I never quite understood the expression “a walk in the park” until taking an actual walk in the park with my little brother. For me, that expression never made sense—walking in a park was neither easy nor pleasant. When I was little, the nearest park was so far away that by the time we finally reached it, I didn't want to walk anymore. But since then, we've moved, and things have changed. My brother helped me realize this. As we walked towards the playground in the park, he was enthusiastic, voicing his opinions. I listened to him in a way I hadn't before, realizing that participation and advocacy are crucial for achieving a peaceful future. When he talked about how important it was for him to be class president next week, he said he was chosen because he promised his peers he would do his best to include everyone in the recess games. These walks are crucial, just as youth participation is for politics. It all started when I saw him climbing to the top of the slide, hoping he would grow up in a world where his perspective is appreciated and valued by adult leaders. As he slid down, I envisioned a great mechanism for youth ideas to reach politicians: establishing a government department dedicated to focusing on the opinions of all the country's inhabitants, not just those who can vote. When he reached the ground, my brother ran to slide down again, despite having already experienced it. It was then that I saw the determination young people have to be heard and not give up in the face of long waits. Later, after he had slid in every safe and imaginable way, he decided to play on the swings. Without hesitation, he asked for my help to get on. I would have tried to avoid adult help and done it myself, but his request excited me and made me understand that intergenerational collaboration will become a daily occurrence. It won't be isolated events where we see young leaders working together with authorities. It even made me reimagine education and its impact. The future my younger brother invited me to imagine was a world where education nurtures students to be leaders and collaborators, where phones are not machines that deliver bad news but connectors through which we can share our ideas for improving the world. A world where every country aims to end apathy and increase advocacy. While my brother fearlessly swung high, I imagined young people not being intimidated but motivated and guided by authority. After the swing, he hopped on the seesaw, and I joined him. There, I imagined a world where young people and adults work as equals, envisioning him as a president alongside me as a minister. When he got down, he took my hand to play tag. As he ran, he said he was a plane, and that imagination and creativity inspired me to not be afraid to have high dreams and be determined to believe in myself. I played with an immense sense of satisfaction. I knew that spaces would be opened for him, and his smile would not be erased by despair or apathy.

Good Day, Wow wee has time just flown by. This summer I spent my time re-writing my manuscript for the editors. My book Viktor, Into the Light will be out sometime in the summer of 2020 and I am delighted to share this exciting moment in my life with you. I am just thrilled that my dream is on the precipice of coming true! Publishing one of my books and having it made into a real book is so exciting for me.I have waited 40 years for this moment in my life and now it is finally happening for me! This is just wonderful! The whole experience of writing Viktor has been quite magical and inspirational. Since 2014 I have written 5 books, with Viktor being my first for publication. I hope you all have something exciting going on in your lives that just brings you pure joy! Have a wonderful time dancing through life. Look for my book; it will make a great gift for someone you love. Thank you for your time! God Bless, Julie Ann

