 My name is Rebecca Ojedile. I'm from Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa. It's a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon. I just returned from visiting a friend. I hopped on a bike, a motorcycle, and off I go to my next destination. The wind is blowing, the sun is shining on my face. Life is beautiful, I have no care in the world, and then suddenly everything changes. I feel a thud on my side. I feel myself being lifted off the motorcycle, and I feel myself landing face down on the ground, and then darkness. I don't know how long I've been out, but as I come to, I realize that I've just been hit by a car, a hit and run car actually. I look around. I see people standing. They look shocked. It's like they're frozen at a spot. So I slowly get up. I try to call for help to say, someone please help me. But I find that my mouth is full of blood, and blood is pouring down my face. And immediately it's like people just awakened, and everyone, people run to me, rush me to the hospital. I undergo surgery to stitch my face and stop the bleeding. The physical scar heal, but the emotional one, that is a different bargain. I feel fear. What's going to happen to me now? My life is completely changed. Will I be attractive again? I'm depressed. It's like no one hears my cry. Everyone thinks I'm this confident young woman who's got it all together. But I need help. I need someone to be a shoulder to cry on, to lean on. And I feel anger. Because this is not my fault. I didn't ask for this. I didn't call for this. I didn't want to be in an accident. I'm even more mad because I don't get to tell the person who hit me that this is what you've done. This is how you've changed my life. Because it's a hit and run accident. But eventually I get to the place of acceptance. This is what it is now. There are lots of people like me who have gone through one trauma or the other. It doesn't even have to be an accident. In conflict regions, in conflict communities like where I come from, people are displaced in their own home, in their own countries, rendered homeless. People are raped. There are people who have lost their families who have lost their loved ones. What about them? They are crying out for help. They need someone to listen to them. And the organisation I work for, the African Radio Drama Association, recognises this. And as part of our trauma healing activities, peace building activities, we do trauma healing. And one of the things we do is to bring the perpetrator of conflict and a victim of conflict. Let them see face to face. Let the victim be able to say, this is what you did. And also give the perpetrator a chance to apologise. Because there can be no peace in the world if individuals do not have enough peace. And we believe that providing a safe space for people to heal is the first step towards conflict resolution and sustainable peace building. My name is Muad Azuga and I'm from Morocco. I come from a tribe called Amazir. At ninth grade, I moved to a new city to finish middle school. There, I lived with my brother, his wife, and kids. Because my family was poor and I didn't like the boarding school I was in before. Though it was far, I was miles away from my parents. I thought, it's fine. At least, I'm living with my brother. In this city, it was pre-dominated by a different tribe from mine. So every day on my way to school, young people there, around my age that time, 13 years old, 12, 13, 14, whenever I pass an hour, they keep throwing rocks at me. I didn't know why they did that. Sometimes I was lucky. Sometimes I was not. I was hit by rocks. I was a part of a conflict. I was a victim of a conflict that I didn't start, but was there for years. I hardly finished the ninth grade and moved back to my hometown. There, I thought, finally, I'm at peace. No more stone throwing. I'm not going to be hurt this time. I finished high school there. I lived with my parents. And at university, the conflict that I thought was long gone just turned to be more violent than before. Young people from this tribe killed people from this tribe. Blood everywhere. You come out of the university and you find blood there and there and there. It was frightening. I was very scared. I didn't know why that was happening. Those people, young people, they were victims as well of a conflict that was there for years. In 2013, I joined the generation change program. There, I learned so many skills about peace. I learned about peace, peace building, conflict resolution, how to communicate with the other, how to deal with different, with difficult conversations. Then I decided to start an organization called Ineos Association to promote peace among the two tribes, the Amazigh tribe, which is my tribe and the other tribe. I was able to use those skills that I've learned from generation change to bring those young people from the two tribes together, to learn about peace, to show them that there is a chance for us all to live peacefully in one community and that it is time for us to stop killing each other. So I was able to do that and it is young people currently are promoting peace by themselves in those communities. Thank you very much. My name is Noru Nalyombia from Uganda. I'm 18 years old. I'm super excited. It's my last year in high school and after high school, I'm going to go and find a job and be able to take care of the love of my life, my mother and my brother and my sister. And finally, we are going to have our happily thereafter because we had gone through a lot. This particular day, I'm at school and I'm picked and I'm told your mother fell sick and she died. What do you mean? What do you mean she died? I'm scared and angry and worried at the same time because we had a plan. I had promised her I'm going to finish school and I will find a job and I will take care of us because we had gone through a lot. But now she's gone. How was I going to be able to take care of my brother and my sister? Just me alone. I wanted to kill myself. I hated myself. I hated everyone. I hated school. I hated everything. All I wanted to do is to die. And then there were these four ladies in my school who helped talk to me and told me it's not over. You can still live a life. There is still a chance for you. They supported me and they helped me out. I resumed school. I didn't try to think about killing myself again and I continued with life. After school, I managed to get a job and start working. And after working, after three years, I decided to find this organization that I have at home. It's called Success Chapter. And our mission is to help people who are vulnerable, people who are scared, people who are worried, people who have given up on