The Boy from Pleebo

The Boy from Pleebo is the gut-wrenching yet heartwarming story of a young African child’s struggle to maintain his innocent-optimism in the face of crippling illnesses, poverty, near-death experiences from a war fraught with ethnic cleansing of his tribe, his hopeless journey through years of refugee camps, and how he became one of top graduates in an American medical school. It is a story of perseverance, survival, and never quitting on a dream.

Have you ever wondered: “Did that emaciated and tattered-clothed African refugee child on TV ever have childhood aspirations?” Meet Sylvester Youlo—born to teenage parents in Pleebo, a small town in Liberia, where survival into adulthood isn’t sure, and a college education is an impossible dream. Consequence of a class-segregation created by free slaves from the United States that settled in this coastal West African country in 1821, it is at five years of age when Sylvester first realizes that the woman he knows as Yah is his grandmother; that his parents moved to the affluent city of Monrovia—a city that holds the keys to success—in pursuit of the life of the country’s elite Americo-Liberians when he was only nine months old. But just as he begins to understand this reality, and starts to imagine a glorious future alongside his parents in the big city, life implodes when Grandmother inexplicably ‘abandons’ Sylvester to relatives, and a brutal civil war that will kill and maim thousands soon begins.