VGCC Student Has Goal In Sight After Overcoming Numerous Obstacles

Many studentsat Vance-Granville Community College have to overcome obstacles to successful education.

Some have youthful mistakes holding them back. Many have to work full-time to help support their families. Lots of women have children to care for. Illnesses or serious health problems are obstacles for some.

Lorena Brown has had all these daunting problems, but she has not let them stop her. In fact, she has used them as motivation to not only earn her degree, but to excel as a VGCC student.

Born and reared in Oxford, Lorena had her first child at age 15 while a student at the former D.N. Hix High School. Son Darrion was born in 1986. She remained in school, transferring later to South Granville High School. She dropped out her senior year there when she became pregnant with her second son, Jazraun, born in 1989. 

Problems just piled up for Lorena. Jazraun was hospitalized for two weeks at two months old with a strep virus. His father, to whom Lorena was engaged, died in a car accident. Lorena was living in Durham at the time and working at Carbon Technologies in Butner. That company closed down, she lost her job, and her apartment caught fire. Before all these mishaps, however, Lorena had earned her Adult High School Diploma at Durham Technical Community College.

After the apartment fire, Lorena moved back to Oxford with her family and began to get her life back together. She met and married Victor Brown of Henderson, who was in the Navy at the time, in 1992. They have two daughters, Morgan, 9, and Ebony, 7. After living in Virginia and New York, the Browns settled in Henderson when Victor was discharged from the Navy in 1995.

A year later, Lorena Brown’s health problems began. She was diagnosed with Graves Disease, a hyperthyroid condition that caused shortness of breath, tiredness, irritability, and weight gain. Lorena took 19 pills a day for a year until she was able to have surgery in 1997 to remove her goiter.

Soon after the surgery, Lorena began to have double vision, and she was diagnosed with Myesthenia Gravis, a disorder that is characterized by muscular weakness and fatigue. Lorena said doctors told her about 2 percent of persons who have Graves Disease contract Mysethenia Gravis. Only about 25,000 people in the United States have the disorder.

“My energy wanes during the day, and toward the end of the week, I begin to wear down,” Lorena said. “Sometimes the fatigue is worse than others, usually in relation to how much stress I’ve been through.”

Did this stop Lorena Brown? Not on your life. It hardly slowed her down.

“I knew all along I wanted to go back to school,” she said. “I promised myself that when my baby, Ebony, started to school I would go again.” She enrolled in Vance-Granville Community College in the spring of 2000.

“I have plenty of motivation,” Brown said. “I made mistakes growing up, and as I matured, I realized I should have gone to school a long time ago and I wouldn’t have to push so hard now.”

On a typical day, Lorena gets up early and gets her four children off to school, then she goes to work as a teacher assistant at Wake Forest-Rolesville High School. Her duties there are as a job coach for the mildly disabled, going out into the community and helping them find practical job training.

Lorena Brown is majoring in Information Systems/Network Administration and Support at VGCC, and she is on track to receive her Associate in Applied Science degree in May of this year. She is taking two night classes at the VGCC main campus and three online courses this semester to complete her degree.

And Lorena Brown is not just completing her degree program – she is excelling. She has maintained a 3.68 grade-point-average, was elected to Phi Theta Kappa, the international honor society of two-year colleges, and has received two Presidential Merit Award scholarships. Last year, Lorena Brown’s biography was published in the 2001-2002 National Dean’s List.

Lorena said she chose Information Systems as a major because she loves computers and would like to continue working in the school system, trouble-shooting computer problems and working on their network.

“I started with almost no computer skills in classes with people who had worked in the field,” Brown said. “But the instructors are wonderful and are able to work with us all.

“The thing I most like about Vance-Granville is that every good thing is noticed,” she added. “The instructors are very supportive, they push you when you need it, and they understand your problems.”

Faith Harris, one of Brown’s instructors in the computer classes, said that Lorena is “a joy to have in class. She really works hard to earn everything she gets.”

Lorena Brown knows she will have Myesthenia Gravis all her life. “The weeks are tiring, but I don’t think about it. I just keep going.

“I push myself because I want my kids to see how I’m doing and realize that they can excel, too.”