Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Nigerian native to graduate Chester High at age of 16
She hopes to attend Bryn Mawr College & be an ambassador for her homeland
Honored by the Chester branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, native African Deborah Ekwale, a student at Chester High School, last week received a scholarship to a college of her choosing.
Already a student pursuing a few credits Delaware County Community College, Ekwale is finishing up her high school career which began in Nigeria, her home county, and continued as a main focus once she traveled to the United States.
Her dream is to go Bryn Mawr College, an all-girls school, where women’s issues that affected her mother, family members, role models and friends back home, is the intended focus of her studies. She is also just 16 years old. “My motivation is to see women build empires,” she said. “That means everything to me.”
With five siblings in all, two living in Canada and an older sister living with a significant other and their child in the United States, Ekwale was just 14 years old when she first came to the United States.
Attending a private school in the city of Lagos, which is the largest city in Africa, which has estimated population of over 16 million people, she came as a visitor to the United States, where she first attended the Christian Academy in Brookhaven in October 2015.
However, it was the “very slow” immigration system she said precluded her from continuing her education there.
“Homeland Security came to the school and said I couldn’t go there,” she said.
Once her mother married a longtime friend who had decades ago come to the United States, granting her a green card, Deborah said that’s when she finally settled into her new American life.
“Moving around was too much and I was already in 11th grade,” she said.
Schools in Nigeria are very expensive, she continued. Her mother, a stylist, and father, a small-business owner, worked very hard to come up with the 2 million Naira a year, the Nigerian currency that for every U.S. dollar equates around 306 Naira back home, to put her through private school in Lagos.
However, the expenses were far too great, and she decided to travel to the United States to further her education. She currently takes courses at DCCC in English and algebra, in addition to reaching graduation at Chester High School.
“It’s kept me ahead,” she said, adding that she was hard-fought to find as many student organizations or clubs she could belong to in Chester.
She is the vice president of student government and hosts culture days at Chester High School where she represents her home country with food and clothing.
“Students were curious about other countries,” she said. “Most of them were willing to try my mother’s food — I had the best food around.”
With her biological father and some relatives still back in Nigeria, she said she is limited to the occasional long-distance phone
calls to keep in touch with them. Most of them, however, are living in North America.
She hopes to visit some of them while traveling abroad.
Back home, she said, she received a high quality education, had open internet access and a keen awareness of the issues within her own country and to the views of her continent from the outside world.
“When I got here people had stereotypes about Africa, they thought we all lived in jungles,” she laughed. “I just try to keep people informed, to make sure there’s not an ignorance of other cultures.”
She said the misconception of the United States of America by African people that here “money grows on trees.”
At first, her accent was thick and other students had difficulty understanding her. But, sitting in the library her English was fluent and clear, complete with Americanisms one would only pick up around students her age. Friends she’s made have expressed an interest in visiting her home county.
“It’s very important to hold onto our culture,” she said.
She and her mother attend Redeemed Christian Church of God in Philadelphia every week where they are joined by other Nigerian people who call the Delaware Valley home.
Her culture has been a driving factor both personally and professionally, and issues regarding women’s rights are among her most passionate. As a student in Lagos, she would visit poor neighborhoods and donate textbooks from previous years in school, host soup kitchens on Christmas and Easter and helped displaced people in her home country.
“Women’s rights are my number one issue, especially through my mom. Nigeria is made of different tribes with different cultural norms — women can’t hold property, they stay at home as a housewife,” she said. “Women aren’t given access to educational opportunities.”
She said much of the government is blatantly corrupt and fraudulent.
Often, too, she said, women are subjected to female genital mutilation, which has no medical benefit and is merely used as a tool to control women’s sexuality.
In April 2014, 276 female students were kidnapped by extremist terrorist organization Boko Haram from the Government Secondary School in the town of Chibok, Nigeria. Some young girls, whose ages at the time of their kidnapping ranged from 16 to 18, have managed to escape, but 195 still remain missing. Reports said that Boko Haram intended to use them as bargaining chips to release their commanders in jail.
“We all got so scared when the Chibok girls were kidnapped,” Deborah said. “We thought, ‘What if it happens to us?’”
In the United States, she hopes to bring awareness to the issues that face her people, and through one vessel or another, to bring change back to her home county.
“I want to be a role model for fellow students here, and I think other students are picking up on that,” she said. “(In Nigeria) everybody at school knows how much our parents suffer to give us an education, I want to give back to my mom to see the fruit of her labor.”
Her dream, she said, is to attend Bryn Mawr, the women’s liberal arts college, a “like-minded school” where she intends to build an independent major regarding women’s rights combined with a public health degree.