The Boy from Boadua is a story of hunger, hardship, hope, and tenacity. It’s about believing anything is possible if you set your heart—and mind—to it. My story begins when I was a young boy growing up in a family so large and impoverished that no amount of backbreaking labor could keep our bellies full. Though no one in Boadua had ever progressed beyond elementary school, I was willing to endure any hardship in pursuit of what any reasonable person would consider a pipe dream: a world-class education. In my remote Ghanaian village, most parents were illiterate and so did not understand the value of education. A love of reading led me to spend my meager breakfast money on newspapers that opened my eyes to a world I was determined to experience. I learned about a famous secondary school my parents could not possibly afford; however, I believed that if I traded precious hours of sleep for studying, I would somehow find my way there. My journey took me from a jungle full of poisonous snakes to an elite boarding school where I learned to use utensils for the first time, to the Soviet Union during the perestroika era, and ultimately to the United States. There, while teaching in an inner-city school district, I experienced a rude awakening: many of my students rejected their precious chance to become educated because they saw no way out of their bleak circumstances. Given the unimaginable sacrifices I had to make as a young boy to advance my education, I was astonished to find such large numbers of minority children who made no attempt to learn when they entered my classroom, even though relative to my village school, this one had much better resources. I subsequently learned from other teachers at the school that the behavior I was witnessing was commonplace in many urban American public schools. Haunted by that revelation, I set out on another quest to explore the reason for these students’ disruptive behavior. As a new immigrant at the time, I had little knowledge of the complex set of racial, socio-economic, cultural, and political factors that, collectively, rob America’s minority communities of their hope, leading many children to give up on education so early. Through extensive readings, listening to debates on some of those thorny issues, and careful observation of American society over the past two decades, I have gained a reasonably good understanding of the environments that shaped my students’s world view. In the process, I began to realize that, ironically, I was perhaps lucky to have grown up in a poor village in Ghana, rather than urban America. The Boy from Boadua takes readers along on that unlikely journey from Ghana to America. It compares the educational systems in Ghana and the U.S., contains firsthand knowledge of life as it was on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the perestroika era, and chronicles my experiences in America over the past two-and-a-half decades. It concludes with some personal reflections, conducted through the prism of the totality of my life experiences, on issues such as education, race, culture, and geopolitics. It also acknowledges the part luck plays in life outcomes and the importance of role models. As an African and an American, I am all too aware of the ways race and socioeconomic status can impact lives. I have observed firsthand how the legacy of slavery still hampers urban blacks, inhibiting ambitions and breaking spirits. But these challenges are not insurmountable. I hope my memoir will inspire others to dream the impossible dream.