During her visit, Dr. Trent shared many stories about the
extreme challenges she faced to achieve her goal of completing an
education. Since there was so much to be told, I want to share with you
more of the remarkable story of her life, as blogged by NY Times Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof. As they say, here is “the
rest of the story:”
November
15, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Triumph
of a Dreamer
Any time anyone tells you that a dream is impossible, any time
you’re discouraged by impossible challenges, just mutter this mantra: Tererai
Trent.
Of all the people earning university degrees this year, perhaps
the most remarkable story belongs to Tererai (pronounced TEH-reh-rye), a
middle-aged woman who is one of my heroes. She is celebrating a personal
triumph, but she’s also a monument to the aid organizations and individuals who
helped her. When you hear that foreign-aid groups just squander money or build
dependency, remember that by all odds Tererai should be an illiterate, battered
cattle-herd in Zimbabwe and instead — ah, but I’m getting ahead of my story.
Tererai was born in a village in rural Zimbabwe, probably sometime
in 1965, and attended elementary school for less than one year. Her father
married her off when she was about 11 to a man who beat her regularly. She
seemed destined to be one more squandered African asset.
A dozen years passed. Jo Luck, the head of an aid group called
Heifer International, passed through the village and told the women there that
they should stand up, nurture dreams, change their lives.
Inspired, Tererai scribbled down four absurd goals based on
accomplishments she had vaguely heard of among famous Africans. She wrote that
she wanted to study abroad, and to earn a B.A., a master’s and a doctorate.
Tererai began to work for Heifer and several Christian
organizations as a community organizer. She used the income to take
correspondence courses, while saving every penny she could.
In 1998 she was accepted to Oklahoma State University, but she
insisted on taking all five of her children with her rather than leave them
with her husband. “I couldn’t abandon my kids,” she recalled. “I knew that they
might end up getting married off.”
Tererai’s husband eventually agreed that she could take the
children to America — as long as he went too. Heifer helped with the plane
tickets, Tererai’s mother sold a cow, and neighbors sold goats to help raise
money. With $4,000 in cash wrapped in a stocking and tied around her waist,
Tererai set off for Oklahoma.
An impossible dream had come true, but it soon looked like a
nightmare. Tererai and her family had little money and lived in a ramshackle
trailer, shivering and hungry. Her husband refused to do any housework — he was
a man! — and coped by beating her.
“There was very little food,” she said. “The kids would come home
from school, and they would be hungry.” Tererai found herself eating from trash
cans, and she thought about quitting — but felt that doing so would let down
other African women.
“I knew that I was getting an opportunity that other women were
dying to get,” she recalled. So she struggled on, holding several jobs, taking
every class she could, washing and scrubbing, enduring beatings, barely
sleeping.
At one point the university tried to expel Tererai for falling
behind on tuition payments. A university official, Ron Beer, intervened on her
behalf and rallied the faculty and community behind her with donations and
support.
“I saw that she had enormous talent,” Dr. Beer said. His church
helped with food, Habitat for Humanity provided housing, and a friend at
Wal-Mart carefully put expired fruits and vegetables in boxes beside the
Dumpster and tipped her off.
Soon afterward, Tererai had her husband deported back to Zimbabwe
for beating her, and she earned her B.A. — and started on her M.A. Then her
husband returned, now frail and sick with a disease that turned out to be AIDS.
Tererai tested negative for H.I.V., and then — feeling sorry for her husband —
she took in her former tormentor and nursed him as he grew sicker and
eventually died.
Through all this blur of pressures, Tererai excelled at school,
pursuing a Ph.D. at Western Michigan University and writing a dissertation on
AIDS prevention in Africa even as she began working for Heifer as a program
evaluator. On top of all that, she was remarried, to Mark Trent, a plant
pathologist she had met at Oklahoma State.
Tererai is a reminder of the adage that talent is universal, while
opportunity is not. There are still 75 million children who are not attending
primary school around the world. We could educate them all for far less than
the cost of the proposed military “surge” in Afghanistan.
Each time Tererai accomplished one of those goals that she had
written long ago, she checked it off on that old, worn paper. Last month, she
ticked off the very last goal, after successfully defending her dissertation.
She’ll receive her Ph.D. next month, and so a one-time impoverished cattle-herd
from Zimbabwe with less than a year of elementary school education will don
academic robes and become Dr. Tererai Trent.
I am so proud to work with Chrysalis, and with leaders like each
of you, as you share Dr. Trent’s belief in the power of girls and women.
Thank you for all you do.
