Education is a gift: Kenyan native misses two grades, catches up to graduate on time

Beritu Kedir is different from her fellow 2020 graduates in a few ways.

For starters, she lived the first 10 years of her life in Kenya.

Secondly, and Kedir herself put it best when she said, “A girl who immigrated and didn’t get the chance to learn for two years can still graduate.”

She moved to the United States in 2012, living in New Jersey for two years before arriving in South Dakota as an eighth-grader. 

But in Kenya, there’s no such thing as free education. Her parents had enough money to get by, but they didn’t always have enough for Kedir to attend school. So she missed both the third and fourth grades in Kenya. 

Luckily, the principal of her Kenyan school liked her a lot, so she received bits of education here and there in exchange for partial tuition payments. 

“I was so thankful … I still appreciated that little gift that she gave me to be able to learn without having to pay the full amount all the time,” Kedir said. 

When her family moved to the States, her new school placed her with her age group.

“They were like, ‘Just go ahead and learn from there, so I had to adjust to everything in fifth grade,” she said. “It was hard. I knew English, but it wasn’t a perfect English. I had people who helped me, but there were also people who were really judgmental, who took advantage of me not knowing English.”

Schoolkids can sometimes be cruel, too.

“They would tell me things that weren’t right, but I would believe them because I didn’t know the norms of America,” she said. 

In Kenya, she explains, it’s more acceptable to use physicality to solve problems, which Kedir had to learn the hard way. When a boy was bothering her, for instance, her first instinct was to hit him. That didn’t go over well in her seventh-grade New Jersey classroom. 

“I learned pretty quickly to adjust and slowly pay attention to everything people do, what they say, how they say things,” she said. 

Kedir’s family moved to the U.S. because Kenya was no longer a safe environment for her and her three siblings.

“Where we lived, we were constantly in danger, looking over our shoulders,” she said. “There were multiple times I was almost kidnapped. It was just too dangerous to live there anymore.”

She’s thankful for her years at Brandon Valley. Homecoming Week of her senior year is one of her favorite memories, and she adored her history and Street Law classes.

“I think that I was able to get everything I needed to learn,” she said. “I just love listening to old stuff that America went through – everyone went through, in general.”

Kedir plans to join the U.S. Marines and wants to become a lawyer eventually. 

“There were a lot of challenges,” she admitted, looking back. “But thinking about it and crying about it was never going to do any good. It’s pushing yourself to do better, always working hard, thinking about what you want to do – not just thinking about it, too, but doing it.”