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T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2019 | 9factor in their entire array of needs
and got reports that USAP students
were sleeping on bare dormitory-room
beds.
“She’s one of my life heroes,” said
Bruce Wharton, who was the public-
affairs officer in the American Embas-
sy in Zimbabwe when USAP began. “I
don’t know anybody who has done so
much on an individual, personal level
to make our world better.”
Her ambitions are expanding: She
plans to open a USAP boarding school
in Zimbabwe next year. Money permit-
ting, it will give up to 50 Zimbabwean
students their 11th- and 12th-grade
educations, so that they’re in the best
shape possible to thrive when they go
to college abroad.
She told me that she also hoped that
the school would give the kids a deeper
investment in Zimbabwe. In her ideal
scenario, they bring the knowledge
that they’ve acquired in college back to
a country with a shortage of leaders, of
innovators, of hope.
Wadzi said that she could envisionYou’ve read a lot over the past year
about kids who end up in the Ivy
League because of their parents’
wealth and wiles, kids with obscene
advantages. I’d like to introduce you to
another kind of kid who landed there.
Her name is Wadzanayi Mayiseni. She
goes by Wadzi.
Before Wadzi, 19, arrived at Colum-
bia University last month for a sum-
mer bridge program to prepare for her
first year, she’d never been to the
United States. She’d never left Africa.
She’s from Zimbabwe, one of the poor-
est countries in the world, where her
mother, who raised her without any
help from her father, has been out of a
steady job since Wadzi was 9.
When Wadzi was 12, she found out
she had bone cancer, which meant not
just chemotherapy but the amputation
of most of her left leg. I asked her how,
psychologically and emotionally, that
changed her. She said it made her
more determined.
“You’re not defined by the things
that hold you back,” she told me.
“You’re defined by how you rise above
them.” She refused to be placed in
classes for disabled children and later
figured out how to get a scholarship to
one of Zimbabwe’s most esteemed
private high schools. Then she figured
out how to translate that into the best
college education possible.
She got help with that last part from
the nonprofit United Student Achievers
Program, which for two decades has
identified disadvantaged high school
students of enormous promise in Zim-
babwe, coached them through apply-
ing to top-notch colleges outside of
their country and steered them toward
futures they never imagined.
And by “disadvantaged,” I mean
students who in some cases grew up
herding livestock and in other cases
were strangers to computers. I mean
orphans: Largely because of the AIDS
epidemic, about a third of Zimbabwe’s
USAP students have lost both parents.
I met one such student, Getrude Maku-
rumidze, last year; by the time shewas 9, her mother, father and 6-month-
old sister had died from complications
related to AIDS. She then bounced
among the members of her extended
family who could afford at a given
moment to keep her. She nonetheless
went on to graduate from Bryn Mawr
and is now in medical school at
Georgetown University.
There are USAP programs in other
developing countries. They not only
provide students with the guidance
necessary to apply to foreign colleges
but also help with application fees and
financial aid forms. Zimbabwe’s USAP
was the model and remains the gold
standard. It has sent more than 400
students abroad, mostly to the United
States, where the schools they’ve
attended include Stanford, Harvard,
Yale, M.I.T., the University of Chicago,
Duke, Pomona — you name it. Many
went on to earn Ph.D.s. Many became
physicians. Six won Rhodes schol-
arships.
That’s worth dwelling on for several
reasons, starting with this one: Zimba-
bwe is the sort of place that President
Trump had in mind
when he used a
fecal epithet for
poor, black and (to
his thinking) worth-
less countries, but
there is obviously
great potential
there, needing only
to be recognized
and nurtured. Countries don’t fall
neatly into categories: good versus
bad sources of immigrants. Reality is
more complicated. Talent is universal.
For example, in another desperate
part of Africa, Somaliland, there’s a
remarkable school, Abaarso, that
Jonathan Starr, an American philan-
thropist, opened in 2009. It educates
children in grades 7 through 12. Its
alumni have been admitted to and
received financial aid from Harvard,
Yale, Columbia, Brown, M.I.T., Swarth-
more.
Those institutions’ receptiveness is
another reason I’m writing this. Yes,
America’s richest colleges stay that
way by giving special consideration to
families with the means to make big
donations. But they simultaneously
use some of their wealth, if not quite
enough, to educate students who can-
not contribute a dime to their tuition.
Zimbabwe’s USAP is also the story
of the difference that one person can
make. It’s run by and was the brain-
child of Rebecca Zeigler Mano, anAmerican who married a Zimbabwean,
moved to Zimbabwe and couldn’t just
shrug off the country’s misery.
“There’s a big gap — a big chasm —
between the talent that we have in
Zimbabwe and the opportunities,” she
said on the first of two occasions over
the last 13 months when I spoke with
her in New York. She returns fre-
quently to America, in part to raise
funds.
