I was born into displacement.

Everyone else, including my parents, had memories of home, of a country and a flag they could call their own, of relatives and an identity that wasn’t defined by displacement and deprivation. The camp was the only thing I knew.

I was the only child there. The other refugees had chosen not to bring children into that life, but my parents believed my birth was God’s will. Because I was the only child, the entire camp became my guardians — Somali refugees, navy men from Ethiopia, aunties and uncles who weren’t blood but who kept me alive.

There were no real walls, no schools; only tattered tents and a building to distribute rations. Yet to me, it was a world: there were herds of goats in the pastures, countless people who loved me as if I were their own and took me from one end of the mountain to the next; there was a church, and music and parties to celebrate my birthday and the passing of time.

Everything I know about resilience began in that place. My parents met at the camp, having found themselves there for different yet similar reasons. Both escaped Ethiopia during the civil war in the 1990s.

My mother ended up at the refugee camp after my maternal grandfather, a member of the intelligentsia who was the minister of finance in the city of Harar, died in prison during the civil war. Soon after, many of my mother’s siblings died, too, of illness and other tragic circumstances. My mother and her remaining siblings were forced to fend for themselves. Everyone went separate ways; my mother fled to Yemen in the hopes of finding better work opportunities so she could earn money to send home and one day return.

My father was in the Ethiopian navy, but when the Derg (military junta) overthrew the government, my father and his shipmates were told: “Leave, or you will be executed.” So they, too, fled to Yemen. The Yemeni government was gracious enough to welcome them and set up the camp.

I tell my story because it deserves to be told. Not to hold myself up as an inspirational figure, but because I believe I was called to share it. My hope is that the story itself — and the characters who carried me from a Yemeni refugee camp to Colgate — can inspire others.

By every statistic, I wasn’t supposed to survive past my 1st birthday. The odds of making it from that camp to a graduation were, rounded to a whole number, zero. Yet I lived — past one year, past five, past decades (I won’t share how many so as not to date myself, but you get the point). Each milestone has been a miracle. Every year, a gift. And to whom much is given, much is expected.