The Moth Radio Hour: Camouflage - Stories of Hidden Selves
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This autumn, fall for Moth Stories as we travel across the globe for our mainstages. We're excited to announce our fall lineup of storytelling shows from New York City to Iowa City, London, Nairobi, and so many more. The Moth will be performing in a city near you, featuring a curation of true stories. The Moth mainstage shows feature five tellers who share beautiful, unbelievable, hilarious, and often powerful true stories on a common theme. Each one told reveals something new about our shared connection.

To buy your tickets or find out more about our calendar, visit themoth.org slash mainstage. We hope to see you soon. From PRX, this is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Sarah Austin-Ginness, and in this hour, we'll hear stories of camouflage and secrecy. We always ask Moth storytellers to be open, and these stories are open, but they're about hidden identities.

Our first story comes from Kevin Roos. He told this at a Moth main stage called Checkmate, Stories of Strategy. Here's Kevin Roos live at the Moth. It was the first time I was going on a Christian date, and I was freaking the hell out. I was in my dorm at Liberty University, the world's largest evangelical Christian university, and I was in the bathroom drinking.

putting gel in my hair, and my friends from my dorm were all around me giving me advice for the night. And one of them told me that the three rules of Christian dating are pay, pray, and say. You pay for the meal as the man, you pray over the meal, and then you lead the conversation. Or because lead doesn't rhyme, you say the conversation. Yeah.

And I was freaking out because, frankly, I'm not very good at going on dates. But I was also freaking out because this was the first time that I was going to have to lie to her. We all tell lies on dates. I've told girls that I like going out dancing, that I cook on my own, that I didn't watch the royal wedding. LAUGHTER

But this was different because this time I was lying about who I was and why I was there at Liberty University. To back up,

I didn't grow up in a Christian family. I'm not an evangelical Christian. I grew up as far away from that as possible. My parents were dyed-in-the-wool liberals who worked for Ralph Nader in the 1970s, and that was the conservative wing. I had other family members who actually on game night would play class struggle, which is the socialist alternative to monopoly.

The box, if you're curious, features Nelson Rockefeller arm wrestling Karl Marx. It's a great game. And then I went to Brown University, which most evangelical Christians consider Cuba with diplomas. But in the middle of my time at Brown, I was down in Lynchburg, Virginia with my boss working on a writing project, and I met a group of students from Liberty University.

And I remember them telling me about their school. They told me it was the world's largest evangelical university. It had this set of sort of crazy rules called the Liberty Way that said no drinking, no smoking, no dancing, no R-rated movies, and perplexingly, no hugs that lasted for longer than three seconds. This is actually a rule there.

And they told me that they had classes in things like creationist biology and evangelism 101 that all the students were required to take.

And I was fascinated and a little bit scared. I went back to Brown feeling like this was the most foreign place I could imagine, much more foreign than Tokyo or Rio or places like that. And this was also coincidentally the time in my college career when all my friends were starting to plan their study abroads. And so I thought to myself, well, what if I went abroad to Lynchburg, Virginia and

and studied this culture of conservative Christianity and found out the worst things they do, how bigoted and intolerant they are, and then wrote a book about it. And so midway through my sophomore year, I withdrew from Brown, I shipped off to Lynchburg, Virginia, and I entered Liberty University as a student and an undercover writer. I was going to write a book about my time there.

And I arrived on campus and I remember feeling the biggest culture shock of my life. These were students that had seemingly nothing in common with me. They didn't curse, they sort of like talked like Kenneth the Page, like you know, golly and gee whiz. They honestly believed the earth was 6,000 years old. And they had Facebook groups like, I hope the rapture comes before my student loans were due.

Which is pretty good, I thought. Not bad, considering the genre. And so I started to settle in, and on my first Friday night there, I went to Bible study, because, you know, what else are you going to do on a Friday night at Christian college? So I was at the house of an older student off campus,

I remember going upstairs after the Bible study and watching a guy and a girl sort of kneeling together and praying very intensely. And the guy is sort of holding the girl's hand and sort of staring into her eyes. And I sort of looked around the room like, is anyone seeing this? And a girl came over to me and she introduced herself as Kristen.