Her program has become so well
known and widely respected in Zimba-
bwe that every year she gets 700 to
800 applications for about 35 spots. “I
like to tell Harvard that we are more
competitive than they are,” she said.
Many of the applicants are from re-
mote rural areas; she tirelessly criss-
crosses the country to interview them.
She also builds networks in the
United States for the students who
come here, so that they have places to
go on school breaks — they can’t afford
to fly home — and so that there are
people to help with things like sheets
and blankets. At the start she didn’tgetting a medical degree in the United
States, becoming a pediatric oncologist
and then returning home to help chil-
dren who confront medical scares like
the one that she survived.
I asked her about her impressions of
America so far. She mentioned a trip to
see, up close, a world-famous land-
mark that was familiar from so many
pictures: the Statue of Liberty.
“It was right in front of me,” she
said. “I was awe-struck.”
“You know the crown represents
seven continents?” she added, refer-
ring to the spikes that radiate from it.
She was transfixed by the fact that an
icon so central to one country would
allude to all the others; by the generos-
ity of that symbolism; by its inclusive-
ness. “I remember really smiling,” she
told me, “because I felt a part of that.”
She said that the tablet that Lady
Liberty holds brought to mind study-
ing, learning, growing. That, too, made
her smile. “I’m here for an education,”
she said. “And there’s a statue embody-
ing what I’ve come for.”The surprising path that some kids take to the Ivy League
Meet the
resilient
strivers who
prove that
brilliance has
no borders. Wadzanay Mayiseni, from Zimbabwe, is attending Columbia University, thanks in part to the United Student Achievers Program.DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMESFrank Bruni
opinion
omy. On the region’s borders, the main
activity in the savanna has become
inefficient cattle grazing.
The Amazonian debacle is part of a
national misdirection. Brazil has un-
derinvested in its people and relied
increasingly on the production and
export of commodities. In the Amazon,
the easy way out leads to destruction.
The only system with a chance of
saving both the people and the trees is
a knowledge economy.
Technological, entrepreneurial and
legal innovation premised on a defini-
tive settlement of land tenure can
allow for the sustainable harvesting of
heterogeneous tropical rain forests and
their use as sources of new drugs and
forms of renewable energy. To make
this possible, technical environmental
services must be provided over an
area larger than Western Europe.
Only knowledge-intensive industries
and services in the cities can turn
toward the rain forest rather than
away from it. New ways of organizing
ownership and financing productioncan help local communities and start-
ups to experiment, compete and co-
operate. This approach can begin to
give practical content to the otherwise
empty slogan of sustainable develop-
ment.
Don’t demand that Brazil turn 61
percent of its national territory into an
international park. And don’t expect
Brazilians, who have managed to
preserve about 80 percent of the trees
in their section of the Amazon, to ap-
preciate being lectured by European
countries left largely treeless by cen-
turies of deforestation.
Saving the Amazon is a project for
Brazil to shape and execute and for the
world — beginning with the Group of 7,
which has just pledged the pittance of
$20 million in emergency aid — to
support. If the Bolsonaro administra-
tion, sunk in its perverse culture wars,
refuses to participate, governments,
research institutions, and businesses of
the world should go to the governors
and mayors of the Amazon.
The Amazonian states have joined in
a regional organization, the InterstateConsortium of the Legal Amazon, that
can partner with our foreign friends.
The real Brazil wants to bet on the
marriage of intelligence and nature.
Give us a hand without disrespecting
our sovereignty. Instead of just helping
put out fires, help us make the discov-
eries and achieve the innovations that
a better future demands.
There is much talk of sustainable
development in the world. But little of
it exists. The dominant tone of envi-
ronmentalism in the rich North Atlan-
tic countries is plaintive and escapist:
As history has disappointed us, let’s
console ourselves in the great garden
of nature.
Brazilians, along with the rest of the
world, need alternatives — including
institutional alternatives — more than
we need consolation. To rescue the
Amazon, we need them right now.To save Amazonia, help Brazil
U NGER, FROM PAGE 1ROBERTO MANGABEIRA UNGER, who
teaches at Harvard, served as minister
for strategic affairs, in the administra-
tions of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and
Dilma Rousseff.of familiarity.
Only upon leaving Kashmir the
following day did I realize that there
had also been no record of what, pre-
cisely, had happened there.
The newspaper was a document of
silence.