Yes I admit, in some ways you are too old for me. The way you talk to children and activate a flashlight somewhere behind their wide eyes gives me shivers. The way you light something up in me makes me feel the same way, but sometimes I don't mind. Every now and then I catch you mention "but that was ahead of your time," and at first it doesn't bother me, but then I feel like I need to scrape my knees to catch up to you. But there's a way you bring me back to when I had just turned 13 - a new innocent spark under my small denim jacket, the calmness I felt listening to my favorite bands that were your favorite bands. You grabbed my arm and twirled me back to my favorite time in my life, riding around the block on my bicycle with my headphones playing the same music you were listening to in high school. I smell rain and I see tall trees that my eyes never saw the tops of, and I feel the smooth keys on my first keyboard I ever played when I unwrapped the shiny model on Christmas. I feel misunderstood again - in a good way. I feel smart, but I also feel like I'm ready to learn. Just when I thought I was trapped in this globe of uncertainty and confusion, you pulled me out and held me with your calloused hands and whispered lyrics to a song I've never heard before. I don't mind if you make me chase you - I feel the way I did when I swung on the swing set in primary school hoping to touch the sky with the curve of my toes. You take the bitter taste of dirt out of my mouth and drop a teaspoon of cough syrup on my tongue and I taste youth again. I love that you don't expect too much from me. I have looming due dates of papers over my head and voices singing that I'm a disappointment. With you, all I have is time. I have a full life ahead of me, that's what you said. I have nothing but time to waste with you while the world stops turning for that night. The little girl you dragged out from under me is frightened and won't let me enjoy living again. She's grown up before, and now that she's back again, she knows what you're going to do - she's seen it all before. Love and learning isn't all playgrounds and love bites and tire streaks in the driveway. It's scar tissue, obsession and smeared hearts on the face of the one who eats their heart out. You must never tell, she tells me. Do not let him know. I feel fire flaring up behind my neck when you whisper in my ear. I hear ghosts from the corners of my brain start to sing when you talk about the things you love. I feel a heavy weight on my heart when you hand me a shot glass. I feel it tugging when you become irritated when I get dressed. "Are you fucking leaving? Because if you want to leave, you can just go, I'll unlock the door for you," you hissed at me. I had to undo my dress and throw it on the floor for you to believe that I wasn't going anywhere. I heard police sirens and saw flashing blue and red lights, but they went away at the blink of an eye when you started to play love songs. I can ignore the signs all I want, but if they start to take away my sight, I will have to feel everything so intensely and blindly. I feel the wind brushing my long hair again while I sit outside by the lake at my grandmother's old house. I remember what it felt like to have my heart broken when I was little and not have anywhere to go but here. I close my eyes when we lay together in your bed and you roll on your side, and I come back to this place. I love it because even as lonely as I have ever been, nobody else has ever taken me here. Something about you forces me to experience everything over again and I feel immortal. I haven't spoken to you in months, I think it might even be a year. I fell in love with someone else. Younger than you, but still significantly older than me. Whenever she says "but that was ahead of your time," it reminds me of you and I wish I was nestled between your chest and your beard but I fell in love with someone else and you never bothered to text me again after that night that I made you walk home. I don't feel bad because you humiliated me in front of all your friends. I know you remember what happened. I drove by your house last night and I saw boxes piled up outside of your front door. You must have moved back to New Jersey finally, just like you told me you were going to do someday, using it as a reason why I deserved better. I see it now. I wanted to tip toe over and hide in the biggest box I could find and tie a long silky red bow around it, but I thought I might get tipped over on the way to the post office. I think about you a lot more than you'd think, you know. I see fragments of you in everyone I meet. You sneak your way into my thoughts very rarely, but still leaving me feeling refreshed. Feeling raw. Feeling free. Feeling immortal.

