This is Justin from The Generation Y, and we're doing a four-part series on rambling the story of

Khalif Browder, a young boy falsely accused of stealing a backpack and held at Rikers Island for three

years without trial. This story is about a young life caught in the middle of the justice system,

listen to Generation Y on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.

When I was a young boy, I had two uncles. Both were heavily infected with guinea worms,

and back then, no one here knew how guinea worm was transmitted. People would become infected

and we just kept wondering why. During those years, we had some communal fighting,

fighting between communities amid South Sudan struggle for independence. One day,

fighting erupted in the evening, so everyone in my village ran away, but my uncles could not run,

so they crawled to the garden to hide because no one could carry them. My mom could not carry them,

and I had lost my dad during the struggle, so we had to leave them. There weren't any options,

we just cried. So warfare comes and fighters raid our cows and kill some people and then go back

where they came from. After that, when the people came back, we found that my uncles were gone.

They had been killed. If it were not for guinea worm, they would have just joined us and

tracked away from the danger, so I say that it was guinea worm that killed them indirectly.

When I was young, I could not understand how the guinea worm killed my uncles, but as time goes on,

I have come to know this is our story. Later, we were living at a refugee camp,

and we were given pipe filters from the Carter Center. I didn't know why people were given pipe

filters, so I refused to use mine. My mom is educated, and she told me these were for guinea worm,

and now she began to tell me this story, and I finally could see the connection between the guinea

worm and the loss of my uncles. I said, okay, there are people that are working for this,

and that was when I committed to working for guinea worm eradication, because guinea worm had

...