Just as Aurora was a man of the year at Momiji Academy, Layla was as good as her cousin wherever she was, and when she was just in junior high school and had not yet awakened her abilities, she studied at a famous girls' school in Europe, and she was also a man of the year in this school.

It's just that Leo didn't become a celebrity like her cousin by virtue of her talent and appearance, and the reason why she became famous in that school was because of her own fists and feet, in other words, she was the little bully in that girls' school.

The school is also a private school, sponsored by the chaebols, and the top chaebols are often keen on public welfare, so they accept a group of poor children from the Third World every year, firstly, to promote their own ideology, and secondly, to return to China to serve the motherland after learning advanced culture.

This kind of investment is actually quite cost-effective, for example, recruiting a group of students from a small poor and war-torn African country, so that these students can open their eyes, and be influenced by subtle ideologies in their study and life for several years, when they return home with a wealth of knowledge and ideas, they will immediately stand out among their own people, and they will also not be as wary of their own people as foreigners, and it is easy to succeed in business and politics, and after ten or even decades, they may grasp the country's economic lifeline and even political power, and how can they forget to give back to their alma mater when they are gratefulAnd the chaebols behind their alma mater can take the opportunity to enter the country and get a piece of the pie.

This is the case with the school where Layla goes, with the mission of nurturing future political and business elites, or the wives of future political and business elites, after all, the power of the pillow wind is also super powerful.

Every year in the new school year, a group of timid Third World students are enrolled and receive a free education for several years at no cost to themselves.

These Third World students are not chosen at random, they can come if they want, but they are carefully selected by the school's admissions committee, who will evaluate the candidate's psychology and intelligence - excellent intelligence is a must, and recruiting a group of students with mediocre or even reckless qualifications will not do the school any good; psychological evaluation is even more complicated, one of the basic principles is that the candidate student must be dissatisfied with the current situation in his home country and have a strong belief in changing the country.

Of course, the rules and regulations implied in these admissions will never be announced to the public, and they will not even be put on paper in the form of words, and the selected people will thank God, but the unsuccessful ones will never understand why they are not selected, and will only think that they are probably not good enough.

Luisa, who was not called Luisa at the time, and her father, who had five wives, did not even look at her when he learned that she had been born a daughter, but pointed to the thatch on the roof and named her "Thatch".

The body is like duckweed, and life is like a weed.

If nothing else, "accident" means that if she dies before she is a few years old, and is swept in a straw and thrown to feed the wild dogs, then when she is eleven or twelve years old, she will be sold to another man in the village as a wife in exchange for four cows as a bride price...... That's how a normal script should be.

Her life was very hard, the ordinary people of the civilized world could not imagine it, and compared to her, another South Asian girl named Rafe, who was thousands of miles away and did not know her, lived a much happier life.

Other surprises happened, though.

The village was swept by the daily war, one warlord fought with another, corpses littered the field, a boy of seven or eight years old was taken to the army, her father and her brothers were taken away, never to return, she was separated from her mother, and with the influx of refugees into the neighboring country.

International charities are stationed in neighbouring countries to settle camps for the influx of refugees, and to send them back one day when the political situation in neighbouring countries settles down.

The camp was overcrowded, with new refugees joining every day, and faces were full of sluggish faces.

Luisa, who was eleven or twelve, was so mixed up in the refugee camp that she was silent, never spoke unless someone asked her, and lined up for three meals a day to get food and clean water, and then stuffed it into her mouth on the spot, and if she couldn't eat it, she had to stuff it down her throat, because once she got it back to her humble accommodation, the older women would snatch it out of her hands, and she had no way to do it alone.

Fortunately, the men and women in the camp lived separately, and at least she would not be bullied by men.

At that time, she didn't have any plans for the future at all, she just wanted to fill her stomach and live every day, that's all, she could only go with the flow, and she didn't have any choice in life.

The living conditions in the refugee camps are not particularly good, after all, there are too many people, the housing is overcrowded, the sanitary conditions are poor, and infectious diseases such as cholera take the lives of several refugees from time to time, and she is really like a tenacious weed, tortured but never completely destroyed.

About a few months later, the fortunes of her life took a turn for the worse.

On that day, a group of strangers entered the camp, mainly Caucasians, who looked very decent and elegant, and the charity honored them, and according to their request, all the children of school age in the camp were singled out and gathered in the square, and Luisa was among them.

These children are mainly girls, after all, many boys of the same age have been captured as cannon fodder.

The charity announced to the children through an interpreter that the guest was the admissions officer of several prestigious secondary schools, and they had come to select suitable children to receive free education in Europe, hoping that the children would actively cooperate with their work and strive to be selected, and then asked if they had taken the initiative to sign up.

Most of these children do not know where Europe is, they don't even know that the world is round, they have not left the 10-kilometer radius of the village before they came to the refugee camp, and now they are told what Europe they are going to, they will inevitably be terrified, especially those children who have fled to the refugee camp with their parents, and if they choose between Europe and their parents, they will of course choose to stay with their parents.

"I ...... I volunteered. ”

A thin voice rang out from among the children, and a thin arm was raised.

None other than Luisa.

The members of the charity and the admissions officer present were surprised that Luisa actually spoke English, although the pronunciation was extremely non-standard and it took a lot of effort to understand, but it was indeed English.

A middle-aged woman in the admissions officer beckoned her to leave the line and stand at the front.

