The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 28, 2012
Paul Lorem epitomizes a blunt truth about the world: talent is universal, but opportunity is not.
Lorem, 21, is an orphan from a South Sudanese village with no
electricity. His parents never went to school, and he grew up without
adult supervision in a refugee camp. Now he’s a freshman at Yale University.
All around the world, remarkable young men and women are on edge because
today they finally hear of admissions decisions from Yale and a number
of other highly competitive universities. So a word of encouragement: No
one ever faced longer odds than Paul Lorem, and he made it.
“How I got to Yale was pure luck, combined with lots of people helping
me,” Lorem told me as we sat in a book-lined study on the Yale campus.
“I had a lot of friends who maybe had almost the same ability as me,
but, due to reasons I don’t really understand, they just couldn’t make
it through. If there’s one thing I wish, it’s that they had more
opportunity to get education.”
Lorem’s family comes from a line of cattle-herders in the southeastern part of South Sudan.
The area is remote. Villagers live in thatch-roof huts, and there is no
functioning school or health clinic. The nearest paved road is several
days’ walk away.
As Lorem was growing up, the region was engulfed in civil war, and, at
age 5, he nearly died of tuberculosis. In hope of saving his life, his
parents dropped him off at the Kakuma refugee camp
in northern Kenya. They returned to their village and later died, and
Lorem was raised in the camp by other refugee boys who were only a bit
older.
Boys raising boys might seem a recipe for Lord-of-the-Flies chaos, but
these teenagers forced Lorem to go to school, seeing education as an
escalator to a better life. And Lorem began to soar.
His class sometimes consisted of 300 pupils meeting under a tree, and
Lorem didn’t have his own notebooks or pencils or schoolbooks, but he
practiced letters by writing in the dust. His friends died of war,
disease and banditry, but he devoured the contents of a tiny refugee
camp library set up by a Lutheran aid group.
Teachers took increasing pride in their brilliant student and arranged
for Lorem to leave the refugee camp and transfer to a Kenyan school for
seventh and eighth grades. That way he could compete in nationwide exams
and perhaps get into high school.
Just one problem: those exams were partly in Swahili, a language that
Lorem did not speak. But he poured himself into his schoolwork, and
classmates helped him. Lorem ended up earning the second highest mark in
that entire region of Kenya.
That led to a scholarship to a top boarding school near the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and then to the African Leadership Academy
in South Africa. On his school vacation between junior and senior year
of high school, Lorem undertook an epic journey across Africa to his
native village. Then he guided his younger brother and sister to the
refugee camp where he grew up so that they, too, could get an education.
Lorem loves Yale, but, academically, it has been a tough transition,
partly because English is Lorem’s fifth language (he also speaks
Didinga, Toposa, Arabic and Swahili). Jeffrey Brenzel, the Yale
admissions director, puts it this way: “On the one hand, these
adjustments are greater for him than for many, but, on the other hand,
he has already overcome far greater challenges than other students have
just to get here.”
The vast majority of children in poor countries never enjoy such
opportunities. The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal of all
children completing primary school by 2015 will almost certainly be
missed. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain is calling for the creation of a Global Fund for Education to help meet the goal, and I hope the United States backs the initiative.
Lorem plans to return to South Sudan after graduation to help rebuild
his country. As I interviewed him in the tranquility of Yale, he choked
with tears as he recalled the many people who had helped him: the boys
in the camp who looked after him; the German nun, Sister Luise Radleimer
Agonia, who enveloped him in love and helped pay his school fees; the
bus driver in Juba, South Sudan, who put Lorem up in his shack for weeks
while he struggled to get a passport to travel to Yale.
Education is the grandest accelerant for human potential. So
congratulations to Lorem as well as to college applicants who receive
great news today — and let’s work to help all those other Paul Lorems
out there, at home and abroad, step onto the education escalator
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