It did not inform us that 17-year-old
Osaib Altaf, cornered by soldiers on a
footbridge in Srinagar, had jumped into
the Jhelum River and died; that at
least 2,000 people had been jailed
without charges; and that my uncle,
one of them, was not in Kashmir but
inside a jail in Agra. Nor would it be
able to record, in the days to come, that
152 people had been injured by pellets
and tear gas; that the family of Mo-
hammad Ayub Khan, a 60-year-old
salesman, found out after four days
that tear gas fired by Indian troops had
suffocated him to death; that a man
walked 34 miles to call his son in New
Delhi and let him know that his family
was alive; that pharmacies were run-
ning short of lifesaving medicines and
a young woman flew in from New
Delhi and then walked 11 miles to bring
insulin to her father.
But inside my final evening in Kash-
mir, as I sat in our besieged garden, all
I had in my hands were newspaper
pages full of notices of wedding cancel-
lations. Soon the silent day was sepa-
rated from its silent night by a voice on
the loudspeaker. It rode through town
in a military jeep while announcing the
fate of curfew: “Apne gharon mein se
mat nikalna. Karwai ki jaayegi.”
(“Don’t step out of your homes. Action
will be taken.”)
Beiga cursed them under his breath,
and then smiled at me weakly. “They
won’t let us out for very long this time,”
he said, lifting himself up to go inside.
“Not before winter.”
Only then did I think of the hazy,
morning dream that I had been awak-
ened from. Within it, the toothless
madman from our neighborhood ran
through a white valley on its first day
of winter and screamed the unbeliev-
able truth, “Kashmir has come back!
Kashmir has come back!” He danced
with rapture and knocked on every
door in town, trying to wake us to the
miracle unfolding outside: Snow fell
and brought back every quarter of
Kashmir that had been erased many
seasons ago. He danced alone.Kashmir and
the fire again
S HAHDAD, FROM PAGE 7NIYA SHAHDADis a writer from Kashmir.that there are future elections to come?
In “The Line Becomes a River,” Fran-
cisco Cantú reflects on his four years
working as a Border Patrol agent, high-
lighting that the naïveté of the young
and idealistic causes us “to overesti-
mate ourselves and underestimate
institutions of power, allowing us to
believe that we might work to change
them from within, that by witnessing
the violence they perpetrate, we might
learn to subvert it without participating
in it ourselves.” Does dissent relieve you
from moral culpability? Do the count-
less good things you do in your job
outweigh telling a 14-year-old victim of
sexual violence that her path to refugee
status, wide open on Jan. 19, 2017, is now
closed?
I publicly supported this administra-
tion longer than some and for less time
than others, and there are no easy an-
swers to these questions. Every individ-
ual has his or her own commitments,
own beliefs and own red lines; there is
no inherent shame or honor in choosing
to work for this administration or not, so
long as it is a conscious choice. Some of
the most noble work is being done by
those who have chosen to stay in the
State Department, advocating sensible
policies or simply keeping the impor-
tant bureaucracy of our lead foreign
affairs agency running.
But when President Trump’s support-
ers chanted, “Send her back!,” I took
that as a charge for me as well. I askedthe Trump administration to send me
back from my overseas posting, ship-
ping home the family, foreign language
textbooks and various tchotchkes from
“shithole countries” that I’ve collected
in my years as a United States diplomat.
I am joining a growing list of Foreign
Service officers who refuse to serve this
administration any longer.
No one knows exactly how many
employees have left the State Depart-
ment because of this administration’s
policies and mismanagement; for every
high-profile or well-publicized resigna-tion, there are other officers who quietly
decided it was time to retire, go back to
school or find a new line of work. A
private Facebook group for Foreign
Service officers contemplating a career
change has moved in the past year from
a place for hushed and agonized conver-
sations to a bustling job board with new
members joining daily. Analysts have
lamented the loss of senior State De-
partment officials, many of whom were
pushed out the door in the first few
months of the administration. But no
one seems to be paying much attention
to the growing exodus of entry-level and
midlevel officers, who take with us
ground-level expertise that is difficult to
replace.
When you’re a Foreign Service officer,
your job is to support the administra-
tion. Without exception. Despite my
personal views, I spent more than two
years working to carry out the adminis-
tration’s immigration and foreign policy
priorities. I continued to do so until the
very minute I handed in my badge and
headed to the airport.
But on Friday, I cleared immigration
and officially returned to life as a private
citizen. And today I have a new chal-
lenge: putting my time and energy into
helping elect new leadership that serves
the true interests of all Americans,
regardless of where they were born.Why I left Trump’s State Department
MILTON, FROM PAGE 7BETHANY MILTONjoined the Foreign
Service in 2008 and most recently
served in Kigali, Rwanda.ADALIS MARTINEZTheGCDNAnnualConvening–Singapore2019is:TheGCDNAnnualConvening–Singapore2019is:TheGCDNAnnualConvening–Singapore2019is:TheGCDNAnnualConvening–Singapore2019is:
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