By Yesua Aliki Uriah Yesua, Business Admin scholar in Bidibidi

They say when you flee, you only carry what fits in a bag. But for many of us in Bidibidi Refugee Settlement, the heaviest thing we carried was a dream that had nowhere to go.


​Back home, I didn’t have a career yet, I had a vision. I was a student, a dreamer standing on the starting line of a life full of promise. I could see myself in a graduation gown, I could see myself serving my community. Then, the unrest came. In one night, the starting line disappeared. The schools closed, the path was cut off and my dream was buried under the red dust of the journey to Uganda.


​For a long time here in the settlement, I felt like a ghost of the person I was supposed to be. Recently, the pressure has mounted. The 2026 Categorization Scheme, the shift in food assistance felt like the final blow. It felt like the world was telling me: Forget your dreams, just focus on surviving today. I felt trapped between a past I couldn’t return to and a future that looked like a closed door. ​I remember sitting in the shade of a neem tree, watching the wind move the grass, feeling completely defeated. My Red Sea wasn’t a body of water; it was the fear that I would spend the rest of my life just surviving without ever becoming who I was meant to be.


​But I remembered a piece of ancient wisdom: The battle isn’t yours to win alone; you need only to be still.

​I realized that being still didn’t mean giving up. It meant stopping the internal panic that told me it was too late. In that stillness, I stopped looking at the food cuts and started looking for the dry ground.
​The closing of one door is a signal to move toward another. I am now reviving my dream through the pursuit of an Academic Scholarship in Business Administration. My goal is to use these skills to create sustainable solutions and help my community stay resilient, moving us from humanitarian reliance to economic independence. I am trading a survivor mindset for a scholar mindset.


​To my brothers and sisters in Bidibidi: Do not let the silence of this place make you believe you are forgotten. Our dreams didn’t die at the border, they are just waiting for us to be still enough to see the way forward.