Joseph was a small scale farmer north of Kinshasa in the DR Congo, growing manioc, maize and corn. His family of 7 kids and his wife lived in a bamboo hut with an extension. For years, life had seemed peaceful and when the war broke out between the rebel group called the M23 and the Congolese government, things took a turn for the worse.

 

One morning Joseph found a group of stray monkeys in his corn field. He tried shooing them away. There was a loud explosion. Joseph realized that the M23 had planted land mines in his field. His peaceful 2 acre farming refuge was not safe anymore. Over the next month his family was harassed by the M23 rebels until Joseph was forced to leave his land to them and move with his family to Angola, and eventually to Madison Heights, a Detroit suburb.

 

Joseph and his family were thrilled for the chance to leave the daily violence behind and restart their lives in the US. But in a few months, his 7 year old daughter Esinam fell sick. Joseph had just found a job three miles away and had bought and repaired an old bicycle to commute to work, but he quickly found that riding to work on snowy winter days through unplowed streets was a dangerous exercise. Early one snowy winter morning, Esinam started having uncontrollable seizures.

 

Leaving his wife at home with the other children, he set off walking through the snow, carrying Esinam wrapped in a blanket to the closest hospital he had seen in the area. By the time he got to work that day having walked miles back and forth from the hospital and back to work again, he was told that his tardiness had cost him his job.