As one of few refugees at his high school in Atlanta, Lewis was shy and withdrawn. He thinks the other students just saw him as “some African kid.”

During sixth period music class, he would sit quietly at the back of the room and watch the other teenagers. There was one person who always caught his eye—a student who had the reputation of being the best drummer at school. Lewis would study his movements on the drum kit, quietly observing how the toms, snare, and cymbals sounded under his wooden stick.

Lewis wasn’t examining the drum kit as a beginner. He had been a popular tam-tam drummer in a refugee camp in Zambia. During long church services, he would smack the stretched hide of his drum into a beat that led songs and prayers. “If I stopped I would have messed up everything,” he says, laughing. “So I was just playing. My hands hurt, I was so tired.”

One day in Atlanta, he showed up to music class only to find the drum set without its usual drummer. Taking hold of a pair of sticks, he sat down on the stool. The teacher looked at him curiously. “I just closed my eyes and started playing,” he says.

The students were shocked by what was coming out of the quiet African kid—complex, rhythmic beats. The teacher asked him to try the snare and the bass drum. By the end of the day, the marching band leader had given him a uniform and sticks. Just like that, Lewis was in the high school marching band.

He liked marching. And he liked how students started to see him as more than a refugee. Someone recorded a video of him drumming a hip-hop beat and posted it on social media where it went viral through the school. “People started talking to me because they knew I could do something,” he says.

That’s when Lewis felt he could finally start to tell his story. He says his only happy day in Africa was the day he learned that his family was moving to the United States.

When he was seven or eight, his family fled their village of Lumumbashi in the southeast part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. A militant group had threatened to enlist his father in its war effort, bullied the family, and eventually abducted his eldest brother, Ogat. “‘Til now, we don’t know where he is,” Lewis says. “We don’t know if he died or if he is still alive, making money, making a life.”

In Zambia, his family was safe from armed groups but life was still difficult. They had to build a new house and farm their food. Humanitarian agencies were a 10-hour walk away, Lewis says.

As a young boy, he knew hunger and hard work. He recalls thinking, “If I eat today, I don’t know when I’m going to eat again.” He often took a bus into the city of Solwezi to find ways to earn money.

“It’s hard to think about,” he says. But in the United States, Lewis hopes to work in the medical field “like my mom.”

He left her and the rest of his family to be closer to his adopted brother who resettled in Buffalo. His high school friends in Atlanta didn’t want him to leave, he says. “When I told them I was moving to New York, everyone was like ‘No!'”

As a memento, he made them a model drum kit out of soda cans and left it in the school music room.