Along Right Pathways

As a child, Janine Padmore Stegall '83 arrived at Brooks after narrowly escaping the violence of a coup d'etat in her native Liberia. After battling displacement, family tragedy and some sharp twists and turns in life, she's laid the groundwork to return home. Her goal: to help repair Liberia's faltering education system, which she believes is critical to the success of Liberia's youngest generation and the war-torn nation's future development.

The 1983 Brooks yearbook tells the story of a school, of an academic year and of a chorus of wins, losses, performances and relationships. It also tells the story of many of that year's sixth-formers, who contributed personalized pages of photos, quotes, memories, and hopes and dreams for the future. The page Janine Stegall '83 put together to mark her time at Brooks doesn't look all that remarkable at first glance. There's a portrait of Stegall, who sits smiling, with her back resting against a tree and her legs folded beneath her. Phrases of text dot the page: a callout to a best friend, to softball teammates, a translation of "Victuri Te Salutamus," the Latin phrase that traditionally rests under the Brooks shield ("We greet thee, we, about to live," Stegall proclaims).

One phrase on the page, though, might stand out: "He revives my soul and guides me along right pathways, for his Name's sake." Stegall is quoting the Christian Psalm 23, which praises God as a protector and provider, the shepherd of a flock.

"I think maybe the sense of healing, the sense of renewed hope," Stegall muses more than 30 years later, when asked why she included those lines from Psalm 23 on her yearbook page. "There had been a lot of loss, you know? My grandparents had done a lot to get me to that point. So maybe it was just me knowing that whatever the future held, I would be okay. When I left Brooks, I felt very empowered, and I felt strong enough to be able to do whatever was necessary to move on."

Getting through Brooks was a major accomplishment. But, there's much more to Stegall's story than what's on the surface of that yearbook page. The story of how Stegall got through Brooks pales in comparison to the story of how Stegall got to Brooks in the first place.

A Dangerous Escape

Stegall grew up in a well-to-do family in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. She is a descendant of freed American slaves who colonized Liberia, and she speaks proudly of her ancestors, some of whom, she says, helped found and establish the country. She attended an international school alongside the children of diplomats and other wealthy Liberians, and lived a privileged, unworried life. Suddenly, though, in 1980, when Stegall was 16 years old, a government plan to increase the price of rice led to protests, police firing into a crowd, riots and, literally overnight, a military coup d'etat that changed Liberia's story and Stegall's life. Deposed former president William R. Tolbert Jr. and more than 20 members of his administration were killed during the coup, and a new government, led by indigenous Liberians, was installed. Instability and unrest reigned, and Liberia sank into two successive civil wars between 1989 and 2003.

"That experience," Stegall says. "It was just like, you go to sleep one day and then the next day you wake up and everything's changed."

The violence of the coup filtered through the Liberian citizenry quickly. Within days, Stegall remembers, soldiers roamed the streets, in search of, she says, those previously in power and their families.

Stegall says that, even if she didn't at the time understand the larger political and social ramifications of the coup, she understood that her life was in danger. "I understood that I was being threatened,"she says."I needed to be mindful that many of my family members were in hiding. The violence felt random, but also focused. It was hard to figure out what would happen next, and all I knew was that there were plans being made to try to get my siblings and me out of the country."

Stegall recalls a perilous drive to the airport with her siblings (she is the oldest of four children). "My father got us all ready and got us to the airport," she says. "All along the way, he was bribing people. Not just to get us to the airport, but also to get us on the plane."

The plane took off, and Stegall was finally safe. The United States seemed an obvious destination: Stegall's mother is American, Stegall had spent summers in New York as a child, and her grandparents, who were in the United States at the time of the coup, were there to meet her as she disembarked in America. Still, though, Stegall realized the enormity of the upheaval her life had just gone through. "I was pulled out of my comfort zone, out of my family, out of my support system, out of my country, and I was transitioned to the United States," she says. "It was very much a moment of realization, of understanding that wow, this is really happening."

This is the history Stegall's childhood portrait was born into: She beams through the camera, carefree and privileged, innocently secure in her place in the world and blissfully unaware of the looming storm.