Being the age I am, which is only 13 years old, I thought writing a biography about myself would be simple. I mean I am only 5,057 days old, how much could I have really experienced? Well according to just about every adult I've ever met, not much. It seems as though people who are grown can no longer remember the glories of their youth and the lack of responsibility they once embraced. Let me tell you, it's annoying. The criticism many other people my age and I have received from others who are older than we are is infuriating, although sometimes necessary. Yet I feel as though young people with bright hopes for their futures are frowned upon in this day and age by people who have tried and failed. This is coming from someone growing up in this age of technology where sharing your ideas can be done with just the tapping of a small button on a light-up screen, and I can tell you many things. I could be writing an essay about myself right now, or I could be writing an essay on how sleep deprivation can cause teenagers to develop mental illnesses. Yet I am only doing one of those things, to the slightest. I was born in Minnesota and still live here now. I personally don't feel any connection to the area itself, but only to the people. I am only in 8th grade and hope to graduate high school as an honor roll student. I have been in varsity track and cross country since I was in 7th grade, but that doesn't matter much. I plan on moving out of state for college to go to med school, and eventually getting a degree in pediatric oncology. After that, I should hopefully find success in my career and live a happy life with whomever my family might be. That is all you need to know about me. Now, let me tell you that if you are someone over the age of 18 reading that, you probably thought that was funny. The reason for that being the fact that I am 13 years old, how could I possibly have my whole future planned already? That's, of course, impossible, which I understand. But isn't it a breath of fresh air to hear a young girl talk about her dreams so confidently as if she has no doubts they won't come true? I would hope so. When I tell people what I hope to do with my life they are generally surprised, yet supportive. Then the questions come flying at me like bullets. People will ask me things such as how I plan to pay for my 10+ years of schooling, or how I'm going to complete my residency. Well, the truth is, I don't know yet. And that's just the glory of being young that adults just can't seem to remember. The best part truly is not knowing what is going to happen next. If only all the adults in the world who have lost hope in their dreams, could go back to their youth and remember how it felt to not know. How it felt to have all these holes in your future plans, but not having to worry about them yet and just trusting that everything would fall perfectly into place even though for a lot of people it never will. Even those people who did have there future go as they hoped, and are doing well, can't seem to remember why they started doing what they are in the first place. For all the adults out there who probably won't ever see this, I hope that you can remember again someday, or that you are one of the few who already do. So the next time a little girl or boy tells you what their dreams are, instead of going along with it blindly pretending to be supportive when you truly don't believe it will happen; or telling them all the ways their plans could possibly go wrong. Help them get there. I challenge you to do whatever you can to help that young boy or girl reach that goal, no matter how unrealistic it may seem to you. Because to them, to me, and the rest of the youth, they are possible. Even though the only thing they might be able to tell you is, “I just want to be a doctor.”

Our generation is more connected than ever thanks to social media, and nowadays everybody can express their opinions. This is a very good thing, and a very frightening one at the same time. Indeed, it's very heartwarming to see that freedom of expression is alive and well, but it is also scary to think that with the modern tools available, anyone can be heard throughout the whole wide world. That means that anyone can create a movement or redirect the purpose of one, which can have good as well as bad consequences. The ease with which someone can be heard is great because it allows anyone to make injustices known and undone, or make heroes known and rewarded. For example, a few days ago, a video of a man named Mamoudou Gassama saving a child by scaling a building in Paris went viral to the point where the French president Emmanuel Macron rewarded him with a medal. This story was quite innocent and had a happy ending. However, the freedom of expression that made the hero known also ended up making him hated, because in this new world, everyone wants to be heard by everybody, and what better way to be heard than by using trends ? Thus, the Parisian hero, who happened to be originally from Africa, became the poster child for pro-migrants militants, who are hated by a lot of people. And that's how, in an instant, in this world of eyes and ears, we started shouting over each other and using a hero as a scapegoat, when the only point of the story was that a child had been saved by a good Samaritan with great climbing skills. We should have rejoiced around that story, but instead we started bickering at each other because everyone wants to have the last word, even when there is no word to be had in the first place. That is what frightens me. My generation is so focused on expressing itself that it sometimes gives too much meaning to trivial or simple things, making actual meaningful things trivial themselves. And if we lost the joy of knowing a life has been saved in a couple of hours, what else did we already lose without realizing it, and what else will we lose if we keep acting this way ?