She was sort of like, she looked like a young Tina Fey. She had glasses and long brown hair and she acted like one too. She was a little cynical and the first thing she said to me was, "They're fellowshipping. That's liberty speak for hitting on each other awkwardly." And I liked her immediately. And so we started spending more time together after that Bible study group and we went on a few dates.

And since you can't do anything on dates, since there's no physicality allowed, we had to actually talk to each other and get to know each other. And...

Over time, I learned that she was not very typical for liberty. She was an evangelical Christian, sure, and she was pretty pure sort of morally, but she read Harry Potter. She liked the Beatles. Her parents had made her come to Christian school, and so through all of this, I found that I had found one person who might even a little bit be able to get me.

And of course I couldn't out myself to her, but as we went on more and more and more dates, I started telling her things about myself. I started talking about my family and my upbringing and my thoughts about some of Liberty's sort of more conservative doctrines.

And it really sort of became an outlet for me as I was sort of struggling with the rest of this school. And at one point, I even was grilling her so hard that she sort of stopped and looked at me quizzically and said, are you recording this?

And I knew at that point that I had gotten a little bit too close. As the semester went on, I sort of experimented in every facet of Liberty's student life. I joined the church choir, I played on the intramural softball team, I made friends in my dorm, and

As all this sort of happened, I felt myself sort of becoming unmoored a little bit. I felt a little bit detached from the person that I'd come in being. I was sort of, I felt like I was almost being brainwashed. And so I remember, you know, sitting and typing emails to my family and friends back home and puzzling for hours about whether I should use they or we, right?

And I knew it was bad when a friend from home sent me a Wikipedia article about Stockholm Syndrome. So my family and friends were not too thrilled about this. But...

The one thing that I had the hardest time sort of figuring out was what to do about Kristen because on one hand I really liked her. On the other hand, I was an undercover journalist and I couldn't exactly in good conscience continue dating her and I realized that in some ways, you know, dating is about what you tell people but relationships are different. They're about sort of what you don't leave out.

And so I knew that even though I had fun dating her, I couldn't really be in a relationship with her. And so midway through the semester, I called her and I said,

You know, I just, I'm really busy lately. You know, I've got a lot going on. I don't know if I can make it out to our date this weekend. I sort of blew her off, frankly. And it killed me to do that. And I remember telling her, you know, like, it's not you, it's me. And for the first time in the history of that phrase, it was not a lie. And so the semester went on.

And I would see Kristen around the school, but I didn't talk to her nearly as frequently. And the semester went on and I had sort of wild and great experiences. Some of what I saw there was awful. It was classes about creationism and the homosexual agenda. And Jerry Falwell was the chancellor of this school. Jerry Falwell who said that 9/11 was the fault of gays and lesbians and the ACLU, or as I like to call them, my friends and family.

So this was not a totally comfortable experience, but it was a productive one. And I came away from the semester sort of feeling more virtuous. And I never converted, but I felt the sort of Christianity rubbing off on me. And I remember coming back to New York, and I was at the Apple store. And I had a broken laptop that I had dropped. And I went to the guy at the Genius Bar, and he said...

Don't tell anyone, but if you say that you didn't drop this, that it just broke, I can save you $400 in repair fees." And I remember sort of sitting there tearing my hair out like, "God is going to judge me if I do this." I can't in good conscience tell... And I know this is not on any Christian virtue scale. It doesn't register. I know Steve Jobs is not like widows and orphans.

But I still felt more virtuous than I had before I got there. Except for one thing, I still hadn't told my friends there that there was this book coming out and that they were going to be in it. And so six months passed and I went back down to Liberty. The book hadn't come out yet and I sort of gathered them one by one and told them

that I was there in essence to sort of catalog their lives and our lives. And, and then I was turning them into the characters of a book. And, uh, and I, they forgave me. I mean, cause you know, like forgiveness is Christian crack or whatever. You know, it's like, um,

But so they weren't mad. They were a little confused and they felt that they had actually not done their job by not converting me. So they apologized to me. They were like, we're so sorry that we didn't show you the way to God. Clearly we screwed something up.