life because our belief is that the first person who gets to this person may change their life. It could be for better. It could be for worse. Because probably if I didn't get the right people to come into my life at that time, I don't know what I would have done to myself or to other people. So our vision is to help people who are vulnerable, to find that light in darkness, to find a vision and be able to create change in their communities. So my work at home is basically to help young people, especially young women, to find a light in darkness. That is what I do. Thank you so much. My name is Imran Al-Hajibuba. I'm from Yobes State in northeastern Nigeria. Yobes State is one of the most peaceful states in Nigeria until the emergence of Boko Haram insurgency. Two of my family members have been victims of a bomb blast during one of the several attacks. My neighbor and his father were murdered in cold blood. And one of my friends was kidnapped for almost three weeks until his father was able to pay a ransom of 10 million naira. These horrific incidences hadn't unfolded in me the task to stop this bloodshed. However, my inspiration to start a peace building work started in a bus. It is early morning of 6th June 2010. I'm traveling back home after my first registration in the university. I'm sleeping inside the bus. Then one of the passengers wake me up that we are in a military checkpoint. I step out of the bus and see men fully dressed in military uniform holding AK-47 rifles. And they are shouting at people, asking people to show their ID card. Show your ID card. So at that moment, I am confused because I don't have any ID with me as I lost my wallet the previous day. As I'm thinking of what to tell them, one of the passengers, one old man whispered to me, young man, don't show them your ID card. I'm suspecting them to be Boko Haram terrorist. They are impersonating the military. And basically Boko Haram is a terror organization, is a deadly terror organization in Nigeria. They fight students and civil servants in an effort to establish their own version of Islamic State. So they pick out all the passengers that show their ID cards, meaning they are either civil servant or student. Then they tie their hands and legs and tear them into a nearby bush. And for those that we don't have our IDs, they ask us to lie down on the road. When two men start to scream because they are so scared, so terrified, they hit their head with their boots. At that moment, I'm just shaking, my body is shaking. Then one of them asked me to stand up and remove my shirt. I'm just thinking at that moment, they will kill me. Then one of them asked me to lie down again on the road. As I lie down, one of them received a phone call. And after he answered the call, he allowed them to leave the place quickly. They disperse quickly, but still they pick out some more people with them. That is how I survived that attack. But they have succeeded in killing so many innocent people that day. So this heroin experience redefined my vision and inspired me to found an organization called Youth Coalition Against Terrorism. It is a volunteer-based youth organization that aims to unite young people against violent extremism through organizing peace education programs in schools to promote a culture of peace and tolerance and skills acquisition training for unemployed young people in villages so that frustration and hopelessness will not force them to join Boko Haram Extremist. So thank you. My name is Victoria Eboe and I come from Lagos, Nigeria. I would like to share with you how my childhood experience inspired me to take action and to work for peace. I am that girl who sits at the back of the classroom because I have no confidence at all. I am that girl who is considered dumb because I have a learning disability. I am always cared to go to school because I knew that I would encounter the same experience of friends laughing at me, making fun of me and also playing on my weaknesses as a means to bully me. I felt so terrible. I had so many internal conflicts. On many days I would go back home and I would sob. I hated my life. I felt so depressed. I remember one day I wanted to run away but there was nowhere for me to run to and then I remembered also that thoughts of committing suicide came to me but I did not discuss this with anybody. It was just a war that I fought within myself. I lived for a long time feeling so uncomfortable trying to discover and realize who I am and exactly how I am supposed to live in a society that dictates to you how you should live, how you should do things. Society tells you act this way and you try to act this way and it says no, not this way, act that way. Then I started to volunteer and volunteering with youth led organization has given me a space where I felt accepted. A space where I could share my story as a means to empower other people. Volunteering has also connected me to a strong community of friends who see a very beautiful future, a community of friends who see beauty in diversity and beauty in differences. Then I look back at my community where I grew up and in the faces of many children I see them trying to fight through identity crisis exactly the challenge that I had as a child and as a way to help them out I founded an organization in 2013 called One African Child Foundation and the motive of this organization is to help children who come from my community which is a slum area in Lagos to realize their self-identity and the potential they have in themselves to be whoever they want to be. I think the power in our story is realizing the I am however we end what comes after I am define who we are rather than say I am weak we can say I am powerful and this is exactly what we teach these children by investing in mental fitness. We not only try to educate them on how to read and write but we also educate them on emotional intelligence learning about their self and also learning about how to control their emotions self-regulation we also teach empathy and tolerance we teach respect for diversity and we also teach them peace building and conflict resolution skills because the challenges that we have in our society will always be there but we only need to learn how to deal with them whenever they arise In life we don't have the power to choose the event and stories that are prone to us but we have the power to choose how we want to respond to it and this is one way that I have responded to a challenge that happened to my childhood in my own community and you also have the power to look at your community and respond differently to some of the violence and conflicts going on around in your community and around the world today. Thank you