Brenau University has plans to offer two full scholarships each year to “deserving students from Zimbabwe” in a stepped-up program to expand the international scope of the Brenau campus and, in turn, hopefully make life better in that destitute African country.

The catalyst for all this is Anne Nixon, a Gainesville woman whose family adopted, “in all but the legal sense,” a student from Zimbabwe who came to Brenau almost four years ago as a member of the tennis team, who now attends Troy State University in Alabama.

Last year the Nixons visited Zimbabwe and experienced how people live in a country in which the economy, as Ms. Nixon puts it, “collapsing like a house of cards.”

This year Ms. Nixon is serving as Chair of the Brenau University Advisory Board. She is spearheading a campaign to raise $15,000 this year to help fund the scholarships. “Each year, we will have to increase our objective by another $15,0000 until we are to the $60,000 level,” she added.

Brenau President Dr. Ed Schrader says in return for accepting a scholarship, a student from Zimbabwe will be asked to do only one thing: return to their native land when they have completed their education and put what they learned while in the U.S. to work helping better life for people in Zimbabwe.

Dr. Schrader says in addition to Zimbabwe, Brenau is already home to students from a number of other African counties as well as other countries around the world.

The inspration for the program is Tsitsi, who was introduced to the Nixons through Brenau’s international host programm and still lives with the Nixons when she is not in school at Troy State.

Tsitsi, Nixon says, is the “number one” player on the Troy State tennis team and a 2006 “conference all-star.”

Tsitsi says while her first career goal was to become a professional tennis player, “another Venus Williams,” she now realizes that dream is a long shot and that medicine is now her “passion.” To that end, she says she wants to complete her studies in the U.S. and return to Zimbabwe and put her medical education to work there. Tsitsi says she’s especially interested in working with HIV/AIDS patients. “In Zimbabwe,” she said, “one in every four people is infected.”

This entry was posted by Taman Siswa on Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Scholarship, Study Abroad. Tags: Education News, Scholarship, Student, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.