And on that trip, I learned that Kristen had actually left Liberty. She had transferred to a home close to where she lived and wasn't going there anymore. And I guess she felt sort of mismatched there too. So there was one more person left to call before this book came out. And I called her and I sort of caught up a little bit and I told her that there was this book and she was going to be in it. And she sort of paused and then she paused some more and then she said,

"Oh, so that's why you didn't know anything." She said, "That's why you called it 'Philippians' instead of 'Philippians.'" Everything sort of clicked into place. And the second thing that she said was that she was glad that it actually wasn't her, that she hadn't done anything wrong. And so after that call, we sort of fell out of touch.

We both sort of in and out of other relationships. The book came out and out of all the questions I got about the book as I was going around telling this story, I would say 90% of the time people would ask, "What happened to Kristen?"

And I had changed your name, I should mention, by that point. But people would ask. They wanted to know, had we ended up together? Had there been a happy ending to our story? And I couldn't exactly tell them what they wanted to hear, but I said, yeah, we're still in touch. And then more and more time passed, and I felt the categories becoming clearer in my life. I knew that I was not...

a Liberty student, I was not an evangelical Christian, my life sort of became much more like what it was before I did this experiment. But I couldn't sort of shake the one thing that she had said to me, which was that, you know, you weren't just sort of using me for material for your book, were you? She said, you know, that was not your point in all this. And I had responded, no, of course, but I thought about that more and more, and so...

years after the book came out, just a little while ago, I gave her a call. And we talked and caught up again and talked about the things in our lives that had been going on. And I said, you know, people ask about you. When I go out on the road and talk and tell this story, they want to know what happened to you, what happened to us. And she said, well, that makes sense because we were pretty amazing. And she sort of chuckled.

And I just sat there and smiled because I realized that for the first time since I had left Liberty, in that statement, I had found a we that felt real to me. Thank you. That was Kevin Roos.

Kevin is a columnist for the New York Times, and he's the author of two books, Young Money and The Unlikely Disciple, which is all about the experiences you heard in this story. He lives in Brooklyn, and he's still not an evangelical Christian. The events in the story took place over a decade ago, and yes, I did ask, what happened to Kristen? And he said, I haven't spoken to Kristen in a few years, although this reminds me I should call her to catch up.

I have to confess a secret of my own, and that is, I was hoping they would end up together. If you'd like to share Kevin's story or others you hear in this hour or anywhere in the Moth Archive, go to our website, themoth.org, and find us on social media, too. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, at The Moth. When we return, another story involving romantic relationships and hidden identities, as told by the nun who lived it, when The Moth Radio Hour continues.

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and presented by PRX.

This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin-Ginness, and we're sharing stories of hiding and being hidden. Our last story was about hiding identity in a religious context, and this one is too, but actually in reverse. Sister Carolyn Martin told the story at a special event that featured five Catholic nuns. The theme of the night was Sister Stories. Here's Sister Carolyn live at the Moth in St. Paul, Minnesota. One day when I was a teenager...

I remember very distinctly being out in my little red convertible with the top down, and I was with my friend Celia.

And we were buzzing around Washington, D.C. on the Capitol Beltway, and blonde hair flying in the breeze and having a great old time. And I remember Celia wanted to be a religious sister. And I thought, "That's great, you'll make a wonderful sister." Me, I'm going to get married and have a big family. I was Catholic, practicing Catholic, but not very devout, no real relationship with the Lord. But she would make a great sister.

So there we were out kicking around having fun and she said, oh, by the way, would you mind stopping by the Little Sisters of the Poor in Washington? It's this home for the elderly poor where I volunteer and I have a little business there. So fine. And we pulled over.

