Writer Shelina Shariff-Zia told stories about her family while living in Kenya and Uganda at the Central Queens YMCA Monday.
She says the Indian-Muslim community in Kenya was small and tight-knit but were friendly with other groups.
Sharriff-Zia says she hopes her talk helps her audience better relate to people from different walks of life.
“People get a little scared when they think of people of different ethnicities and we’ve been having so much controversy. But at the bottom, people are people,” said Shariff-Zia.
She also recently wrote “Nairobi Days,” a novel about growing up in the Indian community in Kenya.
Watch here: http://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2018/01/23/a-queens-author-discusses-life-in-east-africa.html
Ismailimail 
Congratulations Shelina, for sharing your experience from Nairobi which is where i grew up too and arrived in Canada when i was 32, but have always thought of my life in Nairobi and have gone back 4 times. My love for the
African people and seeing their poverty was astounding and always helped them in every way i could and my best friend too was a Kikuyu girl whom i brought home on weekends to stay at my place since her parents had a farm in Limuru and gone there once to meet her parents. At that time, the indian community looked at me very strangely because they were uneducated, I did many things for the street boys begging, my own housemaid whom i would invite to sit on the dining table and eat with me and she burst out crying, To me they were human beings too, and abhorred the way they were treated. My father too had opened a home for the kids to go to school nearby and supplied everything for their comfort and well being from out shop. Todate that home still runs which i made a point of visiting and took what i could for them in a small village. I made friend of all nationalities which taught me a lot. Education is not only book worming.
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