Kalkidan Gebrehiwot, aged 17 from Sudan and Boboya Gabu, 18 years of age and from South Sudan, are on their way to Brussels to attend a presentation session of the UWC Refugee Initiative – an education pathway for refugees supported by UNHCR (read the UNHCR article here). One of the speakers that Kalkidan and Boboya will be overjoyed to meet tomorrow morning will be Mario Konyen Joseph Nakuwa, a UWC Alumnus with former refugee status and co-founder of the South Sudan Young Leaders Forum.
Children are half the worldwide refugee population and the lack of access to education is deeply affecting young refugees. Given the increasingly wider gap in opportunities between refugee children and their peers who have had the good fortune of being spared displacement in connection with warfare, poverty and environmental calamities, UWC is committed to providing refugees with a solid education as instrumental to securing prospects for peace and sustainability both in the countries they now live in and among their communities back home when they manage to return.
At UWC Adriatic Kalkidan is a keen student of math and sciences and finds that studying Math, Physics and Chemistry is “relaxing and joyful”. Boboya, on the other hand, is a biology enthusiast for the profoundest of reasons: in his own words “biology shows us the idea that all living things are important to one another and interdependant”. Their unfortunate background is not all that they have in common: they have developed a similarly resiliant but positive attitude to life. Kalkidan’s favourite quotation is “A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch braking because its trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.” And adds “I believe that I can succeed in doing something with myself, not because the situations are positive or comfortable, but because I am confident that I am strong enough”, to which Boboya replies with the title of a book by Robert Schuller “Tough times never last but tough people do!”.
This year UWC Adriatic counts ten students with a refugee status and at the global level the UWC movement aims to provide on a stable basis 100 scholarships a year to enable internally displaced and refugee students to attend one of 17 UWC colleges (more on the UWC Refugee Initiative here).