And when we got out, the young Mother Superior came out on the front steps and she saw our guitars in the back of the car and she said, well, why don't you bring your guitars in and sing and play for the residents? So we did. But you know, we were beginners, so we weren't really that good.

But we went around and we sang and we played for them, and there were the most beautiful smiles on every wrinkled face. It was very touching. And of course, I didn't know at that time what I know now, that many times older people have a little hearing deficit, but they thought we were great. They thought we were great, or else...

And this is probably more likely true. They heard with the ears of the heart, which old people are awesome at doing. But anyway, I also noticed the sisters serving in the background. They were happy. They were genuinely happy. You could see it.

and humble in their service, but full of joy. And I remember thinking, here I am, a teenager, and I see people racing all around society, frantically looking for happiness. And these people, these women, in all of their poverty and simplicity, they have it. They have the pearl of great price, and I want it.

So then one of the sisters invited me into a room where there was a lady preparing to go home to God. She was in the dying process.

And there was a sister kneeling at her bedside, praying with the lady, holding her hand, holding in her hand a lit candle, which is a symbol we have of their going forth to meet Christ, like the bridegroom's bridesmaid with her lamp lit. And I was so taken aback by that. I was a teenager. I had never thought about end of life. I had my whole life ahead of me.

But I realized that right here in this room, right before my eyes, time was touching eternity. And then I started asking myself the big questions. Well then, what lies after? Is there a God? Is there eternal life? What is there? And I knew that I believed in God. And I knew at that moment that whatever number of years there would be between the time that this happened and the time he called me home at the end of my life,

I wanted those years to be very meaningful and I wanted to spend them for him. So, there was just one problem and that was that I had this boyfriend and we were very serious about each other, very serious, and we had envisioned our life together

and our future together. And he had actually already proposed to me on two occasions, you know, after we'd spent an evening together, begged me to marry him. And I felt an intense love for him, and I knew the answer would be yes, but I knew being a teenager, it's really too soon. So the yes was going to come, but it hadn't come yet.

So now, God had swept me off my feet with this greater love, this beautiful love from the experience that I had had. And so how was I going to tell my boyfriend? And so...

I didn't want to hurt his feelings, and so I kept saying, if I wait one more day, one more day, one more day, I know I'm going to think of just the right words to tell him that he'll understand that it's not that I don't love him anymore, but he'll understand about my vocation and my call. And the days passed, and we continued dating. We'd go out to ball games and parties. We went to the roller rink, hung out with friends. But I couldn't think of the right words to tell him. And...

I was enjoying all the things that life had to offer, you know, everything materially that I wanted and popularity and success and friends and all that and enjoying the beauty of his love for me. But I still was embraced by this mystery. And I couldn't think of the words to tell him because, you know, vocation is a mystery. So the evening before I entered the convent...

I felt like a heel, but I didn't want to hurt him, so time was running out. So we went to a movie, and after the movie, I told him I am going to become a Catholic sister. He was so stunned. First of all, he didn't know what a sister is. And second of all, what about the life together that we had planned? And he was so stunned, and he cried, and I cried.

And we cried and cried. I remember my shoulder was all wet with his tears. I can still almost feel it today, and I can still almost feel the pain in his heart. There had been one instance where before that time I had been called over to get my pinning, you know, for my postulant outfit, and I remember he drove me over there not knowing what it was about. He didn't ask, so I didn't tell him. And...

And I remember the sisters running around, you know, doing my pins. And I'm looking out the window down at him sitting in the car, full of pain for him and for the pain that would be in his heart. I almost felt guilty for the great joy that I felt in following my call. But then when this last night came and I finally had to break the news to him, it was very, very difficult for both of us. So the next day came. It was my entrance ceremony.

And he came. I knew he would be there. He always wanted to be with me, and he was going to for as long as he could. So my family was around me, and he was in the pew immediately behind me at my entrance ceremony. And then when it was time for him to leave, we were at the front entrance together.

