Fritz Klug
Western Herald
For Tererai Trent, Saturday’s walk across the stage at Miller Auditorium was the end of a journey that lead her from a small, patriarchal Zimbabwe village to a world of education and enlightenment.
Trent recvieved a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Western Michigan University, Saturday, Dec. 19. Her story has inspired people across the world having been told in the book “Half the Sky” by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s and on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Sitting backstage in a dressing room at Miller, wearing full regalia and degree in hand, Trent reflected on the experiences that led her to this day.
Trent doesn’t know exactly how old she is, her mother did not keep a birth certificate, but says she is around 40 years old. As a child, she wanted to receive an education and her father allowed her to take a few semesters of classes before marrying her off at age 11. Her husband forbade her from any kind of education. If he caught her reading, he would beat her. Trent said she had no way of leaving the marriage and supporting her five children alone.
In the society she grew up in, boys provided a kind of social security for their parents, so they were educated to be decision makers, Trent said. Girls, on the other hand, were raised to be married.
“In my heart, it didn’t dwell well,” she said.
One day 18 years ago, Jo Luck, the president of Heifer International, came to Trent’s village and sat down with a group of women and began eating bombara nuts with them.
“That kind of surprised me,” Trent said, “to think that this white woman would come and sit on the dirt ground with us.”
Luck told the women that they could achieve whatever dreams they had; she had seen millions of other women come out of poverty through her work with Heifer. Luck asked Trent why she remained silent.
“I didn’t want to say anything,” Trent said, “but she just kept at it. I said ‘I’m not going to talk about the poverty in my family, I’m not going to talk about the abuse that I am going through, neither am I going to talk about the lack of food. I want to talk about my own education. I truly want to have an education which I had been denied by my father.’”
Trent told her that she wanted to earn a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a Ph.D. Luck told her that she had seen women become educated through Heifer and send their own children to school, and that if she really believed in her dreams, she should write them down in her heart.
And Trent did that.
Inspired by the meeting, she went to tell her mother about Luck and Heifer. Her mother urged her to write down those dreams on a piece of paper and bury it in the ground. Whenever she accomplished one, she would dig the list back up and mark it off. Trent chose an area where she used to herd cattle, a place near the rock where she would do her brother’s homework.
From then on Trent began taking classes. She excelled in school work and became a local community organizer for Heifer. In 1998, Trent was accepted to Oklahoma State University. Having saved money over the years, and with the help from her mother and other villagers, Trent was able to travel to America and attend college.
That was the first dream she had written on the buried list.
At Oklahoma State, Trent earned her B.A. and M.A. Two more dreams crossed off the list. All that was left now was to get a Ph.D.
Trent’s five children moved with her to the United States as she started looking at doctoral programs. Western Michigan University stood out to her, being one of the only two schools in the country with a doctoral program in interdisciplinary evaluation.
The program looks at evaluating everything from consumer products to national policy, Chris Coryn, Ph.D. said. “We look at problems from multiple lenses,” he added.
Coryn also chaired the committee for Trent’s thesis, which evaluated HIV/AIDS prevention programs for women and girls in sub-Saharan Africa. He was at Saturday’s ceremony to confer the degree to her. “It was a long, excruciating road, but she did exceptionally well,” he said.
Trent brought the list with her to Kalamazoo for the graduation ceremony and asked WMU President John Dunn, Ph.D., to sign it. Dunn said that he has signed many important documents in the past, and that Trent’s list ranks among his highest honors.
“Signing the document was a powerful and emotional moment,” Dunn wrote in an e-mail. “Dr. Trent is a remarkable woman whose life is an inspiration to all who dream of a better world. We are deeply honored that she chose to complete her list of dreams, written some 18 years earlier, at Western Michigan University.”
Dunn shared Trent’s story during his closing remarks during graduation, and led the audience in a round of applause and standing ovation for her.
“That’s a motto for all of us to follow,” Dunn said. “Make your marks.”
Trent’s degrees are symbolic of the larger change education has made in her life. “I didn’t have the confidence that I have now,” she said.
Education, Trent said, has given her the ability to make choices she was not able to make before. Trent said that before she was educated, she remained in an abusive relationship because she could not financially support herself. Now, with an education, she said that she knows she has the choice to leave an abusive spouse and the ability to provide for her family.
“Education is very important for everyone, for your own self-benefit, and for the nation, for the community,” Trent said. “We add value as we get educated. It’s not only for us, but also to enrich the wider community.”
The other critical role education plays is that it adds value to the things people are passionate about, Trent said. In her case, that means making sure international HIV/AIDS prevention programs have strategies for protecting and educating women in developing countries.
“My goal as a woman is also to make sure I add value to whatever is happening, to make sure that policies are being changed so that whenever we talk about foreign aid, whenever we talk about education, we have to first think about women, because most women are not educated,” Trent said.
“I had a lot of people who helped me on this journey,” Trent continued. “I had people who literally held my hand and said ‘Girl, you can do it, I’m going to be there for you.’ I think they gave me the greatest of gifts and now is my turn to hold other people’s hand.”
For the town where she did much of her doctoral work, Trent urged people in Kalamazoo to become involved with local programs that promote education, such as the Kalamazoo Promise and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. “I always say that you first need to think in your backyard before you start thinking outside,” she said.
It is important for Trent that people realize the power they have to make an influence on someone’s life. “The best thing is on the individual level to say ‘I can also reach out to others, I can give,’” she said. “If nobody reached out to me, I would still be swallowed in that small village of mine and probably be watching my girls go through the same thing. But someone reached out.”
“I was given that opportunity, what about if millions of women were given that opportunity?” Trent asked.
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