A Home Across the World

When Stegall stepped onto the Brooks campus for the first time, she was a girl in need of a home, a community and a sense of stability. She needed, she explains, stable ground on which she could escape the turbulence that defined her sudden evacuation from Liberia. She found a sense of the familiar at Brooks — a place more than 4,000 miles and the Atlantic Ocean away from her home in Monrovia — and particularly in her dormitory, P.B.A. Hall.

"I grew up around family," she says. "My home was always the central location where we gathered. Having that sense of community in my dorm, which had dorm parents and families living on either side of the building, made it feel like home. There was a support system already in place at Brooks, and that was a big deal for me because I was stepping into something that hadn't really been planned. When the rest of my world was so chaotic, that was very impactful in my life."

In P.B.A., Stegall found her anchor, and she credits the close relationships she formed with fellow residents and dorm parents with allowing her to find the grounding she needed to move forward and transition to her new life. She also dove into her classes at Brooks, and found a figure who would, years later, influence her career as an educator.

"I took AP Biology with Nick Evangelos," Stegall recalls. "It was a challenging course for me. It was a topic that I just was never going to fully be comfortable with. But I appreciated the way Mr. Evangelos opened up my understanding of the sciences. He focused on the process of learning, and that approach grabbed my attention. As I started to learn about teaching and teaching strategies, I remembered my experience with him and how to get students to engage with their own learning. Mr. Evangelos truly treated us as individuals. He expected different things from each of his students, and he helped students work from their strengths. I think that's what's stuck with me."

This is the history Stegall's yearbook page was born into: the confident portrait; the acknowledgment of family and community; the expression of healing, of renewed hope, of confidence that a higher power was guiding her through the darkness and along right pathways. Stegall had seen upheaval, violence and national fracture; she had travelled across the world to seek home; she wasn't certain of the tack her life would take, but she had the confidence to face the changing winds.

A Pathway Revealed

Almost immediately, the winds of Stegall's life turned to the south. Although she had been accepted to Smith College, Stegall struggled to meet the tuition. "Coming out of Brooks, it wasn't really clear how I was going to manage college financially," she says. "It had become obvious that the situation in Liberia wasn't a temporary situation; it was a long-term situation." Stegall put off enrolling at Smith to live in Virginia with an aunt. She lived there, she worked there, she started supporting herself. Stegall got married and had a son, and received her undergraduate degree in psychology from George Mason University in 1993, 10 years after she graduated from Brooks. Her husband was a police officer; they were looking into purchasing their first home; "things seemed to be moving toward the American Dream," Stegall says.

When she became pregnant again in 1995, this time with twins, Stegall and her husband were overjoyed and excited.

As it had so many other times, though, life had a different pathway planned for Stegall. Tragic complications in her pregnancy, she says, caused her twins to be born early. One child died at birth; the other, daughter Janelle, survived, but suffered severe complications. Stegall, as she had so many times before, transitioned. "She was a special needs child," Stegall says. "And so, I went from working to staying home to care for her and give her 24-hour support. We, as a family, we did what we had to do."

Janelle was medically fragile, a reality that her doctors had made very clear. She lived to be 2 1/2 years old. During her life, Janelle had received support services, including educational support at home and through the local school district. Stegall still speaks of Janelle's teachers with reverence. "Her teacher in the home was great, and the teacher that received her in the school system was also amazing," she says. The teacher that had worked with Janelle in the Stegall home recommended to Stegall a degree program in special education offered by The George Washington University. Inspired, Stegall applied, was accepted, and within a year, was working as a special education teacher at a school in Fairfax County, Virginia. Stegall immediately felt at home, immediately found a skill as an educator and in supporting students, and her student placement turned into a 12-year stint in the Fairfax schools.

"That's where my journey in education began," she says. "I was like, wow, this is amazing. My first class was full of kids just like Janelle, with varying physical needs. With the mentoring and support that was in place, it was a fantastic placement because that's where I grew, and that's where I learned. It was just all-encompassing in terms of what I had lived through, and also all-encompassing in terms of filling that void in my own life."