And I couldn't kiss him, I couldn't hug him. I mean, it was different now. I was a postulant and I was studying to be a sister. So we were with the sister who's in charge of the young women who had just entered. And he and I said goodbye, tears running down his cheeks. And he turned slowly and went down the steps. And it was a hot summer day. And that very kind sister said to him, wait, would you like a cold drink?

He turned around and he looked up at her and he looked up at me with the tears coming down and he nodded yes. So he came back up. She gave him a cold drink. He sipped it. He made it last as long as he could. We just looked at each other in silence and the tears continued to flow. And when he couldn't make that cold drink last any longer, he gave her the empty cup, took one last look at me, turned around and went down the steps and disappeared.

But you know, I always can find him in the Eucharist. I still love him. But my heart is expanded to this great love that accepts and welcomes everybody that God sends into my life. It's a much greater love. But he's part of it. So I find him when I go to prayer. And I find all of the other people whom I love. And I've never regretted saying yes to God's beautiful plan for my life.

That was Sister Carolyn Martin. Sister Carolyn has been a member of the Little Sisters of the Poor for 46 years. She's also a registered nurse. She said, "This story took place 50 years ago, although I never even include a timeframe in the telling, because love is timeless, no matter how recently or how long ago one has been given that gift."

I asked if she had seen her former boyfriend since the events of the story, and she said, "No, I have not seen him since the day of my entrance into the religious sisterhood. I wanted the gift of my life to the Lord to be total, no looking back except in the joyful gratitude to God that the memories might inspire. I do pray for him in a special way on his birthday each year, but Jesus himself is now my guy."

To see a photo of Sister Carolyn Martin pronouncing her first vows and a photo of four of the nuns who told stories at this show taking a selfie, go to themoth.org. Next up is a classic moth story from Boris Timonovsky. Boris is the proud father of two boys, and many of his moth stories include them. This story is no different. He told it at a moth night when we partnered with the Penn World Voices Festival. Here's Boris live with the moth in Brooklyn, New York.

I was overseas not that long ago on a business trip and my last evening there we all went out and by then everyone was sick and tired of talking about work so we drank and we talked about other things like kids and families and this guy Vlad says that his nine-year-old daughter Julie has an assignment in her English class to find a pen pal and he asked if my son Joseph would be willing to correspond with her

I said, "Sure." Because of course he would. Then I fly back home to New York and I tell Joseph. And Joseph says, "No." And he wouldn't say why, but I figured it must be because Julie is a girl. And Joseph is 11, and the way they teach them in school is

Romantic love is not a part of the curriculum yet. But on the other hand, they're already taught about abstinence and how sex leads to pregnancy and pregnancy leads to additional responsibilities. So if Joseph came to associate girls with additional responsibilities...

And with less playtime as a consequence, like less time for his PlayStation. I can't blame him for that, but what am I gonna do? I don't want to break the promise that I'd already made to Vlad. So I thought, "How hard can it be? I'll do it." And I went to Yahoo and I opened another email account there and I forwarded it to Vlad. And I wrote to him that, yes, Joseph would be happy to be Julie's pen pal.

And I checked that mailbox a few times in the week that followed. And it was empty and I thought maybe I was off the hook.

And then one night I came home late and I live by myself, so I checked my Match.com messages first and then I went to this new email account and there was an email there from Julie. And I read it and I thought, "Yeah, I can do this." Because she wasn't asking me any difficult questions. She wasn't asking what I learned from the past relationships. She wasn't asking what my true intentions are. She wasn't asking if I'm really divorced or just separated.

All she wanted to know was: do I have a pet? What my favorite color is? And who I want to be when I grow up. But an hour later, I still didn't have an answer. Because what was I gonna say? That it would be nice to make senior vice president by the time I'm 40? That the reason I don't have a pet is because I dread the thought of coming home one night and finding it on the floor dead? That...

That I've just gone over every color of the rainbow only to conclude that each color has some sort of an unpleasant memory connected to it. It was hard to concentrate, it was late, I wasn't fully sober, my Match.com screen kept blinking because somebody without a photo wanted to chat. But I tried to remember

I try to remember how I would have answered Julie's questions years ago. So I ended up writing to her that my favorite color is blue because it's the color of the ocean and I have a parrot and when I do my homework my parrot is sitting on my shoulder and when I grow up I want to be a sea captain and my parrot and I will sail around the world.

