One of the things I most love about looking for stories of things that work is finding miracles – like greenhouses that grow vegetables in the desert where water is scarce as hens’ teeth. The BBC had one of those stories the other day, on ‘People Fixing the World‘. It’s one of a series of wonderful stories from around the world that focus on restoring the water cycle and thus an ecosystem, creating food, jobs and new possibilities galore in surprising places.

It was the story of how a low-tech version of the seawater greenhouse is producing cucumbers and other crops just outside the port city of Berbera, in Somaliland. A decade ago, Edan Adan Ismail took me out to see her farm outside Hargeisa, watered from an underground tank. That was the first time I ever saw a banana plant, but there were other crops as well. And I remember seeing a lake outside Hargeisa, but water is still scarce there. So the idea that people in Somaliland could be growing crops in a greenhouse was unexpected good news.