Each year, the Center for Public Service and Community Research at the College of Public Service (CPS) uses grant monies to award a scholarship to students who submit essays that display a clear vision for the role of a citizen, as well as a personal understanding of citizenship earned through experience. This year, two scholarships were awarded to Filmon Teweldebrhan, Computer Science, and Anaisa Paez Escobar, Accounting. Their essays both touch on what citizenship means to them, addressing belonging as well as struggles faced like refugee camps, dangerous border crossings, and flight from countries ruled by dictators, whose goal is to hoard opportunity and prosperity for themselves and a select few.
“Being a U.S. citizen means much more to me than obtaining a legal document,” said Escobar. “Arriving in the United States felt like breathing freedom for the first time.” A committed volunteer at Katy School District, Escobar came to Houston from Cuba and had to balance her studies and motherhood, all while learning English.
For his part, Teweldebrhan hails from Eritrea, arriving via Ethiopia with family and friends, following his father after the elder had already come to the US once he won a citizenship lottery at a US embassy. “We set out across the Mereb River under cover of night, surrounded by danger,” he wrote in his winning essay. He described the journey’s “eerie howls of hyenas, the rush of the river’s current, the constant fear of being spotted by soldiers whose job was to stop people from leaving,” before going on to write that the journey of citizenship is one of “growth, responsibility, and hope.”
The question of what something like citizenship means is, like most questions worth asking, difficult to answer, insofar as the response almost certainly varies from person to person. For both of these Gators, however, there are commonalities: citizenship is a daily practice one must engage in every day. Aside from that, both agree that duty, empathy, and belonging are important, as is allowing the feeling of being a citizen to fill you with hope.
One also hears echoes of Kennedy in their essays, as they emphasize that citizenship is about how you can help those around you, much more so than what you can glean from the country you claim. Join us in congratulating the success and Gator grit of these outstanding students.