#29 – Safia Boateng

Safia Boateng is a 24-year-old woman, originally from Kumasi, Ghana, who has come to rural Kansas to study botany and agriculture.

Safia grew in a large family, the second of five children and the first daughter, and spent much of her childhood at her mother’s side, helping out with household duties as her father supported the family. She took an interest in plants from a young age, embracing her home city’s diversity of plants and gardens.

An adept student, she stood out in classes, and repeatedly proved herself a capable and enduringly curious student. Prone to boredom, Safia was not above causing no small amount of mischief around her school, even terrorizing some of the boys with homemade pyrotechnics and other ideas to upset the usual order of things around her school.

Safia’s father, who worked as a miner, was gone for long stretches, leaving her mother to run the home. Safia is exceptionally close to her mother, who always enouraged her in her pursuits, even the more mischevious ones.

Safia’s relationship with her siblings is a bit more complicated. Her two younger sisters and brothers admire her and what she has achieved, in their own rambunctious way, but her older brother, Anthony, has always taken a dim view of her antics, like her father. The family’s eldest men see her as lacking the kind of basic decency and decorum a girl her age should have.

Safia graduated from college as salutatorian, and decided to pursue graduate school somewhere far from home, to see the world. Her interest in botany and agriculture brought her to Kansas State University, where she has been studying for the last year and a half. Now, as part of the college’s program, she and a few of her classmates have been brought to the small farming community of Summer’s Peak, to study the recent drought and work on creating ways to allow local farmers to continue their businesses.

Hugely resourceful, adaptable and intelligent, Safia got over the culture shock of moving to America with relative ease, and has gotten a reputation on campus as a bit of a girl-McGuyver. She enjoys razzing her classmates, saying she knows more about their nation than they do. She hasn’t revealed to any of her friends yet that she isn’t quite the educated girl from Africa they think she is however.