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Refugees find refuge as college students in Vermont
Champlain College awards scholarships to Rwandans, Vietnamese, and others, enriching recipients and fellow students.
from the February 7, 2008 edition
Page 2 of 3
While the scholarship is available to students who arrived young and grew up in Vermont, it's particularly moving to see the opportunity offered to new arrivals whose education was interrupted by war, says Judy Scott, director of the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program. "The scholarship is an extraordinary gift.... To people who really have lost everything from their past, it offers them a future, in that they can develop their talents, develop their minds, to become contributing members of the community."
Here are some of the Champlain students' stories:
Jean Luc: A long road to college
Jean Luc Dushime's road to Champlain College was more than 4,000 miles long.
That's how far his family walked to escape when violence erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was 16. His family had gone to the DRC seeking refuge during the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
He attended school after arriving in Republic of Congo, before being resettled in Burlington in 2004. "I'm still learning to come back to life," he says, reflecting on the six-month walk where he felt like a "zombie," thinking only about survival.
It's Mr. Dushime's energy, by contrast, that impresses people here. His experiences have left him conversant in five languages and hungry to learn. This lithe young man has refined his English and taken up snowboarding. He volunteers at a youth center and works with refugee students in local schools.
Despite having earned a journalism degree in Africa, he needed a US degree to be marketable, and he's studying public relations. When he inquired at Champlain, he says, "not only did people want to see me get in, but they were interested to know me as a person.... After that, the big jump was the money." The scholarship came just in time.
"The first month was kind of hard, not only being black African, but also being an adult, 27 years old," he says of his adjustment to the campus overlooking Lake Champlain.
Seeing many refugees arrive who don't know English or may have had no schooling, he's driven to help younger students find a path to college. "[I want to] inspire those kids from the inside out.... I'm poor and I have a lot of issues to overcome, but I strongly believe I can do it.... That's what makes me survive and go on every day, and that's what I want to give to those kids." (An audio slide show featuring Dushime is available at: www.csmonitor.com/refugee)
Maria: Breaking stereotypes
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