My mother used to say to me, “Marie Claire, what do you want? You must follow your dreams!”

She first said this to me when I came home from school in tears because the other kids were so mean to me. I had arrived in Zambia the year before after escaping the violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with my family. I did not speak the language well or look like the other kids in my class. They would tease me, call me names, and even spit at me.

I would beg my mother, “Please! Do not make me go back.”

And she would stroke my head as I cried in her lap and say, “Forget about them, Marie Claire! Follow your dreams.”

I was thinking of those words when I woke up on June 16, 2016. The first thing I saw was my red cap and gown hanging on the outside of my closet door. I had placed it there on purpose the night before. I had to see it, to know that it was really happening.

I heard my father and siblings in the kitchen, and the clatter of breakfast dishes. He was speaking in a booming voice that filled the house with his pride.

This was a big day—and my dream realized: I was going to be the first person in my family to graduate from high school. My heart was full and cracked at once. This was my mother’s dream, too. She should be here to experience it with me.

I was young when my family left the Congo—I don’t know the exact age, and I don’t have many happy memories of that time beyond playing with other kids in our village during the rare quiet moments between unspeakable violence. The war started the year I was born—it was all I knew. Mostly what I remember was running. We spent the first four years of my life living in the bush, literally on the run. I have hazy memories of heading south toward Zambia, always moving in the middle of the night and sleeping beneath thorny bushes during the day to protect ourselves from wild animals. I remember being hungry and tired and also knowing, at such a young age, that if we were caught by the militia groups terrorizing our country, we would be killed. And so we ran.

With the help of pastors and priests, we got a boat to Zambia. That was where many people were fleeing—the UNHCR states that even today, 4.25 million are internally displaced in the Congo and that more than six hundred thousand are refugees in sub-Saharan Africa. The war in the Congo is a civil war between rebel forces and the government, like the wars in Syria and Yemen. Although the Congolese war has been going on for much longer, people don’t know much about it.

All I know is that my family was part of the constant stream of refugees fleeing the country in search of safety. We wanted to live. So we had to leave.

People in Zambia did not want us there. They would shout at us in the streets, “Go back to your country! Why are you here?” Kids would insult me and my siblings at school, even throwing rocks, shouting, “You don’t belong here!”

We did not belong, but we had nowhere else to go.

My parents found a cheap one-room house for us, which was better than our tent made from plastic sheets we’d had at the refugee camp when we first arrived. Still, it was cramped—me, my two younger brothers, and two older sisters plus my parents meant eight people sleeping in one small room. We did not mind—it was much better than sleeping in the bush back in the Congo. Everything we had was better by comparison than what we’d left. My father kept saying it was temporary—he and my mother were saving for a bigger place.

In this new place, I could go to school for the first time ever. I was eleven. I started in grade three, and I was so much older and bigger than everyone else that all the other students laughed at me. I spoke no English and very little Nyanja, the local language in Zambia. Kinyarwanda, what we spoke in the Congo, was the only language I knew. Still, I understood the insults. The other kids knew I was a refugee. Like the people in the streets, they, too, would say, “Go back to the Congo! You don’t belong here!”

Some of my teachers were mean as well, but a few supported me. They’d say, “You’ll learn; it just takes time.”

I was in third grade for two years. It was hard to make friends. My mom knew I was having a hard time at school. She, too, was having difficulty communicating. She got up every day and set up her table in our neighborhood and sold the things she grew and made to support our family. People would say horrible things to her or not want to pay. There was so much hatred. It reminded her of the Congo, what we had left behind. But where else could we go?

So whenever I said, “I’m not going to school today. The kids keep laughing at me; I can’t take it,” she would respond, “This is your life. Not theirs. Ignore them and focus on what you want.”

What my mother wanted most was a better life for her family. She used to pray out loud, Dear Lord, you can take my life as long as my children are safe. We were still living at a refugee camp when she heard we could apply for refugee visas through the UNHCR. So when we moved to Lusaka, she found the office there and started the application process. She was told that it could take years. She was willing to wait.

We had no idea how long we would have to wait, but we did know we were not safe. We had already been attacked several times. Men wearing masks had robbed my mother one evening as she packed up her stand. Another time, they threatened my father, saying, “You had better leave, or we will kill you!” Resentment was brewing because my parents were making a decent living. We were not sure who those masked men were—they could’ve been from Zambia or the Congo.

