A gap year prior to starting GW brought lasting friendships with Gambian students for Ashleigh DeLuca. Now she’s trying to bring three of them to college in her native New York.
She arrived in the African village alone a decade ago to teach English, struck both by the dire poverty but also the possibilities contained in the smiles and studiousness of her 50 students. Ashleigh DeLuca, CCAS BA ’13, was just 17 years old, doing a gap year before starting at the George Washington University, in a place she’d longed to be while growing up in Long Island and Hong Kong.
“I’d always been enchanted by Africa,” DeLuca says. “I was really excited for my feet to touch down in Gambia.”
The Gambia is one of Africa’s smallest and poorest nations. It ranked 173 out of 188 countries in the United Nations Development Programme’s 2016 human development index. DeLuca felt so welcomed and inspired by her host family and students during her three and a half months in the West African nation that she started a scholarship upon returning to the U.S. for a group of 18 high-achieving sixth-graders. Funded largely by family and friends on Long Island who each adopted a Gambian student, the scholarship paid for the kids’ education through high school in a place where even the $100 annual school fees cause many to drop out for lack of resources.
Now, three of those now high school graduates want to take the next step of attending college in the United States. DeLuca has promised to pave their way to her country, knowing their horizons will grow and future life possibilities will expand.
“Can you imagine being so close to something that will change your life?” she asks. “That’s what drives me every night.” When she gets home from her full-time job in Washington, D.C., she kicks into her second unofficial job trying to secure a college future here for the three students: twins Adama and Awa Jarju and Penda Jallow.
They’ve done everything they can, graduating from high school and earning acceptance to six American universities, a staggering accomplishment for children of poverty whose parents didn’t attend college and, in some cases, can’t even write their own names.
They now face a daunting final hurdle: raising $270,000 for four years of schooling and expenses at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Rockland County, New York. DeLuca has raised about $7,000 so far through donors who also contributed to the students’ high school scholarship and a gofundme campaign.
The task will not be easy, but neither was the journey that led the students to this point.
“These kids have been through everything,” DeLuca says. When she arrived in their village of Makumbaya, she quickly came to understand that students, especially the females, would regularly have to miss a week or a month of school at a time. Despite being sixth-graders, they’d be called away to work in the fields, or tend to their siblings while their parents worked in the city. Or, commonly, the family would just run out of funds.
One of the three students hoping to come to the U.S., Awa, had to miss a year of school while recovering from malaria. A classmate of theirs, Binta, died of the disease after going home during math class one day in eighth grade with a headache.
“It’s an illness that’s easily cured with a medicine few of our families can afford,” writes Penda, another of the three aspiring college students, on a website explaining their quest. She wants to study health and business in college to prepare her for a return to her country, where she hopes to transform rural health care with better facilities, better access to life-saving medicine and a fleet of clinics on wheels, where doctors and nurses traverse the countryside in buses and tend to the sick.
“I will bring my college education back to the Gambia to make sure that other children like Binta can survive childhood illnesses and grow up to be successful adults who can also help our country,” she writes.
Awa plans to use her degree to open a chain of hotels throughout her country, defying the traditional wife-and-mother role the majority of women are confined to in her patriarchal nation that only outlawed female genital mutilation in 2015.
“I would be able to employ hundreds of Gambians to work at my hotels and I would pay them well,” she writes. “This would mean that they would not have to struggle so much to care for their families but, most importantly, more girls in my country would be able to finish their schooling. As a woman, this is important to me because I want to see the women in my country have their own place among the men.”
It’s here, in the realm of gender relations, where DeLuca hopes her passions intersect with those of her students. A communications major with a gender studies minor at GW, DeLuca says her university writing class freshman year, taught by Professor Gia Harewood, introduced themes of masculinities in America and awakened a still-burning fire to view the world through a gender-based lens and strive for greater equality between the sexes. The class, she says, “changed the trajectory of everything” in her life and career.
She hopes to inspire similar epiphanies in her students.
“I would love to have them involved in some open communication about the role gender plays in their country,” she says. “That seed was planted at GW.”
The third student, Adama, wants to study computer science and bring the liberating gift of technology to villagers and city dwellers alike, establishing computer classes in schools and helping bring Internet connectivity throughout the land.
“I want to dedicate my studies at school so that I can become a cyber superhero for the Gambia,” he writes. “I may not be able to save the world but I can try to help families like my own rise above poverty and make better lives for themselves.”
DeLuca says those kinds of dreams sound like hers and those of her classmates in high school and college. The difference lies in the privileged upbringing of many Americans, who don’t think twice about whether they can afford college. She welcomes support of any kind, but is also pushing for something specific: a gift of $5,000 each from 52 people.
“If we get that, we’re done,” she says. “The fundraiser would be completed.” When that happens, she’d like to make her first return visit to the village where this journey began, and help her now-grownup students as they navigate a series of firsts: car ride, plane ride, steps on U.S. soil. They will be strangers in a new land, with eyes open to the possibilities ahead. DeLuca remembers that feeling, and wants to be there to help their transition just as they helped hers so many years ago.
