Hope and Inspiration for the Underprivileged Student

Beltus Nkwawir
3 min readOct 11, 2022

It always seems impossible until it is done

Exactly four years ago, on October 02, 2018, this village boy boarded a plane for the first time in his life from his home country Cameroon and alighted at the Istanbul Atatürk international airport.

He was welcomed by the Turkish government scholarship team who drove him to his new dormitory apartment, where a new phase of his life was about to start.

Before then, the closest he’s ever been to a plane was watching it on television.

As a kid, he used to watch planes fly thousands of miles above his head and wondered how big they were up close.

In the sky, they looked like giant metal insects buzzing around and about.

He and his friends, would pluck mango leaves, cut the sides, stick a broomstick through its center, and run around, letting the wind rotate it like a plane’s fan.

He had no one to invite him to an airport just to see planes and wave goodbye.

He couldn’t afford to study abroad at a prestigious university.

All he had was his brain, imagination, good friends, supportive family, and his God.

Today, that same village boy has an MSc in Computer Science from one of the best…

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Beltus Nkwawir
Beltus Nkwawir

Written by Beltus Nkwawir

Data Scientist at Robert Koch Institute/WHO Hub | PhD Student Istanbul Technical University | MSc Computer Science | https://www.linkedin.com/in/beltus/

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