represent the village

Unfortunately, MasterCard wasn’t doing the Scholars Program anymore. But I had a suspicion that their experiment had changed the paradigm in higher education. Maybe now colleges were more willing to take a chance on a poor kid from the village, might even be able to see that what initially looks like weakness is actually a tremendous untapped resource.

With a little research, I put together a list of schools Friday could apply to — schools like Duke, Yale, Harvard, Middlebury, and the University of Chicago. Notice a trend here? We were asking for a tremendous amount of financial aid: four years of tuition, room and board, books, spending money, and airfare from Malawi. Any school he applied to needed to have a lot of money.

Would Friday struggle in an Ivy League classroom? Absolutely. His freshman year would eclipse his previous ideas of what constituted hard work. But I believed he could do it. Imagine how much more he could learn if he ate three meals a day. If he weren’t studying by candlelight. If he had the internet and a tutor. If he didn’t have to work long hours in the garden. If his tremendous tenacity and work ethic were focused solely on school.

And just imagine what he could contribute.

Imagine the perspective he could provide in a class about international development. Or at the dinner table. Ivy League schools produce international aid workers and businesspeople and journalists and leaders. Imagine how much fuller their education would be if they learned alongside a member of the population they intend to help. Friday could be an ambassador of the village. He could humanize it, represent it.

Represent the Village. I liked the sound of that.