How Samasource Could Empower Paul Parach

Meet Paul Parach. He's 24, and currently in his second year of high school, thanks to CARE International's operations in Dadaab. His story will make you stop whatever you're doing and think about the latent talent of people in refugee camps.

Paul left his small village in South Sudan at the age of 9, chased out by militia groups. He was forced to leave his mother and four sisters back home. After several weeks of walking across the country with a group of other young boys, he arrived at the Kenyan border and then at Kakuma refugee camp.

 There, he was shot in the leg by a man from a rival tribe, and moved to the ICU in Nairobi. His leg was paralyzed.

But Paul kept going. The UNHCR transfered him to Dadaab's Ifo camp in 1994. Since then, he has lived there on his own, learned English, and made his way through school. He's among only a handful of Dinka (people from South Sudan) in Dadaab -- almost all of the 280,000 people there are Somali.

Paul came to our training last week, even though he only first touched a computer a month ago. Within a few minutes, he had learned how to use email and Google. By the next day, he was teaching his classmates how to complete the work we found them.

One of the assignments was to find the e-mail addresses of financial aid websites for US colleges. In completing the work, Paul stumbled across a picture of a young man from Sudan who he knew from Kakuma -- the man had received a scholarship to a university in Maine and was profiled on their website. When Paul described this to me, his eyes grew big and he had the same look in his eyes that mine have when I get really, really hungry.

Paul is going to be in our first class of refugee remote workers in Dadaab. If he does well, he can earn an income to support himself while he's in high school. We are trying to find ways to connect him to scholarships he may be eligible for in the US.

If you have ideas about ways to help Paul, or if you want to donate to support his training or studies in Dadaab, please comment. He now has an @samasource.org email address so you can reach him directly!