Conflict shut schools. A teen teaches himself, one toy car at a time.

When separatist violence forced 16-year-old Awa Bless Chi to flee his home in Cameroon’s North West region earlier this year, there were many things he had to leave behind.

He couldn’t take the drawing board or working table where he’d spent long hours teaching himself engineering by building motors for toy cars. And he had to leave the well-thumbed schoolbooks that clued him in to the science behind it.

Then there were the people he loved: his recently widowed mother; the aunt, uncle, and cousins who’d helped raise him; a group of childhood friends.  

But there was one cherished thing Bless could take. His electric toy cars – each of which he had built himself with materials from the dump. There was the plywood tank whose