Impact Story · South Sudan
"I Was Nothing. Now I Am Someone's Teacher."
March 2025
Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya
Field Report by Hope for Every Child
Amina Ajak was eight years old the morning the soldiers came. She didn't know what war sounded like until it arrived at her door in the form of smoke and screaming.
Her village sat on the edge of a river in South Sudan, a small and quiet place where children played barefoot in the red dust and her mother cooked kisra bread over open flame every morning. Her father was a primary school teacher — the first person in the village to have gone to university. He used to tell Amina: "Your mind is your farm. Water it every day and nothing can starve you." She did not fully understand what he meant then. She would later.
The attack came without warning in April 2019. Amina remembers grabbing her younger brother Deng, who was only four, and running — running through the sorghum field behind the house, past the water pump, into the bush — without looking back. She would not see her father again. She would not see her home again. She did not know, as she ran, that she was running toward a new life entirely.
"I carried Deng the whole way. He was too scared to cry. I kept telling him, 'Don't cry, don't cry — crying makes you slow.' I don't know where I got those words. Maybe from nowhere. Maybe from needing to be brave for him."
— Amina, now 14
After four days of walking and two of sheltering in a church, Amina and Deng were found by a UN convoy near the Sudanese border and brought to Kakuma Refugee Camp in northern Kenya. Their mother arrived two weeks later — she had survived by hiding in a neighbour's well. Their father never came.
The Day the Classroom Found Her
For eight months, Amina barely spoke. Camp workers described her as "present but absent" — sitting in food queues, standing in registration lines, staring at the ground. She stopped eating regularly. She stopped playing. She sat outside her tent every evening holding a small exercise book she had grabbed the night she fled — the only thing she'd taken from her home besides her brother. The book was her father's. His handwriting filled the first half. The second half was empty.
That was when Miriam, a Hope for Every Child education coordinator, spotted her. Miriam had run Temporary Learning Spaces in Kakuma for six years. She had seen this particular silence before — the silence of a child whose world has been erased. She sat beside Amina for three days in a row without asking anything of her. On the fourth day, she brought two pencils. She placed one beside Amina and began drawing in her own notebook. After a long time, Amina picked up hers.
"She drew her house," Miriam told our team. "She drew it in detail — the door, the window, the tree next to it. Then she drew a small figure beside the tree and she wrote one word underneath: Baba. Father. That was the first word we ever exchanged."
Learning to Live Again
Amina enrolled in the Hope for Every Child Temporary Learning Space the following week. She was placed in a class of 34 children, many of them survivors of violence, most of them behind their expected grade level. The first few weeks were uneven — she would attend, then disappear; engage, then shut down. But something was happening underneath the silence.
She had taught herself to read from her father's notebook. His lesson plans, his notes, his little diagrams explaining fractions and rainfall and the names of rivers — she had memorized them. When the class reached division in mathematics, Amina quietly raised her hand and corrected the teacher's mistake on the chalkboard. The room went still. The teacher — a young Kenyan man named Odongo — looked at the board, then at Amina, then he smiled and said: "Would you like to show us?"
She walked to the front of the class and did.
"That was the moment I knew she would be okay," Odongo said. "Not because of the maths. But because she walked to that board like she owned it. Like she remembered who she was."
— Odongo, HFEC Education Volunteer
Five Years Later
Today, Amina is fourteen. She speaks three languages: Dinka, Arabic, and English. She completed the Hope for Every Child Junior Teacher Training Programme last December — one of only six students selected from a pool of over eighty — and has returned to Kakuma as a teaching assistant in the same TLS where Miriam first sat beside her with a pencil.
Her brother Deng, now nine, is one of her students. Every morning she walks with him to the classroom. Every evening she reviews his work by lamplight. She keeps her father's notebook on her desk — its cover worn soft, its pages filled now from front to back. The second half, the empty half, is hers.
When we asked Amina what she wants for her future, she answered without hesitating: "I want to build a school. A real one, with a roof that doesn't leak. One that stays even when everything else leaves."
"My father used to say: your mind is your farm. I understand now. He was trying to tell me that no soldier, no fire, no war can take away what is already growing inside you."
— Amina Ajak, 14, Kakuma Refugee Camp
Stories like Amina's are made possible by donors like you. Every contribution — however small — funds classrooms, teachers, and futures in crisis zones worldwide.