I can vividly recall the first time I got denied admission to my first choice university. I was at work at an orthodox factory in Lagos, Nigeria about to have lunch. It was a bright sunny day. I came out of the factory, washed my hands, changed from my factory robe and trudged with my friends towards the kitchen. As we approached our destination, scents from the kitchen intensified the ache in our stomach. We hurriedly placed our orders and went to sit. Soon our food arrived, and we started eating. Laughter reverberated through the air as jokes were being cracked while we happily munched our jollof rice- a spicy Nigerian delicacy famous in many parts of West Africa. In the midst of this, I refreshed my email inbox only to receive an email stating that my application portal had been updated. My heartbeat increased. Immediately, I decided to check out my application status on the application portal of the university I applied to. I checked out the website, typed my application ID, and my password and behold, the news was staring at my face right there on my small Nokia C1. I was denied. Immediately, my countenance changed. As people kept laughing at the jokes being thrown around, my thoughts wandered away to seek for an answer to the question of “what do I do next?” “I'll wait for my other applications to other universities” was the thought that came to my head. But that was the genesis of my denials. I got more denials and more and even more until I missed the chance to further proceed with my studies that same year. Then I waited for the next year planning and strategizing on how I'll make the best of the applications and hopefully come out victorious in the end. In a nutshell, I got into two universities in the end and had to pick one that suits my needs and desires. To get what I wanted, I learned about certain qualities I had to possess to have my way and I call them my 5-D rule. Firstly, I had a dream. I knew what I wanted. It was clear as crystal. I knew this was where I wanted to be. I initially did not know how I was going to get there, but I knew that this was the dream. Your dream needs to be fastened to your heart and mind. Then you can map out a trajectory that will eventually lead you to this unique dream of yours. Secondly, I decided on what I want to do to get to the top. I asked myself questions like “what can I do to get to this self-created dream of mine? How do I achieve what I want? What steps do I need to take to get there?” When you start asking these questions, you'll start making conscious efforts on what to do and which steps to take to get there. Also, I was determined to achieve that dream. Whichever honest way I was going to take to get there; I was ready to tread on that path. That is what I call determination. This term does not look at the demotivating comments or ridicules other people say or throw at it; determination never feels tired or weary of its dream; determination perseveres, and that is the mentality that should guide your steps. Diligence was the next personality I imbibed. Anything good that comes your way most of the time comes the hard way. It is not always rosy. I had to fold up my sleeves, dip my hands into the soil and toil really hard to get what I wanted. Hard work is key to anything good in life. Finally, I declared the positive. Death and life are in the power of the tongue. You become what you profess. Therefore, I kept telling myself what I wanted with full assurance that I will get it. The more you profess negativity, the more you start feeling pessimistic about things in your life, and ultimately, that will breed negative results and vice versa. With this article, I hope I have inspired you one way or the other. Always remember that good things do not come easy; only the ones that dare to persevere until the end eventually make it.

It all began along a vibrant street, blossoms everywhere, foliage scattered all around, the brisk frost felt so quiescent, so serene to my soul. How amazing the sky with spiraling cotton clouds, the grass with dew sparkling like diamonds. This divine art of nature tranquilized the mind and body of pedestrians. I was flabbergasted by the nature that I forgot to notice something. Something horrendous indeed. Standing across the street, under the umbrella of sunrays, were four kids with four bags but with “two different stories”. Two kids pale as they seemed, stood in quietude like a phantom, lost in their ocean of thoughts with cries of hopelessness coercing them to drown in abyss. With ceaseless search for hope in their eyes but seemed that destiny stabbed them in the back each time they combated to attain their dream. This never gave them the intrepidity to standup afresh. Their legs quivered, dreams faded and despair engulfed them, compressing them under a state of bewilderment. They knew not whether their future existed, while holding a rugged, patched bag gathering garbage from the surface which enveloped them. While the second story comprised not of rueful souls, bleeding hearts, sorrowful smiles, gloomy eyes and unforgettable tragedies but it accompanied gladsome smiles, blissful lives, faithful hearts and buoyant eyes. The two kids in this tale possessed school bags and books, wore uniform and steadily directed their way towards their school with ambition to strive and chase their aims and dreams. I wish to see the spark of hope in their eyes, in the eyes of the hopeless and grieved ones. I wish to replace garbage bags with school bags, trash with books and brooms with pencils. I wish to see grinning souls and auspicious smiles, instead of lachrymose eyes under the shadows of terror and agony. I wish to glorify each melancholic soul with a resolute vision to thrive and carve their destiny. And I wish them to love life and cherish it like the staunch, enthusiastic children. This example doesn't only represent those four kids but makes us realize how millions of innocent and naive souls kill their dreams, bury their futurity and abolish their destiny due to the lack of opportunities and chances bestowed upon them. This is what I hope to achieve in my lifetime; to make this a “single story” of hope, struggle and passion for fulfilling their dreams. To win the spark of aspiration and contentment in their eyes, and make them flourish their fate and predetermination. I hope to make them construct a promising future, a prosperous life, a determined generation and an ambitious world! I dream to put together the dispersed puzzle fragments into one intact piece of warm fuzziness and beatitude. And dream to make it a “ONE SIMILAR STORY” for each and every juvenile on this planet by healing their sundered futures with the only key to close this door of inequality and poverty, ‘education'.

