It’s strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed… - Clemantine Wamariya

It’s the journey of digging deep into yourself and the things you discover if you only dare to dig deep into your memories, your relationship, and your thoughts. It’s been such an incredible journey, but thank goodness I was not alone in it. So many people feeding me, listening to me, editing, hosting me—so it’s not been alone.

I needed to see the world in front of me clearly so I could perform my part well. I needed to crack the code. So many times, in my former life, I’d had to become someone else in order to stay out of a refugee camp or out of jail, to stay alive. I had played a mother. I had played a yes ma’am younger sister. I had made myself a nobody, invisible. Now I had to become this strange creature: an American teenager.

But nothing gets better. There is no path for improvement—no effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do either, short of the killers in your country laying down their arms and stopping their war so that you can move home.