Person of the Week: Khymi Woo

July 13, 2007 — -- In her 23 years Khymi Woo has faced more struggles than most people do in a life time. She grew up poor in Manchester, N.H., but got a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, Philips Exeter Academy.

"I spent a lot of time there learning phenomenal things while at the same time I really, really struggled with a lot of my own demons," Woo said.

Prep school was foreign territory for a girl who'd been abused by her father. So she dropped out junior year, became addicted to drugs and moved to Boston with an abusive boyfriend.

"I spent a lot of time using drugs very heavily. We spent nights sleeping in the concrete area by Newbury Street they call the crack slab," she said. "My life totally lacked any direction and I felt very, very hopeless."

A year after her move to Boston she was pregnant.

"I am so blessed to be a mom, I would never change that for the world but I had no idea … what it would be like to truly take on the responsibility of another life," Woo said. "I look back on it now and wonder how I got through it because things were absolutely wretched in our household."

Still, she says she "desperately" wanted to go back to school

"I knew that education was going to be my only path out of poverty and out of this life I was living," she explained.

But her boyfriend wouldn't allow it. He had to control her completely and cut her off from her family. Then, when her daughter was 18-months old, the boyfriend was sent to prison for domestic violence. He threw a changing table at the two of them.

They went on welfare and ate at soup kitchens as Woo called hundreds of social services agencies in Boston and managed to get some help. She took three jobs and earned a scholarship from an organization called One Family that allowed her to go back to school, trying to get her schoolwork done as she raised her daughter.

"All of the mornings that we have when she is kicking and screaming and doesn't want to get out of bed and that I'm near tears because I haven't gotten a paper done, it makes it all worth it because she knows that mommy is going to school and that mommy's going to be somebody someday," Woo said.