Carley Petesch, from Huffington Post Teen, posted this amazing story of Michaela DePrince and her story for inspiration from her war ravaged home. Enjoy!
JOHANNESBURG — Michaela DePrince was little more than a toddler when she saw her first ballerina – an image in a magazine page blown against the gate of the orphanage where she ended up during Sierra Leone’s civil war. It showed an American ballet dancer posed on tip toe.
“All I remember is she looked really, really happy,” Michaela told The Associated Press this week. She wished “to become this exact person.”
From the misery of the orphanage “I saw hope in it. And I ripped the page out and I stuck it in my underwear because I didn’t have any place to put it.”
Now Michaela’s the one inspiring young Africans: She escaped war and suffers a skin pigmentation disorder that had her labeled “the devil’s child” at the orphanage. She’s an African dancer in the world of ballet that sees few leading black females. She was adopted and raised to become a ballerina in the U.S. – a country where she believed everyone walked around on tippy toes.
On July 19, Michaela performs in her first professional full ballet, dancing the part of Gulnare in Le Corsaire, as a guest artist of South Africa’s two biggest dance companies, Mzansi Productions and South African Ballet Theatre.
