How a former Mercer student lived up to the school’s slogan, “Majoring in Changing the World”

By Kyle Mullins

Sam Johnson does not have any kids of his own, but that may be in part because he sees himself as a father to the 14 children who live in the orphanage he opened in NZerekore, Guinea.

“They have become a part of me,” Johnson said. “They call me daddy. I see them as my kids.”

Johnson is a 2013 Mercer graduate, who immediately after graduation went about forming his charity organization, My Vision for Refugees, and the orphanage for refugee children, Home of Hope.

Johnson is a former refugee himself, whose family was displaced by the Liberian civil war in 1998.

Johnson lost his father in that conflict at only 8 years old, leaving just his mother to take care of their five kids. She had to get them all to safety, doing her best to avoid the militias that had burned down their village.

Eventually, the family made it to the U.N. refugee camp in Nzerekore, Guinea, a country that prides itself in never having been in a war and serves as a refuge for those devastated by conflicts in surrounding countries.

The Johnson family lived in the camp for eight years, doing their best to get by. Even though he was deprived a formal education, Johnson was able to pick up French while living at the refugee camp and also developed a love for soccer.

In 2007, one month before he and his siblings were to be relocated by the U.N. to Clarkston, Ga., their mother passed away, leaving him and his three school-age brothers and sisters in the hands of teachers and volunteers at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School.

Before he came to the United States, Johnson had no formal education. After his family moved to the country, he was able to get two years of schooling under his belt before he was accepted to Mercer.

“My impression of Mercer was ‘Wow’,” Johnson said. He said he didn’t have to walk long distances to get to school and he was never in need of food.

“Walking to classes was a joke,” he said. “Compared to having to walk miles to go to school.”

Not everything came with ease. Johnson said it felt like the weight of the world was on his shoulders to succeed at Mercer, not just for himself but by his need to go back and help those out in situations similar to the one he grew up in.

“I felt like failure was not an option for me,” Johnson said. “Because other people, like a whole continent was depending on me and a whole generation was depending on me. That was the mindset.”

Johnson took his schooling extremely seriously, graduating with quadruple majors in Political Science, International Relations, Women and Gender Studies and French.

It was so important to him that despite his love for the sport, he eventually quit the Mercer soccer team to focus on his studies.

Johnson said he had dreams of playing the sport for the rest of his life, being one of the “football” players from Africa to also be educated. He said it’s often a difficult thing to find professional football players from Africa with good educations just due to difficult backgrounds.

“Soccer was the way for me to forget about my past, and all the horror that I went through,” Johnson said, but eventually being on the team became too much to juggle with all the classes he was taking.

According to his former professor and now friend, John Dunaway, Johnson was the perfect student in school, with a work ethic that he had never seen up to that point.

“He had a lot of rough edges,” Dunaway said. “But he was so eager and he worked so hard that he was just a joy to teach.”

Their relationship developed further the summer that Dunaway and his wife took a trip to France. In need of someone to house sit for them, they turned to Sam who they discovered didn’t have a place to stay.

The Dunaway’s developed a close relationship with Johnson and his girlfriend at the time and future wife, Mary.

The two were both part of Mercer’s African Student Association when they first met. Johnson said he made it a point to be friendly with any other student he met from Africa.

“I think we just clicked,” Johnson said. “I think she knew I wanted to come to Africa and help.”

The two of them got married in 2014. Mary serves as the secretary for My Vision for Refugees while also working her job in Atlanta.

Dunaway and his wife would take Sam and Mary to church on Sundays and often they would have dinner together.

“We’ve gotten very close to him, we almost feel like family,” Dunaway said.

Dunaway was one of the professors who helped Johnson give back to his former home in NZerekore, collectively donating $5,000 dollars to add to the $2,000 Johnson made during a summer of work study.

“I knew I just wanted to go back because I just wanted to help,” Johnson said. “I wanted to come back and help as soon as possible but I was not equipped with the tools to help.”

This effort from his Mercer family helped to provide him the tools he needed to make a difference in the village where he lived for eight years.

Johnson hired a local company that installed a well to provide the villagers with clean water for bathing and drinking.

On his return to America, he got together a group of friends and former teachers to form his non-profit, My Vision for Refugees, which provides shelter, schooling, food, and perhaps most important, a sense of family to refugee children.