Girl Genius, University Student at 15!
She was sitting up at four months, making pyramid designs with blocks at seven months, walking at eight months and completing 100-piece jigsaw puzzles at 15 months. So it is no surprise that Abigail Wilson, 15, from Connecticut, USA, recently made history when she became the youngest black female ever accepted into an American university! ‘I'm proud of myself for getting in, but I usually find it hard to get excited. It is pretty cool, I guess,’ said Abigail.
Her mother, Nancy, said that Abigail was a quiet baby, born two weeks late on Christmas Day. She didn't speak her first words until she was 22 months! Nancy and her husband thought something must be wrong, but when she started to talk, it was perfect speech. She already knew her colours, letters and was able to read. Her parents read her normal bedtime stories and they didn't know she was learning all of it.
Abigail has always been the youngest person in her class. At six she was in the fourth grade, at eight she started an International Baccalaureate programme and at ten she took her first high school class in maths. She has studied several languages, including Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian, Arabic and German.
Abigail says that she doesn't usually plan when she studies, she calls herself scatterbrained and she always delays things up to the last minute. This gives her the motivation to really do something.
In her free time, Abigail plays hockey and basketball, browses the Internet, reads, cooks and hangs out with her friends: they are all 17 and 18. She has also studied music. Her mother says that Abigail's music lessons helped her to be a normal teen. She believes that Abigail needed to be in a situation where she had to fail in order to learn. ‘She found playing the piano very difficult, but it made her learn better,’ said Nancy. ‘She can't always be successful, she won't learn anything! People always learn more from their failures than from their successes.’
Médecins Sans Frontières: Doctors without Borders
In 1971 there was a war in a part of Nigeria called Biafra, in western Africa. People were dying, children were hungry and there was a lot of disease. There were thousands of people who needed medical help—but there were no doctors or nurses to help them. Some doctors from France went to work there as volunteers, and some of them decided to start an organisation to help disaster victims all over the world. That was when Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was born.
Since it started, Médecins Sans Frontières has helped people all over the world. The disaster might be war or an earthquake or a tsunami or a famine—anything that means people need medical help.
The organisation's headquarters are in Geneva, Switzerland. It is non-political—which means that non-government controls it. About 90% of the money that MSF needs comes from individual donations; the rest comes from governments and businesses. MSF helps everyone, it doesn't matter what their race, religion or politics are.
MSF volunteers do many different things: some, of course, care for people who are sick or injured, and others train local doctors and nurses in their own countries. MSF also sends engineers to poor countries to help people to do things like making wells, so they can have clean water.
It is often dangerous work for the volunteers. They are sometimes attacked, or kidnapped, or killed. For example, five MSF volunteers were killed in Afghanistan in 2004.
In 1999, Médecins Sans Frontiètes won the Nobel Peace Prize. This was in recognition of the work that MSF has done, and of the courage of the men and women who work for the organisation.