Student from East Timor
Some little girls pretend they are princesses, ballerinas or nurses. As a young girl, Gabriela Leite Soares pretended she could speak English.
Gabby, as she’s called, drew pictures of the Statue of Liberty and dreamed of coming to the United States. Now, with the help of the Gonzaga Prep community, this 20-year-old from East Timor has traveled 9,000 miles and realized her dream.
East Timor, one of the newest countries in the world, is located on the eastern half of an island in the Timor Sea between Indonesia and Australia. Paul Grubb, S.J, arrived there in June 2002, one month after the country became independent from Indonesia after 450 years of continuous foreign occupation. Grubb, a Jesuit scholastic, spent that summer teaching English at St. Joseph’s High School in Dili, the country’s capital. “Everybody there was so happy, so hopeful,” said Grubb, a 32-year-old theology teacher and campus minister at G-Prep.
Hope is what the country needs. East Timor is the poorest country in Asia and has a population of about one million. It is still recovering from a wave of violence in September 1999 when pro-Jakarta militias and their sponsors in the Indonesian army went on a rampage, killing an estimated 250,000 East Timorese. This followed East Timor’s vote for independence in a United Nations-sponsored referendum.
Even as children, the East Timorese know that learning English can be a way out of poverty, the gateway to freedom.
“I’ve never seen students study so hard. Some tried to memorize the English dictionary, not knowing what they were reading. From the first day, one student stood out. Soares was a bright light. Her English was much better than anyone else’s. She always wanted to speak English,” said Grubb.
Soares also speaks Indonesian, Portuguese and Tetum, and when she was 15, she worked as an interpreter for the Australian and Kenya soldiers in INTERFET, an international peace-keeping force in East Timor. She graduated from St. Joseph’s in 2003, and worked for the U.N. Development Program as a secretary. She also volunteered to teach English to kids in the bush.
All the students in Grubb’s class were refugees at one time or another. Students would point out the bullet holes in the classroom walls, and show him where their family members were killed.
When it was time for Grubb to return to the United States, Soares asked him to keep her in mind if he found any scholarships or programs that might help get her to the United States to continue her education.
Grubb returned to Portland, his hometown. When he told a friend how much he’d like to help Soares, his friend got out her checkbook and wrote a check for $50. Grubb thought it was a long shot, but perhaps there would be a way to help Soares.
When Grubb began teaching at Gonzaga Prep last year, he talked to his students about the problems in East Timor and about a girl named Gabby who wanted to come to the United States to study so that she could help her people. The students decided to raise money to bring Soares to Spokane. The Gonzaga Peace and Justice Club helped organize the project. The entire student body helped. They held a garage sale and raised money from bake sales, lemonade sales, collection of spare change and donations.
“Surprises came out of nowhere. It was like a miracle,” said Grubb. Gonzaga Prep’s board of directors approved a full-tuition scholarship for Soares. The Jesuit community bought her books and pays for her insurance. Soares arrived in Spokane in July and lives with her host parents, Michael and Theresa Berry, and their daughter Hanna, a sophomore at G-Prep.
“The fact that I’m here in the U.S. is truly a miracle from God. I love G-Prep. They’ve made me feel very welcome. I have good classmates and an understanding faculty. I hope that I’m good enough. They worked so hard to get me here, I don’t want to disappoint them,” said Soares.
Soares said that her mom, a teacher, and her dad, a government worker, tried to send her to the best schools possible, but they couldn’t afford to send her to study abroad. Average wages in East Timor are less than $2 a day.
Soares is older than her senior classmates, but she believes that studying here will give her the ability to continue her education. “Attending one more year of high school will be good for me. It gives me a chance to improve my English and because schools here are more difficult and more pressure, I will become more prepared for college,” said Soares.
She has applied to Smith College, Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, Loyola, Gonzaga University and Seattle University. Soares would like to become a U.S. citizen and said that if she becomes a wealthy woman she would like to send her children to Gonzaga Prep some day.
Grubb thinks she’ll be East Timor’s first female president. Soares laughs, but she wouldn’t mind working for the United Nations or becoming a member of the East Timor Parliament.
As her mom once told her, “always go forward, never go backward.”