A ROAD PAVED WITH LEARNING LEADS TO A NEW SCHOOL IN SOUTH SUDAN

BY ELIOTT GROVER

IT’S A MATTER OF FAITH. For Lorem Aminathia ’11, his faith in the transformative power of education is unshakable. “It has been more dramatic than anything I have ever experienced in my life,” he told the Hotchkiss community at a recent All-School talk. This is a compelling statement considering the dramatic forces that have shaped his life.

Aminathia returned to campus to share his story and discuss how it has led him to make education his life’s work. In 2024, he plans to open Kinyeti Academy, a school in South Sudan that aspires to equip students with the skills to become the kind of globally competitive and innovative leaders the country needs. “The idea is to try to find young boys and girls throughout South Sudan and then provide them with an educational opportunity like the one you enjoy here today,” he told the crowd of students in Walker Auditorium.

Aminathia was born in a rural village in South Sudan at a time when the notyet-independent country was embroiled in a brutal civil war. His grandfather was the chief of their village and owned cows, sheep, and goats, which Aminathia’s father and uncles tended. Shortly after he learned how to walk, Aminathia was sent to a cattle camp. This is how young boys in

South Sudan often begin their journey into adulthood. Rather than starting school, they learn how to care for livestock.

When Aminathia was 4, he contracted tuberculosis and nearly died. He left the cattle camp and returned home where his mother cared for him without access to any medical facilities. “You can imagine my mom having no access to health care at all,” he said. “The only thing she could do was to treat me with traditional concoctions of herbs, which, unsurprisingly, didn’t really help.”

Desperate to save his life, his parents brought him to a refugee camp in Kenya where he received modern medicine. His father returned to South Sudan while his mother stayed by his side. After a year, Aminathia recovered. His father returned to bring his mother home, but they decided to leave Aminathia in the camp. It was the last time he saw them. They soon became two of the war’s many victims.

“I was left in the custody of a young relative a couple years older than me,” Aminathia said. “We lived in a group of teenage boys.” The heroic story of this resilient group, popularly known as “The Lost Boys of Sudan,” has been well documented.

In 2012, Nicholas Kristoff profiled Aminathia for The New York Times. “Boys raising boys might seem a recipe for Lordof-the-Flies chaos, but these teenagers forced Lorem to go to school, seeing education as an escalator to a better life. And Lorem began to soar.”

The refugee camp had a makeshift school run by the United Nations. Classes met under the shade of a large tree where roughly 500 students learned from one teacher. Without any pencils or books, Aminathia practiced writing by scratching letters in the dust. He was a voracious learner. He made a second home in the camp’s library, devouring books and absorbing as much knowledge as possible. By the time he was 10, he was teaching his peers. As he approached high school age,

Aminathia took a national exam and earned the second highest score in the district. The Kenyan government awarded him a full scholarship to Alliance High School, one of the top schools in the country.

At Alliance, Aminathia flourished. When the headmaster became the founding dean of the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, he selected Aminathia as one of a handful of students to join the inaugural class. Aminathia thrived there as well. One of the school’s co-founders was a Yale alumnus who wrote his alma mater and implored them to accept Aminathia. They did, but they worried about his readiness to, in Aminathia’s words, “survive at Yale,” which is how he ended up spending a postgraduate year at Hotchkiss. “This is not a normal high school. This is something really special,” he said with a smile.

“I’m sure a lot of you are curious what it was like here coming from a refugee camp in Kenya via Nairobi and then South Africa,” Aminathia said. “It was very overwhelming. But then I also just learned that this is life. Each of us, you don’t choose where you’re born or what happens to you when you’re young.”

This perspective helped him make the most of his Hotchkiss experience. “One of the things I did here was just remain vulnerable and open up myself,” Aminathia said. He illustrated his point with a story from Christopher Burchfield’s English class in the fall of 2010. The class was reading a poem that featured the word “icicle,” a word Aminathia had never encountered before. “I raised my hand and asked Mr. Burchfield to explain to me what an icicle was.” It was that “openness to learning more” that created unique learning opportunities. When the first snow fell that winter, Burchfield held class outside, a memory Aminathia still cherishes.

“For many people, you don’t realize how an education at Hotchkiss can dramatically change a person’s life. Not only their own personal life, but a whole community,” he said. Following his time as a Bearcat, he graduated from Yale in 2015 with a B.A. in economics and was selected for the second cohort of Schwarzman Scholars at China’s Tsinghua University, where he was awarded an M.A. in global affairs in 2018.

Aminathia’s vision for Kinyeti Academy is to create a model program that can be scaled and replicated to address South Sudan’s acute educational crisis. The country has one of the lowest adult literacy rates in the world and one of the highest rates of uneducated youth; three out of four school-age children do not attend school. Since gaining its independence in 2011, South Sudan has faced a turbulent socio-political landscape that has stifled development.

Aminathia hopes to pave this bumpy road with learning in order to help his country’s future leaders receive the kind of transformative education he has experienced. “The opportunity I had [at Hotchkiss] gave me a chance to see what life could be for young children from my community,” he told students. “This place is extremely powerful. If you make use of it, it can really give you the opportunity to build competence to operate effectively in the world and be able to create an impact that could change many people’s lives.”

A student asked Aminathia where he finds motivation. “There are very few South Sudanese people of my age who have had the background that I’ve had,” he replied. “There’s a sense of responsibility to try and say, ‘I’ve had the fortune of having access to some of the best education that anyone can wish for in the world. What can I do with it?’”

If his words and actions are any indication, he plans to do quite a lot. H