Quote

My life was filled with family in South Sudan. I am the seventh of nine children, and we grew up in what would be considered a middle-class family. We did not have a lot, but we did have more than a lot of other people.

I grew up in Sudan and Kenya, and lived in both the rural and urban centers of both countries throughout my life.

I grew up in a small town in Sudan. There weren't many cars, so we did things in the countryside near where we lived.

I left Sudan when I was 25 or 26 years old. If I had stayed, I would never have ended up being an entrepreneur. You can have the qualities, but if you don't have the environment, you just wither away. It's like a fish: take it out of water, it will not survive.

Leaving southern Sudan as a child was terrifying. It was 1985, and my family and I were trying to escape to Khartoum, the capital in the North, to safety.

For the first years of my life, I went to school in Rhodesia. My memory of living in the townships is that they were actually really happy places.

When I was 10 years old, I fled my homeland amid the bomb blasts of civil war in Sudan.

I fell in love with Africa and began helping people fix things there.

It's a small world when you're from South Sudan.

Life seemed so simple and joyous when I was growing up.