And when I woke up the next morning, I turned on my computer, and this is usually when I check my Match.com messages again. But this time, I was more interested in what Julie had to say about that whole sea captain thing than in the messages that I had waiting for me from my adult, female, open-minded, easygoing, down-to-earth, outgoing, and adventurous pen pals that were...

that were written in response to the very adult messages that I sent to them. And there was an email in that mailbox and I felt nervous about opening it. And I opened it and it wasn't from Julie, it was spam. Something about signing up to have affairs with married women or signing up to find out if your wife is having an affair. Something like that. But I kept checking for new mail almost hourly that day.

And in between checking for new mail, I asked myself all kinds of questions like, "Okay, so you wanted to be a sea captain, and then what happened?" And I remembered telling my parents that I want to be a sea captain. And my mom said that she's not aware of too many sea captains who are Jewish. And my grandma said, "What about Christopher Columbus? He was a Jew."

And I remember everybody looking at my grandma, not saying anything, because pretty much anything my grandma said was ignored. She kind of lost her standing in the family ever since she was seen crying at President Brezhnev's funeral. And my dad said that Christopher Columbus doesn't count because he had converted.

And my other grandma, who always argued with my mom, no matter what the topic, she said, "What about her cousin's husband, who was an accountant for a cruise line?" And my mom said, "It's not the same thing." And my grandfather said that he doesn't know about captains, but what he does know is that TV repairs is a pretty damn good business to be in. And he said that one should look no further than his nephew Alec.

His nephew Alec was a TV repairman. He visited us every couple of months whenever our old TV broke. And he walked around with this beat up old rectangular briefcase filled with spare parts and all shapes and sizes. And he always looked like he was tired all the time. And I was remembering all of these things and I remember how I was dreaming about standing on the bow of a ship

with the sun in my face, and with the wind in my face, and the ocean waves splashes in my face. And I thought that so much has changed since then, because now, if I'm thinking about being on a ship, I see myself walking up and down the deck of some cargo ship anchored somewhere in the vicinity of Staten Island, in the fog, with nothing but those old, rusty shipping containers around me. And how lonely it probably feels.

And so I kept waiting for Julie's message, and nothing was coming from her. And about a week later, Vlad called with some work questions. And then he said that he was really, really sorry, but Julie didn't want to be Joseph's pen pal anymore. And I said, "Why?" And he said he didn't know why, and I thought, "Maybe it's because I didn't ask her any questions?" And Vlad asked me if I read Joseph's mail.

And I said no. So he read it to me over the phone. And then he said that Joseph would probably be very upset if he didn't hear from Julie again. And I don't know what made me say that yes, he probably would be. And Vlad said that if Julie wasn't going to write to Joseph, then he would.

I said, I told him not to worry about it. But I must have sounded really upset because he said that no, he'll write to him. Only he wanted me to tell him what to write. So I said, I'll think about it. And a week later, he called to remind me and I was in the middle of something. And I looked at this postcard from Florida that I had in my cubicle. And I said, well, how about this?

Dear Joseph, my favorite color is also blue and my favorite animal is the dolphin. And when I grow up, I want to be a scientist and study dolphins and live on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean all by myself. And maybe you and your parrot can visit me there sometimes and bring me food and scientific supplies. And Vlad said that he liked it and he asked me to type it up and send it over to him.

Because he wanted to make sure that he got it right. And I typed it up and I sent it over and he sent it back to me and yes, he got it right. And I don't know how long an average pen pal relationship lasts but I felt that ours had run its course. And this is how it ended. But sometimes when Vlad calls, he asks me how his pen pal is doing and does he still want to be a sea captain.

