My story begins in West Africa, Liberia. One morning, at the tender age of seven, I awoke to my father on the phone using a tone I had never heard from him. My mother, siblings and I scrambled to hear what was causing my father to sound so intense. “What, the President has been shot?”, my father exclaimed!

Just a few short weeks later we were out of the country and eventually ended up in Northern California. Liberia had suffered a military coup and civil war had broken out between factions clambering to seize power.  It was no longer safe to live there and over the course of the next year, my Liberian lifestyle ended and my journey in America began.