There are good reasons, we tell ourselves, that we feel compassion more easily for people who look like us, or live close to us, or share our values. It’s easier to identify with them and to imagine their pain as if it were our own. Empathy, then, for distant conflicts, especially ones happening to African, Muslim people, is a stretch. But the stories that are told about a place can enable, or disable, the ability to empathize with those who reside there. News stories told about Somalia are usually alienating; they convey the sense that the near-daily terror attacks are more normal than the less frequent attacks in the West. The implication is that people in Somalia, as a result, mourn differently or with less intensity.

Most major news outlets did run articles on what happened, but, with a few exceptions, most followed the same formula: a dispassionate recounting of the explosion, similar to most news articles on major events. What is often missing in the days following attacks in Somalia are the intimate stories about the victims, the sense that real, breathing people were affected, and that these catastrophes are neither normal nor expected. With a place like Somalia, defined by stereotypes beyond its borders, it has become acceptable to think of the country as holding only war and extremism, and to forget that the lives there are multilayered, possessing similar and universal concerns, interests, and desires. "Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination,” Leslie Jamison writes in "The Empathy Exams.” "Empathy requires knowing you know nothing.”

Somalis told their own stories. Some put together a crowdfunding drive to help support first responders. Others collected and then shared the photos and the aspirations of the missing:

And many simply asked: Where was the outpouring of sympathy for a disaster that had occurred in one of the world’s most marginalized countries? Were these people’s tragedies too marginal to grieve?

Empathy is a fragile viewpoint: it’s potentially a humanizing way of looking at a person who is both different and distant from you, and potentially a means of ignoring the complexities that make up those differences in an effort to relate. If empathy doesn’t lead you to flatten the experiences of the people whom you are trying to understand, though, it can feel radical—a chance to bypass stereotypes and make your own judgments based on perceptiveness and sensitivity. It’s what the people of Somalia deserve as they mourn those who died, cherish those who survived, and find ways, as always, to get on with the business of living.