Paul Lorem epitomizes a blunt truth about the world: talent is universal, but opportunity is not.
Lorem, 21, is an orphan from a South Sudanese village with no electricity. His parents never went to school and he grew up without adult supervision in a refugee camp.
Now, he's a freshman at Yale University.
"How I got to Yale was pure luck, combined with lots of people helping me," Lorem told me as we sat in a book-lined study on the Yale campus.
"I had a lot of friends who maybe had almost the same ability as me, but due to reasons I don't really understand, they just couldn't make it through. If there's one thing I wish, it's that they had more OPPORTUNITY to get education."
His Backround
As Lorem was growing up, the region was engulfed in civil war, and, at age 5, he nearly died of tuberculosis, in hope of saving his life, his parents dropped him off at the Kakuma refugee camp in northern Kenya. They returned to their village and later died, and Lorem was raised in the camp by other refugee boys who were only a bit older.
Boys raising boys might seem a recipe of Lord-of-the-Flies chaos, but these teenagers forced Lorem to go to school, seeing education as an escalator to a better life. And Lorem began to soar.
His class sometimes consisted of 300 pupils meeting under a tree, and Lorem didn't have his own notebooks or pencils or schoolbooks, but he practiced letters by writing in the dust.
His friends dies of war, disease and banditry, but he devoured the contents of a tiny refugee camp library set up by a Lutheran aid group.
Teachers took increasing pride in their brilliant student and arranged Lorem to leave the refugee camp and transfer to a Kenyan school for seventh and eighth grades. That way he could compete in nationwide exams and perhaps get into high school.
Just one problem: those exams were partly in Swahili, a language that Lorem did not speak. But, he poured himself into his school work, and classmates helped him. Lorem ended up earning the second highest mark in that entire region of Kenya.
That led to a scholarship to a top boarding school near the Kenyan capitol Nairobi, and then to the African Leadership Academy in South Africa. On his school holiday between junior and senior year of high school, Lorem undertook an epic journey across Africa to his native village. Then he guided his younger brother and sister to the refugee camp where he grew up so that they, too, could get an education.
Lorem loves Yale, but , academically, it has been a tough transition, partly because English is Lorem's fifth language (he also speaks Didinga, Toposa, Arabic and Swahili).
Former prime minister Gordon Brown is calling for the creation of a Global Fund for Education to help meet the goal, and I hope the United States backs the Initiative.
Lorem plans to return to South Sudan after graduation to help rebuild his country.
As I interview him in the tranquility of Yale, he choked with tears as he recalled the many people who had helped him, the boys in the camp who looked after him; the German nun, Sister Luise Radleimer Agonia, who enveloped him in love and helped pay his school fees; the bus driver in Juba, South Sudan, who put Lorem up in his shack for weeks while he struggled to get a passport to travel to Yale.
If children are equipped with the necessary knowledge, they can find ways for a better living.
Education is also a key to wealth creation.
Poverty stricken children are usually less healthy, their language skills less developed and they are generally less well equipped - socially, emotionally and physically (from International Workshop on Education and Poverty Eradication Kampala, Uganda, 30 July to 3 August 2001)
In situations of extreme poverty, girls are particularly at risk as they tend to inherit the poverty of their mothers. They are prone to abuse of all forms, and very often confined to households in which they are virtually slaves.
There are many actions being taken to eradicate poverty but they are still far from enough.
Every Malaysian has to be made aware that poverty is not a choice. No one wants to be homeless. No one wants to not loved. No one wants to be unheard of.
Feeding the homeless is the ONLY way to know them and to help them. STOP FEEDING them would lead to more problematic issues such as social unrest.
Homeless people can be from a normal healthy person, a drug abuser, an ill person, a HIV stricken person, a former convict to anyone. If one is to strip away the identity of the homeless i.e. drug abuser or ill person or HIV stricken person or a thief or a former convict, what is left is a LIFE. Shouldn't we as a human being help a LIFE?
I am not a smart person. I am not a Saint. I am not pretending to be better than anyone. There's no point in doing that because when I die, I am just a body in a coffin, nothing more that. I am only human. I am only helping a fellow human. There are people out there who are better than me. I am just me.
As for my daughter - Happy birthday and my wish is that every children on Earth would get the education they well deserved.