnesota. Shortly after that, war broke out in Sierra Leone, when a rebel army attempted a coup. When the war in neighboring Liberia overtook Sierra Leone, the brutality left many seeking refuge in neighboring countries and the world at large.

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