“I was born in a refugee camp in Burundi. My parents had been living in that in that same refugee camp for about 18 years.

We're looking at my family. This is my family, except for the two that are not in there. Those are a friend’s family. We're wearing matching shirts. And this is a drawing that I drew back in 2023. And I submitted it for UNHCR (United Nations Human Rights Commission) and Uniqlo art contest, Youth for the Youth. And I won, I was at the top five people among 4,000 people who got in. They took the drawings and put them on shirts and sold them all around the world to help displaced refugees. I'm sitting in the middle of the two people that are not our family, they arefriends. I'm right next to the baby.

The theme was “hope away from home.” Everybody was supposed to draw something to represent hope away from home. So I drew a picture of my friends. And because they're a way of hope for me, when I'm at home. This drawing idea, like I didn't draw the drawing, but I had the idea in the back of my head ever since I got here. Getting to meet new people, you don't really speak the language with, trying to make friends, was very hard for me, very difficult. So just remembering the memories—I still remember these people, we used to share these amazing memories. They still cared, you know, I could speak the same language as them. But holding on to those memories just gave me hope for the future that in a future, we will see each other again, or share those amazing memories again, and we'll get to live our lives to the fullest.”