04/21/2026
This is Andrew.
“I grew up in Sierra Leone, and I would probably still be there if not for an 11-year civil war that shattered my country and my childhood. I was 13 when rebels attacked my town, burned homes to the ground, and killed people my family knew and loved. One day I was a teenager with big dreams. The next, I was running for my life.
My siblings and I fled again and again, village to village, city to city, surviving bombings, gunfire, and checkpoints where you never knew who to trust. I watched entire communities disappear overnight. I lost friends. I lost family. Hunger and fear became normal. Childhood vanished.
We eventually crossed borders into refugee camps where food was scarce, disease spread quickly, and hope felt fragile. There were nights without enough to eat. Days filled with uncertainty. Years spent waiting… for safety, for news of loved ones, for a chance at something different.
And then, after unimaginable loss, a door opened.
A family in Connecticut agreed to host me and my two sisters. I still remember landing in the United States. The relief, the exhaustion, the disbelief that I had survived. It was the first time I slept in a real bed in years. The first time the future felt possible again.
Today, I am Edesia’s Vice President of Global Operations.
For more than a decade, I’ve coordinated shipments of life-saving food to more than 65 countries, including the very country I once fled, reaching almost 30 million children. I understand deeply what it means when a truck arrives. When a shipment clears customs. When a box of therapeutic food reaches a mother who has been waiting.
When I see photos of children recovering from malnutrition, I don’t see numbers. I see faces. I see resilience. I see survival.
My story is not just one of escape. It’s one of return, in a different form.
Now, I help send hope back into the world.
And there is nowhere else I would rather be.”
