When most kids are just getting their heads around kindergarten, Michel Chikwanine was taught how to kill with an AK-47 assault rifle.

At the tender age of five Chikwanine was recruited as a child soldier. At age 10, he and his family were trapped in a hellish refugee camp in Uganda.

A decade later, the 21-year-old Congolese immigrant tries to inspire Canadian youth who can scarcely imagine the horrors he has survived.

Chikwanine spoke Monday night to hundreds of youth at a conference organized by the Kamloops Community Action and Assessment Network, an anti-gang initiative.

“Today I’m going to be talking about young people using the metaphor of struggle,” he said beforehand.

The son of Ramazami Chikwanine, a human rights activist in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), he was recruited in the early ’90s by the rebel Movement for the Liberation of Congo.

“They taught me how to use an AK-47,” he said. “Being a child soldier only five years old, I needed help to lift it off the ground.”

After two weeks the preschooler escaped.

“I ran for three days and three nights through the jungle until I met a man who reunited me with my family.”

When the Second Congo War exploded, the Chikwanine family became refugees, fleeing violence that claimed 5.4 million lives between 1998 and 2008. They fled to Canada with help from the UN.

“It feels like part of my home was ripped away from me,” he said. “You want to go back but you can’t.”

The young Chikwanine gained prominence as a speaker at the We Day conference in Vancouver in September. He regularly tours with a speakers’ bureau called Me to We, having inherited some of his father’s spirit.

“I wanted to be like my father, who was an inspiration and role model. He always told people to remember that great people are not distinguished by their success but by what they do for other people.”

He hoped to encourage his young peers gathered at the Henry Grube Education Centre in Kamloops to not give up, to keep moving forward as they grow and learn to think beyond themselves.

“We have the power to change our community and our world if we choose to do so. It’s very hard sometimes.

“Every generation has a problem set out for them,” he added. “I believe our challenge is to abolish poverty and end the form of slavery known as child labour.”