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Pellagia Muliba '09 |
Pellagia Muliba '09
Zimbabwe teenager Pellagia Muliba carried the expectations of her parents when she boarded a plane for the United States in 2000 and became the family’s first college student.
Muliba studied hard and graduated five years later from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. Her parents dreamed of sharing in the celebration, but AIDS took both their lives before the diploma came.
“My parents never saw the day that I walked down that aisle, dressed in my graduation gown,” Muliba says.
Her mother died on Christmas Eve 2001, and her father died Feb. 28, 2004. Her father’s relatives claimed most of the family’s assets after the second funeral, including a college savings account that Muliba’s father had set aside for his two daughters while he worked as a diplomat in the Zimbabwean government.
That left Muliba with no money for graduate school. But she applied anyway to Thunderbird School of Global Management after working three years in Africa for an international development agency.
“My application was an act of faith,” Muliba says. “Each time a door opened, I would step through that door not knowing whether the next door would open or remain shut.”
‘God brought me here’
A door opened at Thunderbird on July 11, 2008.
That’s when Jay Bryant, Thunderbird’s director of admissions, met Muliba in his office and told her about a grassroots campaign that started in London to create a full-tuition scholarship for students from developing countries. Muliba broke down in tears when Bryant told her that 1977 Thunderbird graduate Marshall Parke and other donors had selected her as one of the first recipients in the Thunderbird Alumni Scholarship Program.
Other inaugural recipients were Tettey Wilson-Tei from Ghana, Hao Diep from Vietnam and Edgardo Paredes Tuesta from Peru.
“This is not just some investment they threw away into the water,” Muliba says. “This is an investment that will yield results years and years and years to come.”
Muliba, who started in the full-time Master of Arts in Global Affairs and Management program in August, says she never could have attended Thunderbird without the scholarship. Her first priority after the death of her parents has been helping her 21-year-old sister, Pamela, finish an undergraduate degree at the same Christian college she attended in Michigan.
“She’s everything I have left in terms of my nuclear family,” Muliba says. “We’re a band of sisters now.”
Muliba says her father picked Calvin College for his girls because he wanted a small college, far from the influence of American hip-hop, that would teach classes from a Christian perspective. She says her own Christian faith and her desire to give back to Africa also led her to Thunderbird, where she is receiving the training she needs to establish a global organization for helping women in poverty.
“Every breath that I take, every waking moment that I spend, is attributed to God,” Muliba says. “God brought me here.”
Box of letters
Muliba’s parents battled HIV/AIDS for more than 10 years without telling their children.
Muliba says her father called her at college on Christmas Eve 2001 and asked her to make an emergency trip home to see her mother, who was in the hospital with cancer.
He did not mention the HIV/AIDS, and he did not tell her that her mother had already died.
Muliba flew to Zimbabwe on Christmas Day and immediately asked to see her mother at the hospital. Instead, her father drove her home, where friends and relatives had gathered in mourning.
Nobody mentioned the death until a friend — unaware of the situation — expressed his condolences. Muliba immediately looked at her father for confirmation and then ran through the house screaming.
“I ran into every spot and every room,” Muliba says. “Her clothes were there, the bed was made. She was there, but she wasn’t there, and that’s when I knew she was gone.”
Muliba did not find out about the HIV/AIDS until she returned to Zimbabwe more than two years later to bury her father. That’s when her aunt gave her a bundle of letters that her mother had written from 1992 to 2000.
The messages chronicled the parents’ struggles with HIV/AIDS. Among other things, the letters encouraged the orphaned sisters to finish college in the United States.
“It was their biggest dream,” Muliba says.
Sewing machine legacy
Her parents grew up in poverty without extensive education.
Her father had the equivalent of a 10th-grade education, and her mother stopped attending school after sixth grade.
Despite this humble background, the couple worked to pull themselves out of poverty. Muliba’s parents eventually traveled the world as representatives of Zimbabwe, and Muliba says she grew up as a citizen of the world.
She studied in Zimbabwe, Germany, Belgium, Botswana and South Africa before coming to the United States for college. As a young girl in 1989, she recalls watching as the Berlin Wall came down.
“For a 9-year-old girl from Zimbabwe living in East Berlin and going to school in West Berlin every day, the magnitude of that event was beyond my comprehension,” she says.
Despite the extensive travels, Muliba says her family never forgot the village where they grew up.
“We always returned to the village and gave back,” she says.
The parents spoke Shona at home so their daughters could learn the language and maintain ties with relatives. At the same time, Muliba’s father made sure his daughters studied global affairs so they could maintain ties with the world beyond Zimbabwe.
Muliba says her father made her sit on the couch and watch CNN World News with him for one hour every day when he returned from work. This became two hours when she turned 10.
“I could bring my dolls to watch CNN with him,” she says. “But it had to be every day when he came home from work.”
Muliba also learned lessons about thrift and industry from her mother, who returned from a stay in Germany in 1990 with two or three secondhand sewing machines. Muliba’s mother didn’t know how to use the machines, so she obtained a microloan that allowed her to hire a seamstress and purchase patterns and material.
After Muliba’s mother learned to sew, she taught her sister, who taught her children. Muliba says the sewing machines have broken down “about 50 times” over the years, but the same machines are still providing a livelihood for her aunt and cousins.
Muliba says her Thunderbird scholarship will work like the sewing machines: The benefits will transfer across generations and across Africa.
Women of Africa
Her dream is to establish a holistic organization called Women of Africa that will help women with finances, education, health care, counseling and entrepreneurship.
“You have to work on all of those components together at the same time,” she says.
Muliba came to this realization after working from 2005 to 2008 as a program coordinator and economic adviser for Partners Worldwide, a faith-based organization based in Grand Rapids, Mich., that works to eliminate poverty in developing nations.
Muliba oversaw loan, mentoring and training programs for Partners Worldwide in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. Later, in 2008, Muliba became African Region program manager for Opportunity International, a faith-based microfinance organization based in Oak Brook, Ill.
During her travels in Africa, Muliba noticed that the women in one village worked from sunrise to sunset while the men sat in the square, talking politics.
After she gained their trust, she asked the men what success would look like to them. They said success would mean having cars, televisions and other things common in the Western world.
Later, she asked the women of the village the same question. They said success would mean having a grinder in their village, which would enable them to make more of the bread they sold at market and give them more time to tend their crops and care for their children.
“When females are taking out loans, it’s not just for themselves, but for their families,” she says. “So there’s more of an incentive to invest in women because you know it will be transferred across the generations.”
Muliba says this is why the largest and most successful microfinance organizations in Africa, Asia and Latin America focus on women.
“The numbers indicate that these are wise investments and yield results,” Muliba says, “not to mention lower rates of loan defaults.”
Changing a life
Parke first approached Thunderbird with his idea for a new scholarship in summer 2007.
Campaign Thunderbird includes fundraising goals in five focus areas: scholarships, professorships, technology and facilities, curricular innovation and student services, plus an annual fund for ongoing support.
Parke pledged $500,000 over eight years to support scholarships for students from emerging markets. But he wanted to give more than cash.
He added a commitment to serve as a mentor to the scholarship recipients during and after their time at Thunderbird. He then began approaching classmates from 1977 and other alumni, asking them if they would donate and serve as mentors.
Parke met the four scholarship recipients for the first time in September.
Muliba says the confidence that Parke and the other donors have shown in her is humbling, and they probably have no idea how broad the impact will be.
“To change a life is not something small,” Muliba says. “It’s big. It’s giving somebody the opportunity to dream.”