A former African refugee named Mireille Twayigira won a full scholarship to study for a Medicine degree at Shandong University in China.
Mireille was born in Rwanda, but she had to flee the Rwandan genocide when she was at a very young age. In a post by Berkley Center, She said she and her family walked on foot to a refugee camp in Congo, and when war erupted in Congo in 1996 they walked to a new refugee camp in Angola.
After several more years of traveling, losing both her mother and grandmother along the way, she and her grandfather settled in a refugee camp in Malawi.
In Malawi, they found a Jesuit Refugee Service-funded school where she excelled and was among the students who received the highest grade in the country in her twelfth-grade exams. Her excellence performance earned her a scholarship to study medicine in China.
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Mireille won the Zodiak Best Girl Award Scholarship, a scholarship program organized by Zodiak Broadcasting Station, a private radio station in Malawi rewarding the 10 girls who scored the highest marks in their Malawi School Certificate Exam.Â
Not long after, the Chinese Embassy decided to offer the 10 awardees full scholarships to go and study in China. ”I realized that I had to be here for a reason, and if I’m here for a reason I have to work hard. In China, I began to see hope in my own story,” Mireille said.
”Up until that time, I just saw it as a tragic story and that’s it, but in China I saw love from my friends who supported me and I began to reflect and see that it’s a story of hope that I can share with other people,” she added.
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Mireille almost lost the scholarship when the country’s Department of Education reviewed the files of the scholarship recipient they realized she was not eligible because she was not a student nor did she have a passport.
But with the intervention of Zodiak Broadcasting station which raised awareness for her, the parliament of Malawi, and the Government of Malawi who awarded her the Malawian Citizenship, Mireille could sustain her scholarship.
She resumed Shenyang University in China where she enrolled for a bachelor’s degree in Medicine. Mireille said it was challenging studying with a language she had never spoken nor written before. But she had a very strong belief, the same belief that had carried her through all the difficulties of her life.
“God had not spared my life and taken me so far for myself. There were people I was meant to serve, and I had to be competent to serve them. And there were people I was meant to inspire, people I need to be a living proof for that there is God who works on their behalf,” she said.
Mireille said her strong faith carried her throughout her six years at Shenyang University. She said she courageously learned Mandarin, one of China’s main languages, in a year and went on to complete her education in July 2016.
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