Davis UWC Scholar Lukasz Nipardo conceived and developed a magazine that encourages people to think globally but to act locally.

Ansally Kuria, Middlebury College Class of 2012 and native of Kenya, spent the summer before her senior year raising awareness about child abuse and painting cartoons on the walls of a Nairobi hospital. It was all part of a project she called “Let Children Be Children.”

For 11 days last July at a boarding school in Jordan, 16 Iraqi and 16 American teenagers came together to talk about achieving a peaceful, sustainable future. Their Youth Initiative for Progress in Iraq Conference was the brainchild of two UWC students, both now Davis UWC Scholars at Princeton University.

In his nation of 23 million people, Felix Amankona-Diawuo (Ghana, UWC-USA, Carleton College) was one of just three high school students in Ghana chosen in 2003 for a United World College scholarship.

To prepare students for a globalized future, colleges and universities across the U.S. are striving to internationalize the campus experience. That’s a key goal of the Davis UWC Scholars Program — and this year a number of colleges found creative ways to amplify the on-campus impact of their Davis UWC Scholars.

I was born in the Saharawi refugee camp located in southern Algeria,” Westminster College junior Alouat Hamoudi Abdelfatah (Western Sahara, UWC of the Adriatic) told the United Nations Hearing on Western Sahara last November.

In Malaysia, Joan Su-May Low and Shen Yoong met in elementary school. They met countryman Lenard Lim when the three went through an eight-hour group interview for the Malaysian UWC scholarship program.

When College of the Atlantic President David Hale committed COA to becoming the nation’s first carbon-neutral campus, Davis UWC Scholar Oliver Bruce was among those who set to work.

When Munkhtsetseg Ayurzana was a preschooler in Mongolia’s capital of Ulan Bator, her mother saw, and heard, something special in her little girl. “My mom tells me I would put different levels of water in these cups, and play them,” says “Mugi.” Her parents, both engineers, brought their daughter to the Music and Dance School of Ulan Bator. She spent 12 years there, studying violin very seriously while she watched her country struggle through the transition from a Soviet satellite to a market economy.

It wasn’t easy — he had to pierce a thicket of bureaucracy in his home city of Kabul to make and keep the selection a merit-based process — but Davis UWC Scholar Qiamuddin Amiry (Hong Kong UWC, Colby College ‘09) succeeded this year in delivering two new preparatory-school scholarships to fellow students from Afghanistan.

Like so many other urban communities in the U.S. and around the world, Easton, Pa., home of Lafayette College, has its population of inner-city teenagers whose futures are far from secure. Lafayette junior Felix Forster isn’t from that world — he’s a UWC-USA graduate from northeastern Germany — but he is finding ways to help local young people learn how to believe in themselves and create hope in their lives.

At Bates College, anthropology professor Charles Carnegie has a hunch about Emmanuel Fulgence Drabo. As the Burkina Faso native, an alumnus of UWC-USA, prepares to graduate, his mentor considers the long list of Emmanuel’s contributions to campus life, together with his ambitious thesis project — and suspects this is someone who might really move the world.

One evening in rural Tanzania, when a teenage boy named Yohanne Kidolezi came home from 12 hours in his family’s rice, corn, bean, and peanut fields, his mother handed him an oddly spelled note. It said something about Dar Es Salaam, United World College, and an interview in three days.

Follow the story of a UWC scholar as he travels from his home in Tanzania to Middlebury College in Vermont.

Kathryn W. Davis

The Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS) in California is among the most international learning communities in higher education: More than a third of its 750 students comes from outside the United States, and 90 percent of its American students have some experience abroad. Primarily a graduate school, MIIS blends academics with the building of practical skills and experience for internationally oriented careers.

Arthur Koenig meets with students at Amherst College after the announcement of the Koenig Scholarship Fund, which will provide scholarships for students from Latin America and Africa, support their academic program, and sponsor annual recruitment trips to those regions. With Koenig is Elvis Maradzike ’10 of Harare, Zimbabwe.

When Chikoti Mibenge’s father died in Kitwe, Zambia, she and her younger brother were told he’d been a victim of witchcraft. When her mother took sick, Chikoti, then 17, cared for her as her condition worsened. Her mother never admitted what was wrong, and the family could afford neither testing nor treatment — but, by then, Chikoti knew this was AIDS.

Colby College sophomore Qiamuddin Amiry sums up his life under the Taliban in Kabul, Afghanistan, as a time of emptiness, grinding labor, and periodic horror.

“I always compare it to Orwell’s 1984 — how education was trying to brainwash you,” he says. “There was no freedom of speech  or anything.”

There 18 million street children in India. There are six young women from six different nations on the board of the Ashraya Initiative for Children, a non-profit that three of them started after working with kids at Mahindra UWC in India.

Senia Bachir-Abderahman (Western Sahara, Red Cross Nordic UWC, Mt. Holyoke ‘10) grew up in a tent. Her family’s tent is in a giant refugee camp, home to 159,000 people, in a remote desert region of Algeria. Her family has existed there since the 1970s, when the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara began fleeing their country during a war with Morocco that would last until 1991.