During the dark days of the unethical and unhinged Trump administration, we need stories of good people doing great things to make the world a better place. So let me share a story about Juan Magahaes, an extraordinary Bowdoin first-year student from Brazil.

Juan spent his youth in a favela (a slum) in Curitiba, one of the poorest cities in Brazil. His mother is a maid; his father is a butcher. Neither of them went beyond sixth grade. When Juan was 11, he started a business called “Wrinkle Free” to help out his parents. He’d go to peoples’ houses and do ironing for them. As a teenager, he started a more profitable business for which he’d import shoes and other goods from China and then sell them. He later offered to pass the import business on to his younger brother if the brother promised to get his act together. The younger brother promised that he would, and he did. “That made me feel good,” Juan says. “My brother has all the tools, and I didn’t want my parents always comparing me to him.”

In ninth grade, Juan entered an international school in Brazil. He spoke little English so he would take notes in English and then go home and translate. Two years later, he got recruited by the Cate School, a prestigious independent boarding school in California. At Cate, he played soccer, earned top grades and led a community service project which raised $10,000 to build a kitchen at an elementary school in South Africa. He coordinated a group of 10 students from Brazil, South Africa, China and the United States to be part of this project.

As a senior, Juan applied for a QuestBridge Scholarship, which covers room, board and tuition at one of several elite colleges in the U.S. Fifteen thousand students applied for a QuestBridge and only 400 were accepted – including Juan. After reviewing the list of participating colleges, Juan chose Bowdoin because of the College’s large endowment and the fact that President Clayton Rose had an excellent record in business before coming to Bowdoin.

And how has this first generation college student for whom English is a second language fared at one of the nation’s finest liberal arts colleges? Well, he compiled a 3.6 g.p.a. his first semester while playing on the varsity soccer team and working 20 hours a week in the dining hall. Incidentally, he was recently nominated rookie of the year for his work in the dining hall. In his not-so-spare time, Juan has been working to gain approval for an “alternative spring break” project, which will involve taking several Bowdoin students to Rio de Jaineiro for a week next year to do community service.

This coming summer, Juan will be interning at JMalucelli Investmentos, one of Brazil’s largest asset management firms. He got the internship by reaching out to the CEO directly through Linked In. “What did I have to lose,” laughs Juan. It turns out that Juan and the CEO had similar backgrounds, and a one-and-a-half hour telephone interview sealed the deal.

Whew! What drives a young man like Juan Magahaes? “You’ll never see me walking,” laughs Juan. “When I’m given an opportunity, I want to take full advantage of it. I want people who invested in me to know that they did the right thing. You can’t just let life pass you by.”

Thanks, Juan. We needed that. And we’ll be following your progress closely over your next three years at Bowdoin.

David Treadwell, a Brunswick writer, welcomes commentary and suggestions for future “Just a Little Old” columns at [email protected].