“The greatest thing any person could do is to help another person. So if you can aid the people around you – that’s enough; there is nothing greater than that.” Jacob lives by these values and they guide him in his academic pursuits. Aspirations to study pharmaceutical chemistry lie at the forefront of his mind. The reason for this specific area of interest is his ambition to later improve the public health system back home in South Sudan.

Jacob’s faith has prepared him and inspired his goodwill. His favorite book is the Bible and particularly important words for him come from Ecclesiastes 1: 9: “There is nothing under the sun that hasn’t been done so you should live your life to the fullest”. The book speaks to him about work and life in general. Living at RCN, Jacob‘s Christian values haven’t changed despite the secular environment. In his family back home he would attend church every Sunday and participate in other activities during the week as well. The church is a uniting factor in his community and when he reached a certain age, he himself became a Bible studies leader.

The academic drive that he possesses cannot however, be credited to anyone but Jacob himself. He was always eager to learn as a young child. Growing up with his grandmother, he didn’t attend school until he was seven. He would see his friends go to school and he wanted to take part as well. When his brother graduated and started working he put Jacob in school. There was never any need for external discipline due to Jacob’s self-sufficiency. Experiencing poverty in his early life made Jacob appreciate the privilege that education is and a wish to help others motivated him in his academics. Jakob has just returned to start the term in which he is going to graduate. He is aiming for further studies at University, most likely in the US, and later he wants to return home to apply the knowledge he has acquired.

Rose Esfandyari (RCN ’16 – ’18)

Where to start? The fjord. Fiskekake. The boathouse. The K building. World Today. Mariano. Kåre S. Pete. Daniel. MT. Winter. Tea. Being cold. The 3km trip to Flekke shop. The room temperature. The fifth umbrella of the year. A show. Lots of music and the love of my life. Ah, yes, and the IB.

RCN was a transformative experience changing every bit of whoever I was in 2007. An inexplicable place where possibility is infinite as is the bond that unites a community in the middle of nowhere. The explanation I give to people when trying to explain RCN and what it means to me, always falls short of an explanation of some sort of social experiment where we play to mirror what the world is or ought to be. I wish the world was a tiny bit of what RCN is.

The strong foundation of critical thinking and immense curiosity for understanding and celebrating diversity led me to pursue human rights as a passion. Building on Naren’s human rights class (and Matthew’s during my first year) I was fortunate that Mark and Nicky were an endless source of advice and encouraged me to attend Macalester. Pursuing perhaps a traditional UWC path, I studied Political Science and got to intern and work in various places that continued to feed into a set of intellectual and practical skills within human rights. However, as challenging and enriching Macalester was, I’m not so sure it compares with a Kantina conversation about the state of the world over tea. The certainty of really knowing how to fix the world is a feeling I only had in RCN and have every time I am lucky to return. It’s an incredible sensation of possibility, certainty and empowerment.

Decided to dig a bit further into the machinery of policy making I pursued a masters degree in human rights policy in the UK, Sweden and Norway. For two years I was lucky to devote time to the question of how to make and measure human right-led interventions. The time spent in Norway and Sweden was particularly enriching as I realized that some of my social policy biases are indeed, very Nordic. Fortunate to arrive in the London in a pre-Brexit world, I started working with Amnesty International, trying to materialize my Kantina-like feelings. Currently, I work in the Office of the Secretary General giving technical support to Amnesty’s offices around the world. As frustrating and challenging working in human rights might be, I am encouraged by knowing that there will come a time when my dear RCN and UWC friends around the world will start calling the shots, making sure those countless nights of debate, tea and overpriced First Price cookies were well spent.

And, at time of writing this, there is an urgency for UWC to do its part in putting a sustainable future before ambition, and before bigotry. Knowing that we belong to a principled way of thinking about service and peace, I am confident that even in a Trumplandia world, we can be part of a path showing respect, curiosity in the other and love for what makes us different, unique. I have an unshakeable trust in the people of RCN to lead the way.