A Return Home

In 2008, more than a decade after turning to a career in education and almost three decades after fleeing Liberia, Stegall's life changed direction again. She started, she says, to feel a tug for home. She had not returned to Liberia, save for a brief visit in 1989. Her father had passed away, she says, and she wanted to take his ashes back to Liberia; she sought, she says, a return to something familiar.

The Liberia she returned to though, Stegall says, was not the same Liberia she had left behind. Since her evacuation in 1980, the country had suffered years of conflict, civil war and an infamous president, Charles Taylor, who has been convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

"The lay of the land looked different in 2008," Stegall says. "First, I was seeing things that I had seen as a child as an adult for the first time. Even down to the physical structures: It's like when you're in a house as a child and it seems big, and then you go back as an adult and you're surprised at how small it is. It felt so different, and everything suddenly felt so compact."

Another reason Liberia looked different had nothing to do with scale: Years of conflict had brought high, fortress-like walls surrounding homes as residents sought to protect themselves and their property. Mismanagement and a lack of services had left most people, Stegall remembers, without electricity or potable water. And, Stegall says, "what really struck me was the children. There were just so many children that seemed to have no structure." The culture, she says, had changed, not for the better, and she didn't recognize vast portions of it.

What Stegall did recognize, though, was the severe need for widespread and accessible high-quality education. She explains that in the face of disruption, violence and systemic failings, the educational system in Liberia had deteriorated. A 2017 Financial Times piece bore Stegall's observations out. According to that piece, the country's education ministry reported that fewer than 60 percent of school-aged Liberian children are in school. Unpaid volunteers make up teacher shortfalls in a drastically underfunded system. Only one in five adult Liberian women who reached the fifth grade can read a sentence. And strikingly, in 2013, 25,000 Liberian high school graduates took the entrance exam for the University of Liberia. None of those 25,000 test-takers passed. "This was not the Liberia that I wanted to be connected to," Stegall says. "It's been a generation since the coup, and now we're dealing with a generation of children and adults who have lost a lot of information. And these are the people who are voting. These are the people who are in leadership positions."

"So, if this was not the Liberia that I wanted to be connected to," she remembers asking herself, "then what was I going to do about it?"

A New Generation

Stegall says that she felt compelled to try to help improve education in Liberia — a country she had to flee from — because of her experience in the world outside of Liberia. "It's because of what I've seen everywhere else in the world," she says. "It's because I know that it's not going to be great everywhere in the world, but things can always improve. Even if it's initially for just a few people: There could be a ripple effect for future generations. I know that tapping into the early years is going to change the outcomes for that future generation if it's done in a way that's caring, that's purposeful, that's intentional."

Stegall returned to Liberia twice more, in 2010 and 2012, and then made the decision to leave America and work overseas. Her first stop (an Ebola virus outbreak was one factor that prevented her immediate return to Liberia) was Côte d'Ivoire, a West African country that shares part of its western border with Liberia. Stegall works as a curriculum coordinator at International Community School of Abidjan. "I came over, and it all just fit," she says. The terrain, the greenery and the people of Côte d'Ivoire, she says, remind her of Liberia, and of her ultimate goal.

Through continued coursework and education, most recently focused on servant leadership, Stegall's view and ultimate vision are becoming clearer. She's been working with a close friend for three years. They've established an educational consulting group that focuses on being a resource clearance center to connect educators in Liberia to other groups, services and agencies that could help provide Liberian children with a high-quality education. She wants, she says, to serve as a facilitator for other educators as they try to do their best work in Liberia.

"I want to give Liberian children access to the best education we can offer them," she says. "I want to establish a culture where groups and people choose to come to Liberia to work with our student population there. I want to serve as a conduit and connector, and I want to make their stay worthwhile and meaningful."

This is the history Stegall's current-day portrait is born into: still confident, she looks into the camera with a determined gaze that belies her weathered smile. The turbulence, the tests, the tragedy — these have all contributed to her determination to heal her homeland.

"You go into places that, on the outside, look chaotic," she says. "Where the poorest of the poor live, and it seems broken. But when you get into that community, you meet people, you learn about what's really going on. You find things happening that are positive. We need to capitalize on that aspect of the community, to appreciate what is going well and do more of it. Now is the time; it's time to go and do it."