Ott

Ellie Ott volunteered at a displacement camp in Zambia where she listened to Congolese refugees’ stories of rape, and she helped a Somali Bantu student with little schooling become a member of the National Honor Society.

The work of the 23-year-old Lawrence native helped her become one of the 32 men and women across the United States selected to study at the University of Oxford as Rhodes Scholars. The scholarships an-nounced early Sunday provide all expenses for two or three years of study at the British university.

Ott said she wanted to expand her knowledge in the field of forced migration.

“I hope to help shape refugee policy in the future, and ideally that would be through using research and evidence,” she told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday.

Ott, a 2004 graduate of Free State High School, now works for the Department of Health and Human and Services in Washington on projects to prevent teenage pregnancy and domestic violence, as well as refugee resettlement.

She volunteered to tutor a Bantu high school student while studying at the University of Pittsburgh.

“She spoke a different language than all of the other Somali Bantus, so she was actually originally ostracized,” Ott said. “So she also needed just a friend in addition to someone to help her with English.”

Ott said she doubted the teen had ever attended school before she arrived in the United States a few years earlier.

“I ended up driving her to her National Honor Society induction after having worked with her for a year, which was a great feeling,” said Ott, a founding member of a campus advocacy organization for refugees called FORGE.

Ott graduated from Pitt in April, earning undergraduate degrees in chemistry, history and French. She also read African and western European history and culture and spent a summer studying nuclear and radiochemistry. She speaks French, Swahili and some Arabic, which has helped her in her work with refugees in Pittsburgh and during the two summers that she volunteered with a nonprofit organization at the Kala Refugee Camp in Zambia.

In Kala she helped to create a solar-powered computer lab, and worked on projects to improve education and women’s health, create a refugee-run newspaper and encourage children in the camp to create art.

“It was life-changing in part because I collected some personal histories there and was told of people forced to rape their mothers,” Ott said of her time in the camp. “Just horrible stories. But also I knew them as these refugees working to make a better community and a better future.”

Ott was in Lawrence on Sunday. She is the daughter of Greg and Genna Hurd, and the late Michael Ott, all of Lawrence.

“Lawrence has really shaped my perspective on the world and shaped who I am today,” Ott said in an interview with the Journal-World. “I was afforded just incredible opportunities with public schools in Lawrence, as well as with the community as a whole. I think it’s a very unique community to grow up in. I’m very thankful that I have grown up in it.”

On studying at Oxford and what she hopes to gain from her time there, Ott said she wanted “to get a solid academic background in areas I’m very passionate about that will serve me well in the future, as well as make connections.”

And on winning the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship: “It feels great. I think I still might be in a state of shock. I don’t know if it’s sunk in.”