Award Winner Turns Negatives Into Positives

By DEBRA ANN YEO Standard Staff

With his ready laugh and smile, his confident, earnest conversation, Nick Ugoalah quickly blows away any stereotypes of down-and-out foster children.

The 21-year-old Brock University student spent most of his teen years in foster homes - estranged from his father and separated by thousands of kilometres from his mother - but don't expect any self-pity here.

The way Nick sees it, the experience allowed him to meet many people and learn many different skills. "Whatever I do - school, athletics, relationships - I try to turn everything into a positive because there has been a lot of negative in my life," said Ugoalah, who is the first recipient of a newly established Family and Children's Services bursary for former foster kids. "I try to say, 'OK, this is what happened. How can I be a better person through this?'"

Nick Ugoalah "I try to always follow my dreams' staff photo

FACS staff cited Ugoalah's academic and athletic accomplishments, along with his involvement in the agency's youth advisory committee and 1992 youth in care conference, in announcing the award last month. The $1,500 bursary is directed to former Crown wards past 21 who are furthering their education or training. A second $1,000 bursary was awarded to Ugoalah by the Ontario Association of Children's Aid Societies. He is a third-year biology major at Brock and winner of the 1992-93 Canadian university wrestling championship in the 72-kilogram class. "School and wrestling, that's basically my whole life right now," he said in a recent interview. "I'm a happy individual ... I have no real hardships right now. I just have to work hard (and) everything should be OK."

Ugoalah has already demonstrated an ability to back up that kind of talk. Two years ago, for instance, he wasn't considered good enough to make Brock's varsity wrestling team. Yet his prediction to the coach that he would not only make the team but win a Canadian championship ended up coming true. "I try to always follow my dreams to whatever I feel is right," he said. As an ll-year-old, he even started recording them in a diary. "I'd say I want to become MVP of my sports team by (the time) I turned 15 or 16, or... I want to get on the honor roll. "I was always setting little goals for myself. Some of them were not really realistic, but I always believed they were and it kept me going."

Ugoalah prefers not to go into detail about the family troubles that drove him into foster care. He was 10 years old, living in his native Nigeria, when his absentee father returned to take Nick, his younger brother and sister to Canada. Nick's mother and a little brother he has never seen still live in Nigeria. On arriving in British Columbia, Ugoalah learned that his father had remarried and had four other children during his absence. "The situation at home wasn't really that great at all. There were a lot of problems. One thing led to another and I ran away from home and ended up in foster homes."

He bounced around to many homes in many B.C. towns in the first year before settling in with the foster family that brought him to Welland in 1989. When the family returned to B.C., an 18-year-old Ugoalah stayed in Niagara.

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