When Ruddy Sirri-Akonwi Abam addresses her fellow graduates at the University of Alaska Anchorage Sunday, she wants to remind them just how resilient they are.
She has watched single parents bring their children to classes. She has known students who don't have a home. She has comforted others who struggled to stay motivated after their family members got sick or people close to them died.
Those students who have overcome struggles are the ones who inspire Abam the most. But Abam, the 22-year-old student speaker at Sunday's commencement ceremony, has her own story fraught with challenges -- from paying her tuition to leaving her hometown in West Africa.
"I don't come from a lot," she said, sitting in UAA's Student Union Friday afternoon as she recounted her past. "I really don't come from anything."
But her personal history tells another story. Abam grew up in Cameroon and had a strict curfew because the streets were unsafe at night. Her mother worked as a teacher and her father as a pharmacist. Abam remembers the endless dust, playing outside and procrastinating when she had to scrub the tile floors in her home.
She also remembers boarding school, where she spent nine months of each year. Everyone wore blue uniforms with white socks and brown sandals. They had no clean water. She remembers walking down steep hills with other children to collect water from streams.
"I have a bald spot in the middle of my head that's never going to go away just because I used to carry really huge buckets of water on my head. And then you have to balance that and carry, like, two other buckets," Abam said. "You have to do this every single day."
Things weren't much easier at home. Abam's father sought political asylum in the United States, Abam said. She never completely understood why and he doesn't talk about it much. He's laid back and quiet.
The family thought that without him in Cameroon they would be safe. But still, people came to their home. They would break in. Sometimes they had guns. Sometimes Abam, her mother and sister would wait until nightfall to walk or take a taxi or motorcycle to a house across town so they could sleep for a few hours, she remembers.
"As a kid it's like, What the heck is going on? Why are we doing all this stuff?" Abam said.
One night, they left for Alaska to rejoin her father. She wanted to tell her friends but she couldn't. Without phones or social media sites, she said, it felt like they just disappeared.
She was about 14 and remembers feeling excited about the United States, its skyscrapers and its technology. She remembers using a toilet that flushed automatically in an airport bathroom and crying because she didn't know what had happened. She remembers the snow and the cold when she landed in Anchorage.
Abam and her sister had seen snow in Cameroon when they watched "Barney & Friends." But from what Abam remembers, the kid-show snow never accumulated. It just fell from the sky and vanished.
"And then we get here and it's sticking and it's really cold and you're falling everywhere and you have to shovel and we hated it after one week," she said. "Alaska wasn't the America we sort of envisioned." In Cameroon, she had seen photographs of a bustling New York City. In Anchorage, she moved into a tiny apartment and saw smaller buildings that reminded her of home.
Abam graduated from West Anchorage High School in 2011 and left for college in Louisiana that summer. By August she had returned to Alaska and enrolled at UAA.
"UAA was really great for me," she said. Her family was close by and the school was just small enough that she could get to know her professors. She also appreciated the university's diverse student body.
Abam said she worked hard at school. Her mother always pushed her. If she had ranked as the fourth-best student in elementary school, her mother would have asked her why she wasn't No. 1.
While a student at UAA, Abam often worked multiple jobs to pay her tuition. When she would apply for classes and get an email with that semester's costs, she said, "I would just sit there and stare at the computer for half an hour." She would ask herself: "So how are you going to pay for this semester? What's going to happen?"
She spent time working at a clothing store, a bakery and a construction company. She always had a job on campus too, and worked for lawmakers and lawyers while holding leadership positions on boards and panels at school.
Abam will graduate Sunday afternoon from UAA's University Honors College with a degree in justice and minors in political science and psychology. That night, she will leave on a flight to Cameroon, where she will visit for nearly two months. She hasn't been back since her family left in the middle of the night years ago.
When she returns to Anchorage, Abam plans to take the law school admission test and hopes to go to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. That's her plan A. Most people would have a plan B, she said. But she really wants Georgetown.
But before any of that, she must give her commencement speech. Her parents will be at the Alaska Airlines Center to listen. Neither of them went to college and Abam isn't sure that they fully understand the honor she received when she was chosen to be the student speaker.
Abam said her father had somehow gotten a copy of The Northern Light, UAA's student newspaper. He read an article with the headline "Commencement speaker Ruddy Abam inspires Class of 2015." He brought it home and called for her mother.
He told her, "Listen, it is a big deal, look at this!" Abam remembered. "And he's just taking it everywhere. And he's like, 'Listen, we don't understand, but it's got to be a big deal, she's in the paper!' It was so great."
Abam said she's proud to speak on behalf of the 1,200 graduates. As she wrote in a copy of her graduation speech, she has overcome the late nights, several jobs and lack of money during her time at UAA "to achieve the American dream."