Beating The Odds With Education: Inspiring Tales Of Young People Highlighted At GESF2018

The sixth annual Global Education & Skills Forum (GESF) 2018 in Dubai heard three inspiring stories by young people, who have touched lives of many and inspires others to draw on the power of education to transform the world we live in.

Rodrigo Hübner Mendes, the Founder and CEO of the Rodrigo Mendes Institute, a non-profit organisation in Brazil, and consultant for UNESCO, shared his personal story of being paralysed after being shot at by two armed robbers.

Passionate about soccer and while preparing to enter medical school, his life then centred on physiotherapy and visits to rehab centres, where he came face-to-face with the “misery that a majority of people with disabilities go through”. Touched by the plight of a family that couldn’t afford to pay for the treatment of their son who was born with cerebral palsy, he founded the Rodrigo Mendes Institute with a “mission to guarantee that every child or teenager with disability can achieve his best as human beings through education”, which is now guiding his life.

“It is more important to talk about education inequality than income inequality,” he said, adding “we are not going to prosper as a society unless each person has access to school, knowledge labour market and dignity.” He also called for the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games to keep the same flame alive, as “the separation is incompatible to an inclusive society. What message are we sending to the world by segregating people based on disability?”

Named as one of New York’s 10 Under 20 Young Innovators to Watch, Emma Yuang, the teenaged founder of Timeless, a mobile app that helps Alzheimer’s patients remember and recognise family and friends, developed the app to assist her grandmother.

She was vocal in the need for kids to be participants in social change, stating, “they are in a special place to solving problems and are only bound by the limits of their imagination. I saw a problem that others didn’t, and I believe, we need to change the perception of being skeptical about kids.” Her advice to her peers is that “if you are driven by purpose, you can solve the problems you see around you and matter to you”.

Sungju Lee, the co-author of his memoir ‘Every Falling Star: The True Story of How I Survived and Escaped North Korea’, recalled the trauma he had to endure, when he found himself living on the streets at the age of 12. North Korea was reeling under a famine and his father had moved to South Korea. He was separated from his mother whom he hasn’t seen since then. To survive, Sungju created a gang, found himself in juvenile detention centre, and finally moved to South Korea to unite with his father. He said one of the happiest moments in his life was when he had the “freedom to choose a pen I like” while he was in South Korea. Today, he champions the unification of the two nations, in the fervent hope of meeting his friends.