By Wendy Carlson

It didn’t take long for Abraham Keita '20 to discover his favorite place on campus. It wasn’t the snack bar or the lounge; it was the quiet spaces of the library. Growing up in Liberia where public libraries were non-existent, he was astounded by the sheer number of volumes in the Edsel Ford Memorial Library.

Keita arrived at Hotchkiss as a postgraduate student last fall as part of a scholarship program sponsored by Leighton Longhi ’63, which provides an additional year of academic preparation for exceptional high school students accepted at Yale. With his wide smile and humble demeanor, Keita fit in easily at Hotchkiss, even though the campus’s undulating green landscape and Georgian buildings stood in sharp contrast to the place where he grew up.

Abraham, who goes by his last name, Keita, was born in a slum neighborhood of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, during the country’s second civil war. When he was five years old, his father — who was a driver for a humanitarian relief organization for refugees — was killed during an ambush. Since he stayed home to help his mother support the family, Keita didn’t start school until he was nine years old.

By then, he had already become an advocate for children’s rights. Outraged by the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl in his community, he took part in a peaceful protest, demanding that the perpetrators — her foster parents — be brought to trial. Soon after, he was invited to join the Liberian Children’s Parliament, which inspired in him a passion for advocacy.

When a boy in his neighborhood was killed by armed forces while protesting against the blockades set up to contain the Ebola virus, Keita, then 14, organized a march to compel the Liberian government to take responsibility for the boy’s death.

The march sparked a national debate and eventually forced the government to acknowledge its culpability. For his work to end violence and injustice against children, Keita received the International Children’s Peace Prize in 2015, joining the ranks of youth activists Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg.

He became a member of The KidsRights Youngsters, a youth-led advocacy and awareness coalition composed of recipients of the International Children’s Peace Prize, and went on to address the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates on the refugee crisis and the importance of justice and safety for children. In 2016, he spoke to the UN Human Rights Council about child protection. Then, in 2017, while leading a march to protest the assault of a 13-year-old girl by a Liberian government official, Keita was arrested for criminal coercion and slander in Liberia.

“When I was taken to prison, I remember my mother coming to visit in tears and admonishing me. I told her the world cannot change if you’re too afraid to act,” Keita recalls.

But he came to realize that a willingness to act would not be enough to bring about change; education was a crucial part of societal transformation.

The impact of the civil war, compounded by the 2015 Ebola outbreak, which closed schools across Liberia, took a toll on the country’s fragile education system.

“In Liberia,” Keita says, “there are around 500,000 children who have never sat in a classroom, and 1.1 million who will not graduate. Even those who do are, at times, still illiterate due to inadequate schools. When I was growing up, we never had any public libraries in Liberia. And I doubt there are any now. But I always read and was fascinated by books; whether it was an outdated physics book lying along the street or a damaged math book in the hand of a student, I saw books as the way and the light. There was this one bookshop in Monrovia where I would go, to just glance at books. It was a source of joy.”

He graduated from high school in Liberia in 2016, was invited to the U.S. to speak at an event on violence against children during the UN General Assembly that year. He returned twice, in 2017 and 2018, and applied to colleges. But it wasn’t until Yale offered him a full scholarship on the condition that he complete a year at Hotchkiss that he knew he would attend college in the United States. After clearing some immigration hurdles that delayed his arrival, he moved to the United States, where he continued his advocacy. Shortly after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, he joined the March for Our Lives demonstration for tighter gun control in Washington, D.C. When he arrived at Hotchkiss in the fall of 2019, he chose a co-curricular service project that included working with intellectually disabled students at a Hudson Valley farm.

Although his time in Lakeville was cut short when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the campus to close, Keita gained much from his Hotchkiss experience. Not surprisingly, when he could find some free time, he settled into his usual chair in the library, where he would lose himself for hours in literature, philosophy, poetry, or U.S. history.

 “I learned that time is of the essence,” reflects Keita. “Everything I did was timed — waking up in the morning, going for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, homework, co-curriculars — each activity needs to be done within a specified time. Every night, I would sit in my dorm room and reflect on all the things I had done during the day, and the feeling that I had accomplished it all was exciting.”

Hotchkiss also gave him the opportunity to live in a diverse and interdependent community, with people from different cultures, backgrounds, and identities from all around the world. “This experience further cemented my perspective on tolerance of different people and issues. It taught me the essence of intercultural communication,” he says.

The biggest challenge for Keita was learning to navigate the classroom and course system at Hotchkiss, which was completely different from his high school in Liberia.

“In my country, including the high school I attended, I didn’t get to switch from one classroom to the other. No matter how many subjects (courses) I was taking, they all occurred in just one room, often in a single sitting except the 45-minute break period (recess) for lunch. After lunch, students return to their respective classrooms for the second half of the school day, which for most day schools is 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. But for my school, we weren’t out until 4 p.m. Unlike Hotchkiss, my school didn’t have a course catalog that students had to select courses from, and the fewest number of students in a class was 45,” he says.

Even though he had so much to offer the Hotchkiss community from his own life experience, Keita was known for his humility, according to his advisor, David Thompson, director of international programs.

“Since he arrived, he has said that this year is an opportunity to learn from others, to hear their stories, and to witness them applying their skills and pursuing their passions,” Thompson says.

With his family thousands of miles away in Liberia, Keita’s instructors became more than teachers; they became his mentors, shaping both his academic and personal life. “They taught me to analyze and critique books: a lesson that I shouldn’t always accept ‘what is,’ but seek ‘what can be’ or ‘what ought to be.’ They inspired and helped me look for answers even when there seem to be none,” he said.

After he graduates from Yale, Keita plans to return to Liberia, braced with a renewed passion to make his country a better place than when he left it.

“I believe issues of human rights are not bounded by geography; they penetrate every border and every wall,” he said.

“Whether I am home or abroad, for me, standing up and speaking for human rights is a moral imperative, and I will continue to do so, even here in the United States. Activism has no nationality. And as a global citizen, a citizen of the world, what affects my country, Liberia, indirectly affects the United States, and vice versa. This is what keeps my passion alive, the belief that we are one human family, not defined and restricted by borders.”