I have found few people to be more inspiring than Benite Luhando, a senior at Sahuaro who has more perseverance in one day than most people have in their whole lives combined. Benite was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa but fled to a refugee camp called Nakivale in Uganda because of war when she was only one year old. At the age of four, another disaster struck that caused their family to have to go to another refugee camp. She was sixteen and a week away from graduation when she moved to America.
“And sometimes, you just have to go to school like that and spend the whole day without food,” Benite shared. Benite’s school itself would be hard for anyone to complete – taking 11 classes a semester and waking up at 5:30 in the morning to get to school – but on an empty stomach seems nearly impossible. When Benite was promoted to high school, her persistence only got stronger, because now she had to leave for school at 5:30 instead of waking up at that time due to a further morning walk and extra classes in the morning.
Benite’s story of courage from before she came to America is unlike any I’ve ever known before, but what I have come to find even more incredible is her tenacity when she moved here. For one, her first language is Swahili, not English. She has known English for a long time now, because, “I lived in a community where if I don’t know English, I won’t be able to speak with anybody simply because all the other kids had other first languages that I didn’t know.” Despite this, Benite has pushed herself above and beyond what many students are doing in American schools. Benite is the president of Sahuaro’s Unified in Color Club, the Treasurer of the National Honor Society, the Vice President of Health Occupations Students of America at JTED, where she is in the Physical Therapy Technician program. She also participates in Robotics, is the track and field manager, and she is working on a science research paper in the U of A’s STAR Lab program. Oh, and she does this all with no coffee…
While her involvement in the Sahuaro community and in other various programs is amazing, there’s still so much more to a day in Benite’s life that is insane to me. She starts her day at 5:30 am to catch the 6:30 bus from Tucson High to be at Sahuaro around 7. Her school day then ENDS around 7:15 (that’s a twelve-hour school day if you can’t do the math) on JTED days – Monday, Wednesday, and Friday – and then gets home around 9 pm. On the days she doesn’t have JTED, she would go to robotics, finish at around 4:30, and then go the the U of A for her STAR Lab research. During robotics season, she would often stay up until 1 am if a robot needed to be fixed – when everything is right in the world of robots, then she has other homework for her AP classes.
Yeah, that’s the other thing, Benite does tons of AP classes. “I have AP Chemistry, AP Statistics, Engineering, AP computer science…I always forget my classes a lot,” Benite explained. She did leave out AP Literature, which piggybacking off of how English isn’t her first language, is pretty cool.
Right before Benite left the refugee camp, she was about to graduate high school, but when she moved here, her transcript listed many of her classes with Fs, Ds, Cs, and Bs – none of which were up to Benite’s standards. She spent much of her junior year catching up on classes and improving her grades where she felt she needed to. Benite’s GPA was 2.7 when she moved here, and she really wanted to be at the top of her class. In just one year, she completed 19 courses in credit recovery and bumped her GPA up to 4.02.
Benite competed her science fair project “Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Algorithms for Gene Expression Level” at the SARSEF (Southern Arizona Research, Science, and Engineering Foundation) science fair, winning the Scientific Resilience Award. From there, she moved on to the Arizona Science Fair, with the hopes of moving to ISEF, the international science fair.
Although Benite fell short of ISEF, she still has some exciting things coming for her last summer before college. She is currently debating which of the camps she wants to go to: Med-Start or Keys. Both are prestigious camps at the U of A which Benite has been accepted to. KEYS is a research program that brings students to the U of A to work alongside top faculty members to complete a project that will contribute to society. Med-Start helps students get ahead on courses they will be taking when they go to college.
Benite found her passion for science – specifically medicine – and will be using it to study neuroscience. She will do her undergraduate studies at the U of A, staying close to home, but she dreams of going to Harvard one day, and I fully believe with her perseverance and dedication, she will. Benite says, “I feel like if anyone wants to do something, they should really do it…You can do anything you want to.”
Benite’s story is one of the limits of human tenacity. Her story is one that I find great inspiration in. Benite – I believe you can do anything you want in life, you have already accomplished so much.