Luisa stumbled out of the line.

The middle-aged woman crouched in front of her and looked at her carefully, and found that she was clearly different from most other refugees, that is, her eyes were not like a pool of stagnant water, but still retained their agility.

"Do you speak English?" asked the middle-aged woman kindly.

Luisa nodded, "A little." ”

"Who did you learn from?"

She shook her head, "No one. ”

"Then you are ......"

She pointed to the members of the charity, "Listen to them when you distribute food." ”

Her English has no grammar at all, except for its strange pronunciation, and it is almost a stiff patchwork of different words, but at least she can understand what she means.

The middle-aged woman was even more surprised, "You learned just by listening to them?"

Luisa nodded and repeated, "A little." ”

The middle-aged woman seemed to have received a piece of jade, and a smile of surprise appeared on her face.

"What's your name?"

"Thatch. ”

When three meals a day are distributed, the other refugees really just receive the meals mechanically, and the young Luisa listens attentively to the conversation of the members of the charity, she must not understand, but many times when the charity wants the refugees to do something, they will tell them through an interpreter, such as standing in line, not cutting in line, one per person, not receiving more, not making noise, Keep order, etc., these phrases are concise and clear, just relate the local language spoken by the translator to the English spoken by the charity, and then memorize it by rote - it's easy to say, but how many people have this heart when they are in that kind of environment?

When queuing to receive the meal, the members of the charity organization responsible for distributing the meal will also talk to each other, such as the bread is gone, and then go to transport a car, the mineral water is finished, go to get a few boxes, the beef is finished, today's stew is chicken and so on, everywhere is attentive, but few people will pay attention to it like Luisa and take every opportunity to learn.

In Luisa's heart, the members of these charitable organizations are like gods, bringing them free food and drink, and not beating them or forcing them to be cows and horses, and she instinctively has a longing, even if she can be closer to them, so she pays attention to learning their language, and after receiving food and drink, she eats it on the spot, and when she returns to her residence there is nothing to do, she recalls the English she learned today in her mind.

In addition to Luisa, there were a few other children who took the initiative to stand up, but none of them could have a simple conversation in English like Luisa, and it would be nice to be able to pop up two or three words at most.

The children are grouped into male and female groups and are tested by the admissions officer, including IQ tests and psychometric tests.

In fact, when Luisa took the initiative to stand up and speak in English, she had already passed by default, and the rest of the test was just a formality, and she did a beautiful job in the test, almost perfectly meeting the criteria for selecting students.

Together with the other chosen children, she was taken out of the camp and taken in a truck to the capital of a neighbouring country, where she was accommodated for the first time in a hotel, which, although the conditions of the hotel were not at all inaccessible in other countries, were no less than paradise for her.

They were joined by a number of children from other camps.

Luisa enjoyed a lot of "firsts in her life" in the hotel, the first time she showered, the first time she soaked in the bathtub, the first time she knew that fragrant shampoo was for washing her hair and not for drinking, the first time she slept in a soft bed, the first time she got dressed—unless you call the rags she used to wear around her waist and over her shoulders.

She knew that if the children who remained in the camp saw this, they would definitely cry with envy, but why didn't the charity say it in advance? If the selected children were shown in advance, more children would have preferred to abandon their parents and sign up.

This is of course because the admissions director is intentional, actively embracing fate in the face of unknown fate, and passively being chosen by fate under the temptation of material conditions, these are two completely different attitudes towards life, and the admissions organization does not need the latter, because the latter is not ideal, just worshipping money.

In the hotel, in addition to receiving basic etiquette training, she and other children focused on learning English by surprise, and Luisa, who was already basic and willing to work hard, was too far ahead of the other children. Not only that, but she is also using every opportunity to observe this strange world, absorbing new knowledge like a sponge absorbing water.

Unbeknownst to her, the admissions officers at several schools were secretly observing her and the other children, and her excellent performance attracted everyone's attention, and they quarreled behind their backs to get her.

After so many years of admissions, the admissions directors could tell at a glance which child had great potential, and the middle-aged woman she spoke to in the camp said that she thought the child could change the world in the future, comparing Luisa to the famous leaders among the blacks.

Whether the world will change in the future is put aside, at least Luisa's fate is changed, completely changed.

On the day of the end of the English training, she walked up to Louisa, half-squatted down, and smiled happily when she saw Hunting: "Child, you will come with me in a while." By the way, you don't call thatch anymore, you deserve a new, better-sounding name, let me think about it...... There is an African woman with that name who has been selected as one of the 100 most powerful women in the world, and I am sure you will do even better in the future. ”

Luisa didn't ask much, didn't raise any objections or questions about the new name, nodded and easily accepted the new name, and left the hotel behind the middle-aged woman, while the other children also left with the other admissions officers, running to different fates, without any nostalgia for each other.

Luisa was taken to the airport, where she experienced many firsts, and she saw the giant giant steel bird flying into the sky, with passports and tickets in her hands, and followed the middle-aged women on a plane to Cairo, where after a short rest, several more refugee girls were joined, they came from refugee camps in other countries, and were told that they would become classmates and study in a school.

They traveled north in bigger and more beautiful planes, across the sapphire Mediterranean, and onward.

At that time, Luisa did not know that in the school she was about to attend, there was a little bully named Layla, and the lives of the two of them would have a wonderful intersection.