An Education

ing her mind and also had been diagnosed with cancer.

“She suffered from clinical anxiety and depression and psychosis. The cancer took a backseat to the mental illness in those days,” Semien explains.

When she had them around, Semien never understood her parents’ profoundness, she says. Now her life is dedicated to making sure their sacrifices meant something.

Due to their parents’ illnesses, Semien and her older sister Rama, even as middle schoolers, were forced to tackle responsibilities such as filling out medical insurance paperwork, paying bills, buying groceries and working part-time jobs.

Members of the Ethiopian community and other family friends helped during the toughest times, Semien says.

One week when Semien was 9 and her sister 13, both parents were hospitalized and the girls were left unsupervised. It had happened before, but this time it drew attention.

Cheri & Eric Luck

Bettering Dallas by Organics

Visit us today for North Texas’ best tropicals, annuals, perennials and more. Step in the store for fun gifts and beautiful home accessories. Also, ask us how we can help build your outdoor kitchen, arbor and outdoor living space

Walton’s Garden Center Hours Monday – Saturday 8:30 am – 6:00 pm

11:00 am – 5:00 pm

“When CPS pulled me out of class and told me they were going to put us in foster care, I said, ‘no, no’ and stopped answering their questions,” Semien recalls. “I was mad.”

That is when Laurie Garousi, a Lake Highlands parent and friend of Semien’s mom, accepted legal guardianship of the Hagos sisters.

“We were grateful, but it was tense back then,” Semien recalls. “Laurie wanted to take us in, but her husband wasn’t as happy with it. There was a lot of fighting and it was because of us being there. We tried as hard as we could, but it was like walking on eggshells.”

Entering high school, Semien was, in general, brokenhearted and ill at ease. She coped by making herself extraordinarily busy.

“Both to occupy my mind and for a reason to stay away from the house,” she explains.

She joined choir, cross country, track, student council, Girls Service League, Young Democrats, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Young Life and Habesha Collegiate Student Networking, to name a few. She started a Lake Highlands High School Disaster Action Team and organized Red Cross blood drives.

Garland Road

214-321-2387 www.waltonsgarden.com

She did not just participate — she excelled, winning endless awards and earning supervisory roles in clubs and teams. She has worked as a babysitter, retailer and, now, a file clerk at a law firm.

Her high school counselor Shamika Brak- ens, momentarily contemplating the right word, describes Semien as “amazing.”

“She lost both parents at a young age, one of them quite recently, she has been under an incredible amount of stress — what it takes to keep pushing herself to succeed despite all of it is something I cannot even imagine.”

Much of Semien’s drive is altruistic rather than selfish, Brackens continues.

“She is also a very giving person. She is always in the community trying to help others, rather than focusing on the unfortunate hand she was dealt.”

In track, Semien specializes in the 800-meter event. It is painful, exhausting and strategic — she hated it at first, but became good by embracing the agony.

She keeps an abundant stash of journals in which she has been writing since childhood. They amass in her trunk — they are safest there, she thinks. She doesn’t want to chance someone finding them. They contain confessions — of both self and peers.

“For some reason people feel comfortable sharing their secrets with me. I share mine with the journals. My friends know it and they joke that those journals better never become public.”

The ease with which she counsels her friends and acquaintances, the empathy she feels, plus her familiarity with mental illness, attracts her to the study of psychiatry, she says.

“Even as a very young kid, when my mom was acting crazy — she would run around with a knife or hallucinate that she hadn’t slept in days, when in fact she had slept for a long while — I was able to react calmly.” At age 7, for example, Semien recorded her mom sleeping to prove to Mom that she had slept. “I still have those videos. I see how well I dealt with that as a kid.”

She thinks psychiatry might be her calling, but she also is interested in law.

Her choice university is Haverford College in Pennsylvania. But finances are a concern. She has applied for every scholarship imaginable, she says.

She assures that no matter where she goes, she will adapt.

“For a lot of people, they form their personalities in college, so they have to be careful about what environment they enter. Me? I can go anywhere,” she says, half teasing. “I am formed.”

Tom Barrett Optical