The visit that will stay with me longest was our encounter with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) in Italy. The coordinators shared a soul-touching testimony with us of one of the migrant-survivors, Mahamat Daoud, who had crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa, fleeing conflicts that had taken everything from him except the will to try once more. What struck me was not only the danger of their journey as migrants, but the quiet persistence of hope in people who had nothing to hope for. JRS was offering shelter, but also resurrection—the deliberate, patient work of giving new life to those who had lost it. I recognized something there. Coming from Africa, where poverty, conflict, and the absence of real dialogue have pushed so many young people toward similarly desperate journeys, I saw JRS Italy as a mirror of redemption to these people.
This recognition deepened during a workshop where we explored our own human tendencies in moments of heightened conflict and tension. We examined rigidity, self-absorption, and reactivity as the quiet engines that turn disagreement into division. The facilitators pushed us toward something harder than debate: demonstrating understanding, the discipline of genuinely grasping another’s perspective before defending your own. Sitting in that room, I thought immediately of home–of a continent where too many conflicts persist precisely because dialogue has never been given the chance to do its work, where rigidity and reactivity are mistaken for strength, and where the young pay the price in displacement, poverty, and dangerous migration.
What moved me most, though, was not a single workshop or site visit, but the cohort itself. As a fellow representing Africa in this program, I carried a particular weight into every conversation and a particular hope. I found, almost immediately, fellows from other continents who shared the same restlessness about the state of the world, the same refusal to accept division as inevitable. We spoke as though we had known each other for years, not days. We shared ideas, listened, laughed, and built something that felt less like a professional network and more like kinship. Global citizenship, I learned, is not an abstraction taught in a seminar room. It is what happens when people who should be strangers choose instead to become family.
I return to my community and to Hekima University College with concrete commitments. I intend to bring the discipline of demonstrating understanding into how I teach, mediate, and write about conflict in Africa and the world. I intend to keep building the bridges this beautiful cohort has begun in our divided world and between the rigid certainties that keep us apart and the patient, humble work of understanding that might finally bring us together.
Rome gave me a global family. I am bringing it home.