One evening, we heard a commotion outside our house. More than ten men with machetes and knives had circled the building. Some banged on our door. There were robbers in Africa who would break into your house to steal stuff, but this was different.

My mother and father had heard of these vigilante mobs terrorizing refugees, and now one was outside our home.

I was twelve and paralyzed with fear. My siblings and I huddled in the corner as my mother shouted, “Do not take my children. If you must take someone, take me!” They attacked her first, dragging her from our hut into the street. My father tried to fight back as my siblings screamed and cried, begging them to stop. Then they turned on my father.

My mother died in front of us that day. The most painful memory for me is that she was left naked, something to this day I still can’t understand. We thought my father had died as well. We watched as he was stabbed in the head several times.

We went to go live with our older brother. We were in shock. At first, we thought both of our parents were gone. But after some days, the doctor told us that our father was alive.

A miracle.

The police came to interview us. They said they were looking for our mother’s killers, but no one was ever charged. We didn’t follow up because we were undocumented, which means technically we were not allowed to be in Zambia. We had no rights. We also had no mother. Or a home. I dropped out of school to help care for my father.

It took him months to recover, and for me as well. I could not have gone to school—it was all too much. I was in shock—it did not dawn on me until later, the brutal irony that we had escaped one violence for another. And I kept thinking of my mother’s prayer, You can take my life as long as my children are safe. They took my mother, but not her love. I still have that, and it keeps me strong.

The year after my mother died, I rarely left home. My grief was overwhelming. When I was finally strong enough to return to school, my new teacher placed me in the sixth grade. I started taking school very seriously. It was a connection to my mother—she would always say, “Marie Claire, with a good education, you can do whatever you want.” Neither she nor my father ever got the chance to go to school. It was her dream that I would go and graduate one day. So I studied hard, not just for myself but also for her.

Things got better as the years passed. I excelled at school; kids stopped teasing me for being Congolese. I spoke the language fluently, and Zambia began to feel less hostile, more like home. We encouraged our father to remarry—I was busy with school, as were my siblings, and he seemed so alone. Through the pastor at his church, he met his wife, who is from the Congo as well. They married in 2012.

And then one day, my father got a call from the UNHCR saying our refugee application had been accepted. We did not learn where we were going—only that we would leave Zambia soon.

It was such bittersweet news—my mother had started the process so many years earlier. I remember that we got a call to be interviewed when she was still alive, and we were all so hopeful. But then we heard nothing for years—and in between we lost her. I was sixteen when they called us again: They wanted to interview everyone in our extended family who was applying. I was interviewed more than five times over the next three years. So when we got the call to say that we had been approved, I almost could not believe it.

One week before we were scheduled to leave Zambia, we were told that our new home was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I started to do some research and learned that it was the “refugee capital” of the United States because so many refugees lived there. I was excited—I was finally going to have papers. A home. A life. A new beginning. It started to feel real.

My guardian angel was Jennifer. She met me and my family at the airport when we arrived in Pennsylvania.

I will never forget seeing her standing there, this small white woman with a big smile and blond bangs, holding a sign that read, WELCOME TO LANCASTER! Since that moment, she, her husband, and their kids have become our American family.

I was almost nineteen and excited to finish high school. I had only one year left. But then I learned that at my new school, the cutoff was eighteen. I didn’t want to do a GED, so I went to the high school counselor in charge of admitting students and asked him to please give me a chance. He explained that his experience with refugees was that so many had missed so much school by the time they arrived that it was very hard for them to catch up and become acclimated.

I convinced him I could do it—I was a good student and spoke decent English. I just needed a chance.

I kept imagining my mother whisper, You can do whatever you dream.

This was my dream.

When he said, “I will give you a chance,” I held back tears.

He placed me in twelfth grade and told me I had five months to get my diploma. If I could not finish twelfth grade by June, I would have to do my GED.

Graduation was in June 2016. I woke up and saw my red cap and gown hanging in my bedroom. I heard the chatter of my family downstairs, in my new home. I jumped out of bed.

Six hundred people graduated that day, but I felt that I stood out, in a good way. I have pictures of my family carrying me on their shoulders through the crowds, their faces filled with joy. My father was smiling so hard his eyes were closed. Jennifer, whom I’d started calling my American mom, beamed with pride. As they threw me up in the air and caught me, I also felt my mother lifting me up in that airborne and suspended moment, smiling down from above.