"In the days before, before all that, before what I'm going to say and the rest, it was happiness, life without explaining it. If someone asked me 'How are you?' I always answered "It's okay!", tit for tat. Happiness saves you from thinking. the whole country was at it. People only responded with "It's okay a little". Because life couldn't be completely okay anymore after everything that had happened to us."

Before, Gabriel was fooling around with his friends in their corner of paradise. And then the family harmony fell apart at the same time as his “small country”, Burundi, this part of central Africa brutally mistreated by History.

Later, Gabriel brings back to life a world forever lost. The beating of the heart and the shortness of breath, the deep thoughts and the bursting laughter, the scent of lemongrass, the termites on stormy days, the jacarandas in flower... Childhood, its infinite sweetness, its pains which do not let us never leave.