Before she was even a teenager, Beteliham Mamo questioned the world around her. She studied the writings of Carl Sagan and stargazed with her father from outside their home in Tigray, Ethiopia, fascinated by deep questions about the universe and scientific advances like gene editing. A book chronicling the 20th century’s greatest inventions further stoked her interest in medicine and how to bring health care to the masses.
“When I read those books, I understood how much I didn’t know and how many questions there were to be solved. How many things to understand. And it really opened my eyes,” Mamo said.
“They show you the process of understanding the world beyond what you see.”
But as she pondered those questions, the world around her was cascading into chaos. In late 2020, long-simmering tensions between the Ethiopian government and the local governing group erupted in violence. Government officials severed electricity in her community and made the internet go dark. Sexual violence and deadly fighting quickly followed.
The disruptions ratcheted up during the middle of the school year, so she took matters into her own hands and taught herself the entire ninth-grade curriculum. But as the unrest intensified, she needed to leave. Mamo, then 14, hiked through the mountains, crammed into the cargo bay of a military plane and fled for her life to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. From there, with a family connection in the U.S., she was able to fly with her mother, who gave up everything to ensure their safety, and brother as refugees to Boulder, Colorado.
She was safe, yet she initially felt she was “in the same room, but not the same world” as the 10th graders around her, she said. Still, Mamo’s brother helped her navigate life in the U.S., and she found a supportive community at school that encouraged her to keep asking questions about science and the universe. Her curiosity led to a high school internship studying the physiological impacts of space travel — and now to a full-ride scholarship to UC Berkeley.
Mamo is one of this year’s scholarship recipients from the Robinson International Scholars Program. The two-year-old award covers UC Berkeley tuition, housing and living stipends and is given to high-achieving students from Africa who are refugees, lack legal standing in their current country, or graduated from high school in a sub-Saharan or developing nation.
Awarded to just two students each academic year, the scholarship is part of the Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholarship initiative and also pays for immigration-related expenses, like visas, and finances a flight home for each student annually.
While there were existing financial aid offerings for incoming students living in the U.S., resources were lacking for those living abroad, said Stephanie Robinson, who created the award along with her husband, UC Regent Mark Robinson. That meant if exceptional students in some of the most challenging situations in Africa were able to navigate the application process and gain acceptance, they might still have missed out on a UC Berkeley education because there were no resources to help them pay to attend.
“It was heartbreaking to learn that there were no scholarship options for them,” Stephanie Robinson said. “We believe that there are students of enormous promise everywhere, including in refugee camps and other similar situations, and we wanted them to have access to a Cal education.”
The award doesn’t just benefit those who receive the funding, she said. The entire campus is “immeasurably enriched by getting to know these scholars and learning about their life experiences.”
“In the current climate,” she said, “this seems more important than ever.”
The scholarship is part of a broader effort at Berkeley to bring high-achieving students from around the world to campus, said Olufemi “Femi” Ogundele, associate vice chancellor of enrollment and dean of undergraduate admissions. He said such efforts lead to exciting new collaborations of ideas and perspectives and further make Berkeley’s scholarly community “world-class.”
“These scholarships both acknowledge these students for their academic achievements in some of the most trying experiences imaginable, as well as acknowledge their unique needs to transition and fully participate in the Berkeley experience,” Ogundele said.
Mamo plans to major in chemical engineering and one day return to Africa to work in health care, perhaps as an OB/GYN, like her father, who treated survivors of trauma and abuse free of charge. “Seeing the fulfillment he found in helping others inspired me to do the same,” she said.
She realizes the incredible odds she’s overcome, having fled Tigray to a university that gives rise to the kind research she read about as a young girl.
Of her first semester on campus, Mamo said, “It was all I had hoped for and more.”
The results of the Robinsons’ support and Mamo’s education will ripple far beyond Berkeley.
“They’re helping a multitude of people,” Mamo said. “If — not if, when — I become a doctor or delve more into the pharmaceutical industries, they’re not just helping me. They’re helping the people who are going to be helped through me, as well.”
Beating ignorance through education
Mamo was the third of four scholarship recipients to arrive on campus since the program began in fall 2023. The first two awardees, Riak Mayar and Ruremesha Hussein, are midway through their second year.
In 2012, Mayar fled from South Sudan’s civil war and was rescued by a U.N. peacekeeping troop that took him to Kenya’s massive Kakuma Refugee Camp, where more than 200,000 people now live.
