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As she walked the campus in Phoenix, marveling at its size, the heat, her own life path, she said, “It feels like reality, but also like a dream.”
As a child in Kampala, Uganda, Phiona Alinda Hall walked from door after door, knocking, cold calling to survive. “Do you need tutoring?” she would ask parents.
Hall was 11, the middle of six orphan children, but had a sixth grade education, enough to play the expert, help her family eat one meal a day and pay for younger siblings’ basic schooling.
Their parents left them an old flood-zone home after both died of complications from HIV, so she would perch on piled-up tables with her siblings all night, floodwaters swirling below, and convinced the older ones to join her.
“All you have to do is help the kids with homework,” she told them. “It is not like you are illiterate. Wing it.”
That was 20 years ago. The Seattle woman walked across the stage Thursday at Grand Canyon University’s commencement for online students after completing a bachelor’s degree in elementary education and special education.
“We all pitched in to buy the basic things like food. The whole of our childhood was like, well, we will leave it to God. The weird thing is we never got sick enough to go to the hospital,” she said. “That’s why sometimes I think it was God.”
More than a decade later, after a church member helped her get a teaching certificate in Uganda, she met a man on a Christian dating website who promised to take her to America. “I’m like, OK, I think I like you. He is a Christian. For me, that was the important part.
“And all my life, I wanted to be married. We would play wedding as little kids in the back yard.”
She moved to the U.S., had the marriage she dreamed of, and began to work. Five years later, in the COVID year of 2020, she was handed divorce papers, she said, and that was after the doctors found a mass on her brain, slow growing but one they still monitor.
“What you learn without parents is life doesn’t pause for you,” she said. “You still have to keep moving. Sometimes, I feel like I could hear my parents yelling at me: ‘Get yourself up! You’ve got to keep moving!
“It is not like you have a choice. … It hit me. I can finally go back to school.”
By fall of 2020, Hall enrolled at GCU.
She had three jobs – as a school paraprofessional for children with special needs, weekend tutoring and day-care work, all while going to classes online and scheduling numerous doctors appointments.
“I have a sister now in Germany, and I am calling, crying in tears. ‘Everything here is complicated. It has to be done right. I can’t wing through it.’”
She pulled herself together, thinking back to where she came from.
“When I lost my parents, I still had to move, and I was younger then. No one is coming to save you. I thought my marriage would save me. I found this guy who I thought would give me this love I didn’t have growing up, and that can vanish right in front of your face.
“So do you pick yourself up? Do you keep going? Or do you just sit there, beat down, and live on the streets? No, because you want better.”
If she could wing it at 11 in Uganda, she could do this – become a teacher – especially with God behind her.
“It is God. How did I manage it? It has to be God,” she said, walking past the College of Education building before her commencement and musing how her parents would love that she was here and had gotten an education.
“I had to come to campus. My friends and family are sick of it, it’s all I talked about. They don’t understand it because I have lived a lot of trauma. It’s a big deal to me.”
They do know she is good at teaching and as a para was loved by special education students.
“I compare my life to how special education kids are. Sometimes they can’t help themselves. They want somebody to listen and be there for them and to love them,” she said.
“When I was little, I felt helpless. I felt like we didn’t have the love everyone else has or what other kids grew up with. I compare my life to special ed. I want to be that person that helps these kids.”
Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at mike.kilen@gcu.edu
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