Henok Mehari’s High School Graduation Speech

Henok Mehari’s high school graduation speech at the Notre Dame Education Center:

I was just fourteen years old and a teenager in Ethiopia, when the civil war broke out. I found myself all alone without my mother and father in a hot and dusty refugee camp stuck in the middle of Kenya, struggling to survive. Do you have any idea what life in a refugee camp is like? Let me tell you, it’s hell. Eighty thousand refugees crowded together and doing their best to stay alive survived on just one meal a day suffering in the heat and the dust. No matter how dusty the road, no matter how empty my stomach, I did what I thought was important for me at the time. And I had a crazy dream, but I never gave up hope.