This TED Talk features physician and TED Prize winner, Raj Punjabi, recorded live at TED-2017.

I want to share with you something my father taught me.

No condition is permanent.

It's a lesson he shared with me again and again, and I learned it to be true the hard way.

Here I am in my fourth grade class.

This is my yearbook picture taken in my class in school in Monrovia, Liberia.

My parents migrated from India to West Africa in the 1970s,

and I had the privilege of growing up there.

I was nine years old. I loved kicking around a soccer ball,

and I was a total math and science

geek. I was living the kind of life that really any child would dream of. But no condition

is permanent. On Christmas Eve in 1989, civil war erupted in Liberia.

The war started in the rural countryside,

and within months, rebel armies had marched towards our hometown.

My school shut down,

and when the rebel armies captured the only international airport,

people started panicking and fleeing.

My mom came knocking one morning and said,

Raj, pack your things, we have to go.

We were rushed to the center of town,

and there on a tarmac,

we were split into two lines.

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