Michelle mania (Pt II) for British schoolgirls
MICHELLE Obama was greeted by cheering and waving girls yesterday as she returned to the British state school that has become close to her heart. She told pupils at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson girls’ school in Islington, North London, that meeting their counterparts in 2009 – months after her husband Barack Obama had become US President – had given her the strength to take on the challenges of becoming First Lady. Back then, 20 per cent of the pupils were refugees and 55 languages were spoken there. In her new memoir Becoming, Mrs Obama, 54, writes how she told them that ‘though I had come from far away… I was more like them than they knew’. She told the girls then that like many of them she had grown up in a poor neighbourhood, but through determination and hard work had been able to attend Princeton University and Harvard Law School. Yesterday at the school, rated outstanding by Ofsted, 350 pupils heard Mrs Obama tell executive head Jo Dibb how meeting the girls had ‘reminded me how much courage and talent and hope there is’.