By Salam Kanhoush, a master’s student at the Geneva Graduate Institute
About 20 years ago, as a young boy in Syria, I was helping my father in our garden when he shared a piece of wisdom with me. He said: “Your pen is your tool to navigate life and secure your future.” At that time, I did not realise that it was a prophecy.
In 2010, I just finished high school with a dream: to become a telecommunications engineer at Aleppo University. But shortly after, the revolution began. I was detained by the regime of then-President Bashar al-Assad, and eventually I was forced to flee to Damascus. My pursuit of higher education meant spending five hours a day commuting through checkpoints, surviving shelling, and risking kidnapping just to get to class. By the end of 2015, the danger had simply become too high. I had to leave my home, my family, and my fourth year of university, to seek safety.
With extremely limited options, in January 2016 I traveled to Khartoum, Sudan – the only place I could go without a visa at the time. I arrived knowing no one. A year later, I enrolled at the University of Kassala to study electrical engineering, in a town in the east of the country. Fast forward to March 2023: I had finally finished my last exam. I moved back to Khartoum, took my International English Language Testing System test, and began preparing my applications for different master’s programmes.
One month later, I woke up to a familiar sound: the sound of war. The devastating conflict in Sudan, which is still ongoing to this day, had just erupted.
After a week isolated near the airport, I self-evacuated with three friends to another state, and then to the Ethiopian border. I eventually managed to fly to Brazil. It was there, from a small room in São Paulo, that I presented my graduation project online and officially completed my degree. I got married in Brazil, and eventually moved to Geneva, Switzerland. In January 2025, I finally managed to extract my academic credentials from Sudan so that I could submit my master’s applications. This fall, I started my second year of my master’s degree at the Graduate Institute of Geneva.
I like to think of myself as not just a survivor of two devastating conflicts, but as living proof of what education can do. I managed to navigate life-threatening crises, displacement, and the terrifying unknown thanks to the foundational education provided by my parents. They gave me the basic tools to survive.
I am, of course, far from alone. We are facing a world where conflicts are intensifying, and an estimated 258 million children and adolescents urgently need educational support.
When I meet people here in Switzerland, I sometime ask them to try to remember themselves as ten-year-olds, as they were putting on their backpacks and going to school. To think of all the memories, good and bad, that they made in those classrooms. Then, to imagine if that vanished. Imagine if that school was gone, and you were left in the chaos of conflict. Where would they be? Who would they be today?
Our challenge is what can we do today to make sure that all of those other 10-year-olds can enjoy their basic human right to education to change their lives. How can we give them the tools for the unknown futures awaiting them?
My parents gave me the pen to write my future.
Now, we all have the chance to put pens in the hands of many other children.