Rebuild Ahmed Jama's The Village

On 7 September 2013, a militant group targeted The Village restaurant in Mogadishu, setting off two blasts that killed 15 people and left at least 20 more wounded. The attack occurred almost exactly one year after another bombing of the restaurant which took 14 lives.

This fundraising campaign has been established to aid The Village's chef and owner Ahmed Jama in rebuilding the restaurant, which he opened in 2008 during one of the most violent stretches of the war against the transitional government. Jama had returned to his war-torn homeland from London, where he ran a successful restaurant, to do it. He has said that he wanted to open a restaurant that would "change the lives of the people who don't have somewhere to work and have been locked indoors and don't have anywhere to go and socialize "” to show them, 'Yes, you can laugh when you finish university or office work... You have somewhere to go.'"



Despite the odds, Jama now runs 5 branches of The Village, the first modern restaurants in Mogadishu. He employs over 100 people and has no intention of closing any of his businesses. When reached for comment by a reporter after the most recent bombing, Jama put it simply: "I won't let this stop me. I will start clean up tomorrow."

Please give what you can in order to ensure The Village remains open and alive.