A brave heart
Despite woes, teen from Africa rises to head of class
With her world falling apart, her mother's credit cards maxed out, and the landlord insisting it was time to leave, Keaboka Nyumbu had to move yet again.
Last summer, six years after she left Africa, the uncomplaining teenager and her mother left Hartford for Boston, with no money, few friends, and nowhere to live. They found a single room in the stuffy attic of a family homeless shelter in Brighton, where they have to keep the windows open despite the smell from the fast-food restaurant across the street, the constant crawl of traffic, and the throngs of drunken college students screaming through the night.
A year later, their lives still in flux, Nyumbu managed to pull off a feat neither she nor her mother thought possible: After enrolling at Odyssey High School in South Boston, earning straight A's and a place in the National Honor Society, she became valedictorian of her senior class.
"I couldn't believe it; I thought I lost any chance of being valedictorian after we moved," said Nyumbu, 18, who has earned a full scholarship to Northeastern University, where she hopes to study marine biology. "But it made me very happy."
It's been a long journey for Nyumbu, who grew up in a village in the Kingdom of Lesotho, a tiny country of 2 million people in the center of South Africa. When Nyumbu was 2, her mother moved to Hyde Park to work as an au pair, and the two were separated for eight years.
When Nyumbu was 10, her mother returned home and brought her to Zambia to meet their extended family. But when the girl tried to return to Lesotho with her grandmother, there was a problem at the border, and Nyumbu had to stay in Zambia for a year with an aunt.
A year later, her mother returned to the United States and brought Nyumbu with her to Connecticut. On her first day there, they went to a
"I'm very blessed to have such a patient daughter," Inonge Nyumbu said as she provided a tour of their cramped quarters at the family shelter, where they both sleep on twin beds that also serve as sofas, desks, and laundry baskets. "Through it all, she has never complained; I would have complained if I were brought up the same way. She didn't. She just did what she had to do."
The transition to the United States and studying in English, which isn't her native language, was full of challenges.
Two weeks after her plane landed in New York City, where she gawked at the World Trade Center, she watched as the towers were destroyed and wondered whether it was an omen.
"I was afraid and excited," she wrote in a college application essay. "I thought I was ready to take the new world by storm. But instead of taking the world, it took me."
At her new school in Hartford, fellow students made fun of her accent. She hated to read out loud and grew to loathe her own voice.
"I was put in learning-how-to read classes, because I pronounced the words differently," she wrote. "No one thought I could read. . . . I found kids making fun of me because I was African."
Sometimes they threw gum wrappers at her.
"Every night, I would pray to God to take me back home," she wrote. "I would wake up in the morning, excited, thinking that I was in Africa. But every morning it was always the same thing; I was still in the south end of Hartford."
But as she learned who she was and began to make friends, Nyumbu grew more comfortable in her new home.
"When I was in Lesotho, I viewed Caucasians as superior beings and feared them," she wrote. "We were told the stories of Nelson Mandela and shown drawings of him tied up with chains around his neck and feet. Everyone feared the people who did this to him. But when I came here, my fear gradually went away. Now I see Caucasians as people just like me, maybe lighter in complexion, but just like me. They are my friends, my peers, my teachers, and my movie star crushes."
It was a blow when her mother told her they would have to leave Hartford the year before she would graduate, when she thought she had a shot at becoming valedictorian of her high school there.
When she first entered Odyssey High School, it was unlike anything she had seen before.
"It was so big and there were metal detectors," she said. "I was very scared."
It was also a long commute - nearly an hour - to arrive on time for classes that start at 7:20 a.m.
Virginia Ordway, headmaster of the school, was not sure Nyumbu would pull it off.
"My biggest concern was that her adjustment would be difficult," Ordway said. "But she not only adjusted, she thrived. She let nothing stop her.
"It had to be a difficult adjustment, and she didn't get anything lower than an A."
Nyumbu took AP biology, precalculus, English, computer classes, and earned a 4.37 grade point average - considerably higher than any other student at Odyssey.
"It's unbelievable the drive that she has, with all that she's gone through," said Kathy Cahill, her guidance counselor.
As Nyumbu graduated on Friday, she and her mother received another present.
After nearly a year in the shelter, where their clothes are in piles and the kitchen is little more than a microwave and boxes of instant chow mein, they received the keys to a two-bedroom apartment in the Bromley-Heath public housing development in Jamaica Plain.
"This means more than I can say," said her mother, now a US citizen, who works at a Cambridge telemarketing company. "It's something you take for granted when you have it - a place to come home to. This will help us a lot."
In her valedictorian address to her fellow students, Nyumbu spoke about the meaning of bravery.
"It is much more difficult but far more rewarding when things get bad to persevere," she said.
"I believe each of us has it in us to not only endure, but to prevail."
David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com.
