‘You have to think about tomorrow’
Teen wins TD scholarship for work with Sudanese-Canadian youth
Zeinab Abugrga seems like any other teenager. She loves watching TV, eating sushi, and listening to indie folk music.
But the 18-year-old Brookfield High School graduate is one of this year’s TD Scholarship recipients, a major financial award Abugrga received for her leadership and involvement in Ottawa’s Sudanese-Canadian community.
The TD Scholarships for Community Leadership, valued at $70,000 each, are awarded annually to 20 promising young Canadians to help with tuition and living costs as they enter university or college.
Abugrga, a first-generation Sudanese-Canadian, founded a youth initiative to involve young Sudanese people and their parents in networking, sporting and volunteering as a way for them to establish connections they otherwise couldn’t.
When Abugrga speaks, her words of wisdom in her highpitched, almost childlike sweet voice give insight into her maturity and deep-rooted sense of caring for those in need.
“I think it comes down to recognizing an issue in the community and then trying to resolve it in a way that the community wants it to be dealt with,” she said when asked where the idea for a youth initiative came from. “It’s very important to not just think about now. You also have to think about tomorrow.
“I consistently saw Sudanese-Canadian individuals in my community who weren’t connecting with either culture, or who were complaining about not fitting in at school but then not fitting in at home, either,” Abugrga said. "I thought that nobody should feel that way, especially when there are opportunities for them to connect with people who went through the same thing, like I did.
“So when I saw this problem arise in my community, I was able to ask, ‘If we have this council for adults, why don’t we have the same for youth?’ and from there it snowballed into me creating the youth initiative.”
Abugrga is also passionate about student governance. She is co-president of her student council and co-chair of her school board’s council of student council presidents.
“At school, people tell me all the time, ‘You never eat lunch with us. You’re always busy. Why don’t you just relax and take a chill pill? This is high school, it’s not that serious.’
“But I don’t think of what I do as work. For me, this is my hobby, this is what I love doing in my free time. Both individual activities are very rewarding and have been very beneficial to myself and the people they affect,” she said.
Abugrga has already enrolled in biochemistry classes at the University of Alberta and hopes to continue to medical school and become a palliative care specialist to improve the quality of life for cancer patients and their families.
She says winning the scholarship felt almost liking winning the lottery.
“I was very emotionally unprepared to get the news,” she said. “The phone rang while I was studying upstairs for a biology test. I rushed downstairs and my mom handed me the phone.
“The lady on the line wouldn’t tell her if I’d won so I was very disappointed. I thought she didn’t want to tell my mom because she didn’t want to disappoint her,” Abugrga recounted.
“But the person on the line told me, ‘Congratulations, you’ve won.’ ”
“Honestly, I don’t think I even let her finish the sentence. I think she said congratulations and I was just like, ‘Oh my God.’ It was so surreal. It was a like a complete out-of-body experience. I was jumping up and down and my mom was jumping up and down. My aunt was sitting on the couch crying.
I saw consistently Sudanese-Canadian individuals in my community who weren’t connecting with either culture.
“We were so incredibly ecstatic. I remember falling down and looking at the ceiling and thinking there’s no way. I’m going to wake up in five seconds and this isn’t going to be a real thing,” she said.
Abugrga encourages people to take the initiative and act on opportunities.
“People often feel like scholarships are very difficult to achieve, like you have to be the ideal person, but by no means am I that,” she said. "I think people have a lot of different things they can bring to the table, and there’re scholarships to address all sorts of excellence. By no means did I fathom I would receive this scholarship when I applied for it.
But I thought this is an opportunity, so I’ll take it and see what happens. And I feel like other people would benefit from having a similar mentality.”