And I tell him that yes, his pen pal still wants to be a sea captain very much. Because if he didn't, then what does he want to be? Thank you. That was Boris Timinovsky. Boris is a member of Three Bridges Theatre in Brooklyn. His sons are teenagers now. He works for a financial software company, and yes, he still wants to be a sea captain. But he says he hasn't found the right continuing education class.

Do you have a story to tell us? You can pitch us your story by recording it right on our site or call 877-799-MOTH. The best pitches are developed for moth shows all around the world. When we return, a refugee originally from Sierra Leone is torn between joining the Army and staying in school. When the Moth Radio Hour continues. ♪

The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by the public radio exchange, PRX.org. You're listening to The Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Sarah Austin-Ginesse. In this hour, we're hearing stories of people who are in disguise. And next, in our final story, that twist is at the end.

The story is from Abraham Laino. We met Abraham a few years ago in a moth community workshop with the Aspen New Voices Fellows. These days, Abraham works to help refugees, and that's because of his own experience as a refugee from Sierra Leone, which you are about to hear. Here's Abraham Laino live at the moth. Growing up in my house in Sierra Leone, there was always music. One family member only needed to do something like, Daddy sing bass, Mama sing tenor.

Me and little brother will join right in there. And soon there was music all around the house. We had fun playing a lot of household games, Scrabble, Monopoly. But being a religious family, we were taught a lot of values. We were taught to love. We were taught to have respect, compassion, but above all, kindness. My dad would say, there's no reason not to be kind. We even had catchphrases that we used in the house.

to depict kindness. One was happy to share, happy to bear one another's burdens, that's why we're here. My parents gave a lot of importance to education, so at a very young age, I was already dreaming to become an engineer. Everything stopped. I was 16 and there was a war. Actually, the war that ravaged Sierra Leone for about a decade started in the town where I grew up. My family and I crossed over

from Sierra Leone into Guinea and we became refugees. Now life as a refugee was not easy. At 16, I stood in line to receive food rations. I learned to build a shelter and that is mud, sticks and some plastic sheet. When the food rations were not enough, my brothers and I worked as porters to make some money and bring home so that mommy can cook. Because there was no opportunity for me to go to school, I was on the street.

selling fuel in bottles. Now, if you go to Africa and you see some kids playing with fuel, with bottles and something that looks like juice, it's not apple juice. It's fuel. That's what I did. I would leave my family in Guinea, in the refugee camps, and I would return to Sierra Leone whenever there was a cessation of the violence, just for me to be able to go back to school. This was my life for the 10 years that the war lasted.

I will leave my family in Guinea, go to Sierra Leone. There will be a war and then I will come back and join them. In 1999, I was again in Sierra Leone. This time, I was in my first year of university, studying engineering. Another war broke out. My family was in Guinea. We had lost contact and I was in a very brutal war. Actually, most of what people know about the Sierra Leonean war happened in this period.

I saw people being killed, shot, and waiting for their time to die. I saw vultures eating dead bodies in the streets. I saw people whose limbs were cut. And what this did to me was to, it changed me. It changed my life. I lost my innocence. I became angry with the world. I became angry with myself. So I said to myself, the only thing I will do, I'm not going to run anymore. I'm also going to take a weapon and fight. So I decided to join the

a fighting group. Now before I went to war to fight in the army, I decided to go back when there was an opportunity to my parents and seek their blessing. It was one Sunday morning in my parents' house, now in Guinea. The telephone rang and on the side of the telephone was my friend with whom I had registered for the army and he said, "Abraham, come! You've been selected. You're a cadet officer. This is our chance. Let's go to war."

promising him that I will return, I will come to him, I put down the phone. I turn, and there was my dad. He had that look. He wanted to know what I was talking about. So I told him, Dad, remember when I came, I told you my plans, that I no longer want to run, and now is the time. I just got a call that I've been selected for the army. I'm going, and I'm going to fight. He told me, Junior, that's the name they called me home. Sit down.

He said, "For all the time that the war had lasted, I spared you some details, things that I now think you need to know. Do you remember this person?" And that was the name of his youngest brother. And I said, "Yes, I remember. He's dead, right?" It was not a natural death. He was killed in that war. And he went on to call many more names of people that I knew who had suffered violence, who had suffered rape, and who were killed.