What I want to talk about is a solution that I have come up with as an African leader which I think is a sustainable way to finance development and transformation in community areas of Africa. We have an existing problem in our community when it comes to continuance availability of developmental funds which has led stalled improvements in our living standards and has led to some of the community projects either cancelled or halted and I believe it's also what most communities and counties in Africa face. I believe the solution is the establishment of a development fund for our community of which its proceedings will be used to develop our communities and their transformation. last rain season every household in our community was told to contribute money to make repairs to damaged community roads. But a few weeks after the repairs were made the roads were damaged by rain again and people become reluctant to contribute money again. This is an example of situations many areas in our country face were there can be an availability of funds for infrastructure maintenance and development but the source of the funds is not sustainable. I see that the main problem is not just availability of development funds but the problem is also the continuance flow of those funds in order to complete their objective. In the example I gave about how our community contributed funds to develop our roads rather than wait for government, the problem come because the source of the funds was not sustainable and when there was pause in contributions from the people, the project failed. The problem also manifest in many projects in our country evidenced by the countless number of unfinished projects that have turned official headquarters for those running from the law all because there was a halt in flow of funds . When I was thinking of a plan that can be put in place to insure that there is a continuance flow of funds that can be used for infrastructural and community development , then I found a certain book about Malawi's history where part of it talked about an initiative that our former president Dr. Bakili Muluzi established in 1995. Instead of injecting money directly into development projects he established a trust fund, the Press trust fund. The fund invested the money that Dr. Muluzi channeled to it and then from the profits it acquired from the invested it made was used to fund different projects like building schools , hospitals and also funding other initiatives and The fund has been around for years and it continues to grow in size . This is the approach I want our communities to take. If I was a leaders of our society I will lead to the creation of a development fund or Trust that we can use its revenues for the development work of our community. instead of contributing money to fund one project at a time, the Best approach is contribute money for establishment of a community trust funds that can invest in different business or low risk investments like mutual funds, then the revenues that we get from the investments be used to finance development of our community in things like road maintenance, buying teaching materials for our local primary school that usually don't have small materials like chalk and other things. The fund can also invest in businesses people are involved in which means it can also foster economic empowerment. Strict rules, guidelines and protocols can be put in place on how to operate the development fund to ensure its proper operation and accountability so as to make sure no one person misuse the funds which is also what rocks many projects in Africa. In implementing such an initiative I can like very much to work with the youths so as to involve them in coming up with sustainable solutions to the problems in our society because as everyone says that the youth we are the cornerstones of the society and we are the next presidents, minister and executives. If the youth of today accept responsibilities , take part in coming up and implementing sustainable solutions to our problems and work towards the development and transformation of their societies then we will have great leaders in our society and together we can uplift our societies , the country and the world at large. Sometimes small actions matter in solving a problem than wait for those we look up to and maybe this small actions may motivate other people into a movement that can change the world. So I think the model of creating development fund for our society can turn into a movement where development funds will be created by other societies, countries and leaders because of its sustainability. If the youth I can work up with ends up seeing the benefits of a development fund then a new generation of leaders will be emerged with a different perspective towards financing development and transformation in a sustainable way.