Op-Ed Columnist
From South Sudan to Yale
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 28, 2012
Andrew Sullivan for The New York Times
Paul Lorem is a freshman at Yale University.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
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.