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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.