TUSD refugee student wants to travel world as a surgeon

Constance Mwamba has long had a love for the languages of the world. So much so that by age 11, she could speak four different ones.

But of all the languages she acquired during her childhood in Africa, she was without words when her family immigrated to the U.S. six years ago.

Now a Pueblo Magnet High School senior, Mwamba speaks fluent English and has managed to pick up Spanish with the help of telenovelas. She has also devoted the last several months to learning Korean.

Mwamba, 18, aspires to become a surgeon. She wants to make use of her multilingual skills as she travels the world, helping people in need, much like the doctors at the refugee camp she and her family lived in for about a decade after fleeing the violence-plagued Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Armed with a handful of scholarship awards and having been accepted into the University of Arizona, Mwamba says she will not be deterred by the years of schooling required to go into medicine, given all that she has overcome thus far.

For many English-language learners, the road to graduation is difficult to navigate. U.S. Department of Education data show that Arizona’s 18 percent graduation rate of English-language learners was not only far lower than the 75 percent rate statewide, but the lowest in the country for the 2013-14 school year.

Upon arriving in Tucson in December 2009 as a sixth-grader, Mwamba did not speak English.

Her only friends, she said, were her teachers and her siblings. She credits her English-language development teacher and the PBS Kids television shows with helping her gain proficiency by the end of her seventh-grade year.

While having the ability to communicate was empowering, Mwamba found herself targeted by bullies for being different and having an accent.

By the end of her junior year of high school, Mwamba decided to remove herself from that environment, and transferred to Pueblo.

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“It’s the best decision I’ve made in my school career,” Mwamba said. “I’ve done so many things, and I feel proud of myself for once.”

She quickly made friends on campus and was encouraged to plan for the future.

“It’s a good community,” she said of the Tucson Unified School District campus. “I have people to help me, people to talk to. People encourage you to go to college and apply for scholarships, and I did that and I received some scholarships.

“I’m going to the U of A, and that’s a great accomplishment, really. I’m really proud of that.”

Also proud of Mwamba is Pueblo’s senior student counselor, Teresa Toro.

“In my 10 years as a high school counselor, Constance is one of the few students who has impressed me with her academic resiliency, tenacity and achievements,” said Toro, sharing that Mwamba enrolled in honors and dual-enrollment college Spanish as well as Advanced Placement statistics.

“Being recently immigrated to the United States has come with its challenges, but because of her personal assets and family support, (Constance) has risen above those challenges and is planning for a promising future.”

Mwamba encourages students like herself to strive to overcome challenges.

“It is not a good idea to give up, because you never know what you can accomplish once you break that barrier between you and what you see as impossible.”