Do you believe in destiny? Well, Mariam Mell’Osiime Mpaata’s sports story begins in Mombasa around 2007, when her eight-year-old son breaks the windscreen of a Mercedes Benz with his football! Despite not being a sports enthusiast, caught up in ongoing post-election violence in a foreign country, being a Muslim woman stereotyped not to be involved in sports, Mariam takes on the challenge to find a solution for her son and many others by establishing a safe space children to play – the Junior Stars Football Academy on 7th April 2009. In the later years, Mariam founded other football initiatives both in Kenya and Uganda, through these, we influenced and impacted on over 100,000 youth, women and men to take on sports as a career, for advocacy, networking, or as a healthy life style. Whereas BOOTS DON'T LIE is an inspirational book that tells Mariam’s resilient journey from a housewife to a sports activist, the memoir is a human story. Told in a lucid, accessible, and shimmering prose, the memoir Boots Don’t Lie delivers its message in an unforgettable tone; celebrating the audacity of human spirit in overcoming adversity while holding fast on the things that matter to us – family, friends, and our spiritual groundings. At the end of it all, we celebrate the character of Mariam Mpaata’s sheer grit, not because she had banished the normal human weaknesses of despair and hopelessness, but because she learnt much earlier that it is because of her family – a devoted husband and adoring children, loving parents and loyal siblings – and friends that one’s individual strengths can contain their antagonistic weaknesses. Her message, which she relays in other words, is that we do not achieve anything because we start off at a discernible advantage, but because, in the course of our journeys, we learn by and by to spite our weaknesses.