Three Siblings. One Journey. A Shared Graduation
by Karen Clos,
Director of Communications and Media Relations –
In the white window-paned, three-story, burnt-orange home outside of Kumasi in Ghana’s Ashanti Region, Jennifer Appiah’s kitchen often smelled like her four children’s favorite meal: yam and spinach stew.
Humble ingredients came together—palm oil, kontomire greens, subtle spices—warm and rounded, faintly smoky, coating even the steam so that when the lid was lifted, it felt as if the kitchen itself were exhaling into their hungry faces.
Like many children, they loved school—especially field trips—excelled in math and science, sang in the choir, spoke both the English they were taught and the trill of their native Twi, and enjoyed the close‑knit company of family and friends in neighborhoods lined with mosques and churches.
Prince and Princess – twins – joined their siblings, Sandra and Irene, welcomed at birth by their father, Akwasi, who declared their arrival a foretelling of good fortune for the whole family. And the future they could not see in that auspicious moment would prove him right. In just three years, this humble family would fulfill their wildest dreams and defy the laws of probability.
Moving to the U.S.
Their father, then a school teacher, received notice that his name had been randomly selected among millions to compete for a U.S. visa through the immigration lottery. Created by Congress in 1990 as part of the Immigration Act and signed by President George H. W. Bush, the program allows tens of millions of applicants from more than 160 countries to compete each year for just 50,000 visas.
Selection, however, was only an invitation to begin. Approval required years of scrutiny—medical exams, background checks, repeated interviews, and strict compliance with unforgiving timelines. Fortune, Akwasi understood, was provisional. Persistence would decide the rest.
Even in this context—where fortune was likely to become futility without warning—he knew that luck alone would not carry him. Sometimes, he reasoned, fortune favors wisdom and persistence. And if a taste of luck required a truckload of persistence, then so be it.
For the next two years, they complied with every single request – in triplicate and always on time until Akwasi was approved for travel to Maryland. Not as a part of the process, but because he had asked to be allowed to join the U.S. Army.
Akwasi, who had been adamant about keeping his family together, wanted to demonstrate his loyalty to the country that offered him a chance by enlisting just months after they had been told they were formally approved for the visas required to go to the U.S. together.
A Stressful Process
While she may never admit to it, it is hard to imagine that Irene, the oldest, didn’t have the hardest time of the children. It is a reality known to many military families: one moment a parent is there, and the next moment, they are gone. Sometimes for years. And the requirement of life and practicality is that life must go on.
So, when, as a senior in her home country, Irene was told by her father to return to the 10th grade once in the U.S., she did not argue. She did it without question. And so did her siblings. First, Ellison and then Shoemaker High School. Then graduation.
The twins, Prince and Princess, remember too. They were only 11 when the years of fulfilling every part of the process began, closely followed by many long and repeated drives from their home to the embassy in Accra six hours away. Questions and DNA tests. Vaccinations.
Of course, he says, they were curious. But, he reminds, they remained obedient children. Even up to and beyond the final day when their father suddenly instructed them to pack their belongings and be prepared to leave.
Moving to a New Home
Prince recalls that he did as he was told and stood in front of their home not completely aware that it was the last time he would see it while they waited on transport. There, surrounded by every suitcase he owned filled with the worldly possessions that would fit, he caught a glimpse of his childhood friends, Isaac, who asked when he was coming back.
He did the only thing he could do, and replied, “I don’t know.”
Thirty hours later, he says, they landed in Houston. It was deep into the night, and if the Houston skyline had been twinkling, he missed it, curled up in the back seat of his father’s car for another three-and-a-half-hour drive to Killeen. People in Africa think America is magic, he admits. Maybe it would still be magic in the morning.
Returning to School
They acclimated as best they could, adopting a new routine, and adjusting to the unfamiliar, the unpredictable weather, the sights and smells, and, of course, returning to school.
There, they realized that they could not be told apart from many of the other students there – at least, Prince observed, if they never spoke. They had been educated in the British way and with the British lexicon and accent.
The day-to-day rituals were baffling. Back home students were kept in a cohort in the same classroom all day and required the subject teachers to rotate in and out, in this new place, when the bell buzzed, everyone everywhere scattered like marbles on the floor.
He was comfortable under the radar, he told himself. Speaking meant revealing himself as different: his accent, he knew, would give him away. And it may have carried on that way, he said, were it not for the need to ask for help in between classes.
Right there in the Nolan Middle School front office, he told them plainly, “I am new here. How do I find these places?”
His English was pluperfect, but there was still the matter of vocabulary, to say nothing of the slang. In Central Texas, for example, he laughs, asking of a biscuit definitively would not result in a cookie.
When it came to coursework, the children all excelled. In Ghana, parents pay for the luxury of educating their children. And it is a wise, or at the least, very obedient child who takes full advantage of that privilege.
He still marvels when he recalls how casually his peers spoke to their teachers. Or how on a crowded playground during recess, he might as well have been invisible. Until, in eighth grade, he surfaced as a gifted soccer player.
Advanced Education
Then, later, at Shoemaker High School, he and his sister took advanced placement classes and excelled academically, too, doing it together. If it works out for me, he observed, it works out for her, too. We are together in this. And it did work out. Indeed, it did.
Both earned an associate’s degree from Central Texas College with nearly a 4.0 grade point average: a 3.7 and 3.85, respectively. Their sister, Irene, had gone before them and earned a masterful 3.5. She had been a senior when her siblings were in middle school, first trying nursing and finally choosing programming. Her older sister, Sandra, did the same, and is now a nurse.
Graduating Together
This May, Prince and Princess and their sister, Irene, will sit together again—this time among hundreds of others—waiting their turn at commencement. When their names were called, they will cross the stage minutes apart, degrees in hand, the latest checkpoint in a journey that had begun years earlier and half a world away.
Years later, when Prince thinks back to the place they came from, he does not begin with paperwork or interviews or the long wait for permission. He begins in a kitchen outside Kumasi, where yam boiled on the stove and greens simmered in palm oil, and where the air itself seemed to breathe.
They have learned new systems since then—new weather, new words, new rules for how classrooms work and bells send students scattering. They have learned how to move quietly when needed and how to step forward when it matters. What they did not have to learn was how to stay together.
From Ghana to Central Texas, from middle school hallways to college lecture rooms, they carried the same certainty with them: if it worked out for one, it worked out for all. Not luck, exactly. Something steadier than that. Something earned. Some lessons begin at a desk. Others begin at a table.
