THIS week, I want to focus on two sets of extraordinary achievements of sorts. The first is not so clearly apparent – recently, Somali-American teenager, Ubah Mohammed Abdulle, wishing to unite with the mother he thought was dead did the impossible and survived. According to one online report, his mother recounted his ordeal:“Authorities say her son Yahya hopped a fence at the San Jose airport, evaded security and stowed away in the wheel well of the Hawaiian Airlines Boeing 767 several hours before it left for Maui. He miraculously survived temperatures approaching minus-85 and little oxygen during the 5½-hour flight. Video showed him emerging from the jet’s landing gear in Hawaii before being picked up by airport security. He remains in a Hawaiian hospital, and it is not clear when he might return to the San Francisco Bay Area.”

For me, this story not only presents a powerful human drama, that of a young man risking his life to be with a loved one, however hair-brained his scheme might have seemed, but it also presents him in an incidental heroic light as well. At a time when countries are doing their utmost to protect the lives of their citizens from terrorist attacks in the post-9/11 era, what he did has exposed potential gaps in the security system, ones that no doubt will be filled in the wake of this incident. Considering Abdulle’s background, he could easily have been radicalized and accessed the same plane for purposes other than that he did it for, and I believe that the authorities should, if quietly, find some way of engaging his help in showing how he accessed the plane, and then compensate him for his cooperation in doing so.
The second has to do with a more straightforward achievement, also from an American of African heritage. Recently, 17-year-old Ghanaian American Kwasi Enin achieved the rare feat of being accepted to all eight ivy league colleges in the US: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.

According to Time magazine’s article on his achievement: “Enin, a straight A student who scored a 2,250 on his SAT exam, applied to all of the nation’s Ivy League schools on a whim and beat the odds when all eight of the notoriously selective…sent him a letters of acceptance.”

For those of my readers who don’t quite know what an ivy league college is, in brief, it means that these institutions represent the height of excellence and academic elitism in American tertiary education, with seven out of the eight being founded since America was a colony of England.

In a country that remains burdened with serious racial issues, from the Trayvon Martin to Donald Sterling furores, even in the era of President Barack Obama, himself the child of an African immigrant and a graduate of the ivy league institution of Harvard, Enin’s achievement has special connotations for both minority Americans and immigrant Americans. Even as the American right wing, particularly the Tea Party, continues to rant about the stereotypical ‘laziness’ and ‘poor intelligence of immigrants, we have the child of arguably the most looked down upon of immigrants, those from the continent of Africa, not struggling to get into some mid-level university and scraping in by some affirmative action quota, but being accepted to every single top education institution.

I would like to bet that some young child of Guyanese parentage, who represent one of the relatively largest immigrant populations in the US, with an immigrant population rivaling the national population, can one day equal or better Enin’s achievement.
By Keith Burrowes