Mayar said living in a refugee camp for much of his life instilled in him a sense of resilience and determination, traits he drew from during several years in a row of applying for admission to major universities. Mayar was admitted to Berkeley and arrived for the 2023 fall semester.
“I feel like I’m in the best place in the world,” said Mayar, who is pursuing a degree and career in chemical engineering. Having witnessed the ill health effects in his homeland that are caused by oil and gas extraction, he hopes to use knowledge gained at Berkeley to address industrial dangers in South Sudan.
“I haven’t forgotten where I came from,” Mayar said. “I want to try to do something that is constructive, that can allow me to go and change the lives of others.”
Those elements of determination are through-lines for each of the scholarship’s four recipients.
In 2007, eight-year-old Hussein, who goes by Alimas, fled an escalating civil war in Bujumbura, Burundi, “because of fear for our lives.” After a perilous trip, Hussein, his mother and his younger siblings arrived as refugees in South Africa. Hussein, who uses he and they pronouns interchangeably, quickly embraced a sliver of stability and found comfort in math, “the only language I could understand.”
Thanks to a teacher who spent an extra 10 minutes each day quizzing Hussein on vocabulary, they soon became comfortable speaking English and excelled in academics after that. In high school, instructors recognized his potential as he aced exam after exam. While classmates opted to pursue careers in medicine, Hussein was drawn to computer science.
But there were barriers to college, including being labeled a refugee, which disqualified him from universities in South Africa. Then, in 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched a program to connect eligible refugee students with counselors to help them navigate university admissions processes. One of them encouraged Hussein to apply to his dream school: Berkeley.
“To the world, and especially where I come from, it’s a powerful institution,” Hussein said.
Hussein wants to pursue a career in the corporate world — perhaps in finance — to support his four young siblings, mother and community in South Africa. He plans to major in analytics while continuing to stoke his curiosity about the world’s powerful social and economic structures.
“The only way to beat ignorance,” they said, “is through education.”
At Berkeley at last
For 16 years, Deng Chol Deng called the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya “home.” He arrived there at age six with his mother and four brothers, narrowly escaping war in South Sudan that took the lives of his father and sisters. While the camp provides safety, opportunities for work, education and eventually moving beyond the camp are sparse. Little has changed, he said, “because of the idea that this should be a temporary place.”
In that place, he found solace in basketball, which helped earn him a scholarship to a boarding school outside of the camp’s borders. There, teachers and mentors understood the challenges he’d face to get into a university, including being ineligible for most forms of student aid. But he persevered, taking college-level courses in public speaking and academic writing, both essential if he was ever going to leave Kenya.
“It was a huge opportunity for me to go to boarding school, and I didn’t want to waste it,” he said. “Basketball was more than a sport for me because it gave me that opportunity.”
After he graduated in 2021, a college adviser from Elimisha Kakuma, an intensive college preparatory program for high-achieving graduates in the camp, encouraged him and his peers to search online for schools around the world that piqued their interest. Deng noticed online that Berkeley was ranked the world’s top public research university. After a bit more searching, he saw that the Robinson scholarship seemed tailored for students like him.
“When my counselor asked who wanted to apply to Berkeley, I think I was the first one to raise my hand,” he said.
He was awarded the scholarship last spring and immediately made plans to arrive for the fall semester. Those plans were scuttled when paperwork problems at the U.S. embassy in Kenya delayed his arrival until December. It pained him to know he’d be a semester behind Mamo, the year’s other scholarship recipient, but after spending 16 years in a refugee camp, he’d grown accustomed to waiting.
Being accepted to Berkeley felt like “compensation for all the struggles” he’d endured, he said.
More than that, “In the small community I come from, it gave the kids a lot of hope — hope to go to college and hope for a better life.”
Finally, in December, he nervously stepped on a plane for the first time in his life, took a seat by the window and waited for takeoff en route to San Francisco International Airport.
Taking his first steps on campus soon afterward, “I was really excited,” he said. “I felt that it was really happening. It’s real. It’s not a dream. It felt really good to see the Campanile, to see my dorm, to see the libraries and to see all the different landmarks.”
Deng realizes people have skewed perceptions about the refugee label. But in earning a chance to study at Berkeley and, one day, apply his knowledge toward helping others, he wants to dismantle misperceptions and instill hope for others like him.
“These are people who also want to go to school,” he said. “They also want to have a good life. They also want to love their families. They also want to go to good universities and study and also help other people.
“We’re also like normal people who only need an opportunity to succeed like others.”
