It's 1987 in southern Sudan.
Santino Akot is nine.
A slender boy tending cattle at the edge of his village, Marial Baai.
Until this moment, he is a middle child in a middle-class family with seven children.
The second Sudanese civil war was a part of this life. His father had died from war-related disease. Eighteen months earlier soldiers had taken his family's property and burned their home to ashes.
His mother made a hut and kept them alive.
The soldiers are back now.
Killing.
Burning.
Destroying.
Defining moments.
They sound big, don't they?
Big and loud.
Moments that say: 'Life change headed your way.'
But they are quiet, and usually only seen with hindsight.
Jeremy Wilhelm is not even 35, but he's had his share.
His biggest was more like a defining 30 seconds, during a round table board meeting of a new renewable fuels company based in California.
Wilhelm was leading the meeting, when, 15 minutes in, the board member with an MBA from Harvard looked at Wilhelm and told the farm kid from Unadilla, Nebraska:
"You don't have the pedigree to lead this company."
Trash Bags to Handbags It all started with a question.
"Could Doane help a local effort to replace plastic shopping bags with a better alternative?" Linda Kalbach and Karla Cooper asked Brad Elder.
If you meet these three faculty members you'll understand how the question leaped from "Can we do this?" to "How big can we do this?"
And then to the answer: start local and make an international impact.
Those flimsy plastic bags that carry so many groceries home around the globe each day are the scourge of environmentalists, the detriment of municipal infrastructure and the enemy of wildlife.
2007.
Doane offers free HIV testing.
Four students show up.
2008.
The free HIV test station in Perry Campus Center is the place to be one cold February Tuesday.
Testers run out of kits and turn a couple hundred students away.
The difference? Maggie Sheehy.
O.K. Maggie Sheehy and a little bit of prize money.
Sheehy saw the devastation of AIDS in Africa firsthand while living there as part of Doane's Semester in Africa program. She also spent two summers as a counselor at Camp Kindle - a camp for children affected and infected with HIV and AIDS.
Lindsay Anderson sent off her letters of recommendation for a national
NAIA award in February and promptly forgot about it.
She's pretty busy that time of year.
Majoring in accounting and business finance is not easy.
She tutors other students in four accounting and business courses. She's a member of the Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society and Hansen Leadership Program, and, as Doane's leading scorer, she squeezes in a little basketball, too.
Sure, a lot of students are involved in a lot of activities in high school and college.
But José Mejia stands out.
He even tries activities and courses he's not interested in, just in case it could help him in the future.
For him, the easiest way to open a door is to try.
He tried an internship in high school, when he was pretty sure he wanted to go into physical therapy. But once he tried it, he realized, he's really more of a business man.
Nicole Williams was just five when she told her mom she wanted to be a nurse.
Her mom told her to aim higher.
"‘You can be a doctor. I see the potential,'" her mom, Lisa, told her.
At the time, Lisa was a 32-year-old mother of two diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma.
She battled, enduring the pain of the cure through the initial diagnosis, the relapse four years later, the Burkitt's lymphoma that followed, and on to her current mark of seven years cancer free.
But when a family member gets cancer, everyone fights. Nicole's battle? She plans to become an oncologist.