Mario Konyen Joseph
Mario Konyen Joseph is using his UWC education as a springboard to help other African refugees. Transcript of the video.
My name is Mario Konyen Joseph. I’m from southern Sudan in Sudan and I went to Mahindra United World College in India from 1998 to 2000.
I enjoyed my time in UWC at Mahindra very much. There were tough times there but I think that relatively and generally speaking I had a good time, enjoying the activities, meeting people, excited people, people who you find that they actually have a common belief or a common interest in something. And that was my best time actually, meeting people, living with them, going to classes, doing activities, playing sports, and travelling the sub-continent of India which was just amazing. Those will always be my best memories.
I work for Windle Trust International in Oxford. I manage one of the sponsorship programmes, I am the programme officer for that particular programme. Windle Trust International as a whole is the reason why I am here to start with. It has a very long connection to me, dating back probably to 1997 or 1998 and I have always kept in touch with them and so when they offered me the opportunity to come and work for them it was something that I couldn’t even think twice about. They do very special, but in a minor, small scale way, work with refugees and give them the opportunity to be able to get knowledge and skills or just to recognise them as people who can do something in the future, should their countries become peaceful. That to me is more than just working or more than having a job and so it was an opportunity that I could not turn down.
To me, I have always wondered how I can apply the UWC education in a more general context because, yes, I was there, I was one of the 200 students who were lucky to be at Mahindra but, really, I think that the world needs much more than 200. Obviously there are not just only 200 of them, there are other colleges but I have always wondered, “how can I put my UWC education into practice, how can somebody else who did not have the chance to go to a UWC or who will probably not have a chance to go to a UWC get something similar to what I got?”
And so one of my plans in the long term, if everything goes well, would be to return to my country, if it ever becomes peaceful, to my community, and try to do something. It is a community which has been devastated by war over the past twenty something years. I would like to set up a foundation that would focus on leadership because one of the things that fails most African countries is a lack of leadership. If you can actually do something from a grassroots level, to bring some of these values, because what UWC teaches you about people is that humans are humans. We can co-exist, we can peacefully live together, we can understand each other, we can accept, we can tolerate each other. And so those are the kinds of values I would like to bring to this particular foundation. It would start up and maybe from that community level move outward, to state level and then later on to the national level.
Having been to a UWC itself and spent two years there, learning, living with 200 students from 80 countries or 83 countries, it’s so special that’s it’s something that you have got to cherish. Whether or not you like it, it’s a very unique experience. That has changed me as a person but also obviously the education of UWC that I received, the whole belief that we can bring different races, people of different races, different religious backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds together and actually live and study happily together is just so unique and is the type of thing that I have always tried to live my life by.
The experience of being there for two years and doing all the kinds of things that everybody is expected to do at a UWC college was just fantastic.
Read the graduate profile for Mario Konyen Joseph.