And he said, while you were away, I was praying for you to come back. If you went back into that war and something were to happen to you, I don't know if I would survive it. And he cried. Now you know, a typical African man, it's not very easy to see him cry. Seeing my dad cry left me with mixed feelings. I was angry. Angry because I knew the effect of what his tears would do to me. But I was no longer in that position. I was a changed person.

I was a soldier. I wanted to go and fight. That was my life now. So I said, Dad, what am I going to do? I've been a refugee. I'm not going to continue being a refugee for the rest of my life. It's been 10 years. I'm 26 years old. I don't have a bank account. I don't have a job. I don't even have a certificate to show that I'm somebody in this world. I can't stay. I'm going. And he said, I can't answer to all the things that you have, all the questions that you have now.

But if you listen to me, I will pray. Dad, we've been praying for how long and the war is still going on. I'm not going to sit to wait for another prayer to be answered. This is about my life and this is what I want to do. I left the room. It was a couple of days afterwards. There was another telephone call. This time it was from a guy called Gerald Dams from Holland. Now, Gerald Dams had visited Guinea while I was away traveling.

and I didn't have any communication with my parents and going through the war that I explained earlier, Gerald Dam met my parents. He heard their story. He heard that they had a son that was missing in the war and he grew friendship with them. When he went back to Holland, this tourist took upon himself to call every now and then to ask, "Is Junior home?" Finally today, on a fateful day that he called, they told him, "Yes, Junior is here."

But before he could get excited, they told him, but there is a problem. And Gerard said to my parents, what's the problem? My parents said to him, he cannot stay. What do you mean he cannot stay? Because we can't keep him here. He doesn't see his dreams in this place. So Gerard asked, what can we do? What can I do? My parents said, the only thing that we know would keep this young man here is if he were able to go back to school. And he said, why not? They said, there are schools here.

They are private. They are very expensive, but we can't afford it. Gerard Herringdott said to my parents, please go, find a way to open an account for him, register him in school, and I will pay for his education. Gerard kept to his promise. He paid for me to go back to school. I went back to school. I went to college, and I graduated in 2002. I went back to the camps where I worked with refugees, but Gerard Dams said,

That was Abraham Leno.

Today, Abraham is the country representative for the American Refugee Committee, ARC, in Bukavu, Congo, where he oversees the management of refugee programs in the country. He's the father of three, and he said, "Telling my story helps my kids and my larger family to piece together our story, our refugee story."

After Abraham told this story, we found Gerard Dams. But when we spoke to him in yet another twist in a story with so many twists and turns, Gerard said he wasn't actually the person who sponsored Abraham's education. It was a woman named Mrs. Koenig, the mother of a very good friend of Gerard's.

Abraham was blown away by this news. He remembers writing to Mrs. Koenig a few times, but he thought she was Gerard's secretary. He said, that's just how I understood it. Mrs. Koenig once told me that it wasn't even necessary for me to send my year-end grades to show how I was doing in school. She told me, I trust you. These are words of a stranger that have always stayed with me.

Abraham said, I owe her so much. She changed my life and the lives of thousands of refugees that I have served and continue to serve today. That's it for this episode of the Moth Radio Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. And that's the story from the moth.

Your host this hour was Sarah Austin-Ginesse. Sarah also directed the stories in the show, along with Katherine Burns, Larry Rosen, and Kate Kellers. The rest of the Moth's directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Jennifer Hickson, and Meg Bowles. Production support from Timothy Liu Lee. The Moth would like to thank the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their support of the Moth Community Program, as well as Andrew Quinn and Rachel Stretcher from the Aspen Institute.

Most stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from The Drift, David Stanwood, Kaki King, Ali Farka-Torre, and Toumani Jubate. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by me, Jay Allison, with Vicki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

This hour was produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by PRX. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story and everything else, go to our website, themoth.org.