Three semesters after arriving amid international attention, Lydia Pogu is now so entrenched that she serves on First Year Experience, a program that helps acclimate incoming students to campus.

LAKELAND — Lydia Pogu is no longer a novelty on the Southeastern University campus.

Three semesters after arriving amid international attention, Pogu is now so entrenched that she serves on First Year Experience, a program that helps acclimate incoming students to campus.

“Sometimes students get caught up in who the cool students are or who the popular students are,” said Erica Steiner, coordinator of First Year Experience. “She has zero lens for that, so it’s really refreshing. She treats every student with the same amount of dignity and respect.”

In turn, Pogu doesn’t wish to be known as a celebrity or a curiosity. She makes it clear she won't be defined simply as a “Chibok girl,” one of the Nigerian teenagers abducted by Islamic militants in 2014.

“That was the thing I was most concerned about because people see me here, they know me — they think — but they don’t know me,” she said, sitting in a campus building on a recent afternoon. “You can’t just hear about my story; that was just what happened to me. It’s not my childhood story or how I grew up.”

Pogu, 21, is one of two women from Chibok, a town in northeast Nigeria, who enrolled at Southeastern in the fall of 2017. She and a friend, Joy Bishara, had been among 276 girls kidnapped in April 2014 from a boarding school by the terrorist group Boko Haram.

The mass abduction drew international media attention and spawned the social-media campaign #BringBackOurGirls.

Pogu and Bishara made a daring escape on the first night, leaping off a truck and hiking for miles to return home. Several dozen other girls escaped, a few more were rescued and the captors eventually released about 100 other girls, according to BBC News.

The Jubilee Campaign, a Virginia-based nonprofit, helped relocate Pogu, Bishara and a few others to the Mountain Mission School in Grundy, Virginia. Two years later, the pair moved to a private Christian school in Oregon, from which they graduated in 2017.

Southeastern offered the duo scholarships, and they arrived in August 2017, two months after traveling to Washington, D.C., and meeting President Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

Despite that background, Steiner said Pogu projects no pretensions.

“She genuinely cares about people, and so she definitely doesn’t use her story to wield it or talk about it for any type of attention or anything like that,” Steiner said.

'Life of party'

As she talked about her ongoing adjustment to American culture, Pogu — who speaks Kibaku, Hausa, Nigerian Pidgin as well as English — sometimes allowed her thin, silvery braids to slide before her eyes, a form of effacement matching her soft-spoken manner. But her housemate, Sarah East, said she has learned that Pogu’s gentle demeanor can be misleading.

“I remember thinking she was reserved and that she was a very strong person,” East said of her first impression. “When she stated her opinion, she was very sure of it. There was no questioning it. But now that I’ve gotten to know her a little bit more, she’s the life of the party. She’s so much fun. She’s really just latched onto our culture and become such an integral part of our team and our social circle.”

Having previously worn only dresses and skirts, Pogu is now comfortable wearing pants — even jeans with holes in the knees. She wears traditional Nigerian attire — long, colorful dresses — only on special occasions. (Bishara chose not to be interviewed.)

Pogu, a tall and svelte woman, seems bemused at the prevalence of sweets in American diets, and she laughed in bafflement at dishes that combine many different vegetables. She has attended Southeastern football games but is not fond of the sport.

“It’s OK,” she said. “It’s not what I’m used to. It’s just a confusing game.”

Pogu, a legal studies major, plans to attend law school after earning a bachelor’s degree. She hopes eventually to split time between the United States and Nigeria.

“I want be a lawyer just to bring justice to people, to help people,” she said in her lilting, musical accent.

After living in a dorm her first year, Pogu now resides in a school-owned house designated for members of the First Year Experience team. East, a senior from Virginia, said Pogu sometimes cooks traditional Nigerian meals for friends.

“She’s done a good job of maintaining her own sense of identity and her culture while being adaptable and flexible to ours,” East said. “She tries new things with us, and she’s like, ‘OK, I tried yours and now you try mine.’ It’s a fun give-and-take relationship where we’re all trying new things together.”

Perhaps because of her immersion in an unfamiliar culture, Pogu has little patience for American students who resist new experiences, East said.

“She’s so willing to go on adventures and try new things,” East said. “She pushes all us to become a better version of ourselves because she’s like, ‘Why won’t you try this?’ and ‘Why won’t you do this?’ ”

Yearning for home

Pogu, the sixth of eight siblings, hasn’t been able to visit Nigeria since a trip home just before she enrolled at Southeastern. She keeps in touch with family members through a calling application, though the six-hour time difference creates challenges.

Pogu missed an older brother’s wedding over the winter break, which she spent with a family in Virginia she met while at Mountain Mission School. She said Bishara traveled home and then shared photos from the trip.

“I just miss the culture, just the people and what they’re doing,” Pogu said. “I miss the food, my friends; I miss every single thing about home. When you see someone doing something you used to do, you’re like, ‘Oh, I want to do it.’ ”

Pogu works in a campus restaurant and is studying to get a driver’s license so that she might work off campus. When she’s not studying or working, she watches Netflix (“I’m not picky on TV”), plays games with friends and sometimes makes trips to Tampa for dining and leisure.

Steiner said she hears effusive praise for Pogu from students she mentors in First Year Experience.

“Even just her presence is so humble and genuine, so even students coming from out of state that don’t know a soul here, who might be more introverted and feel intimidated in a social setting, she just does a great job breaking down those barriers,” Steiner said. “She’s super bubbly and joyful, and she doesn’t withhold or really come across like she cares what people think about her. She’s super herself no matter what context she’s in.”

Though Pogu doesn’t come across as judgmental, she described the bewilderment that sometimes arises when she sees Americans taking for granted the freedoms and relative affluence into which they were born. She recalled a discussion of Switzerland, one of the wealthiest richest countries, in a recent class.

“When I first came here, I thought, ‘It looks beautiful,’ and I thought everything is perfect, but then —” a cackle — “I come to realize that people are complaining their country is not rich,” she said. “Today we were talking about it in U.S. Government, (that) Switzerland is the richest country in the world. They’re, like, wanting to go to a different country to experience something, while other people are coming to their country. I told them, ‘You have everything you need. Why do you need to go to this country?’ ”

Although Pogu keenly misses her home country, she seems to have everything she needs here.

Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or 863-802-7518. Follow on Twitter @garywhite13.