Incredible gift from anonymous source makes a Baylor dream come true
Over and over, people told Rebekkah Wallin that her dream of attending Baylor was just not likely to happen. With no mother or father to pay for school, she could easily have believed them. Short on resources but long on determination, Rebekkah never gave up on the Baylor dream — but she never dreamed just how an incredible gift would make it possible.
Rebekkah, a senior speech communication major, never knew her father, and her young mother and stepfather were consumed by their own problems, at the expense of Rebekkah and her four siblings. She grew accustomed to her parents vanishing for days at a time, and she and her older sister were often tasked with finding food for themselves and their younger brothers and sisters.
When she was eight years old, her grandmother made a monumental decision that changed the course of Rebekkah’s life. Boys and Girls Country, a group home for children dealing with adverse family situations, would be Rebekkah and her siblings’ new home. Less than a year after the move, Rebekkah’s mom died suddenly. At a very young age, her family became children with similar backgrounds, and the house parents who took care of them and prepared them for a better future. The home provided a nurturing environment, as well as tutoring to help in school, where she began to excel.
Amidst the upheaval, Rebekkah decided she was going to go to Baylor — as a fifth grader. The decision was about as simple as it could be — she heard of it as a 10 year old, learned of its Christian foundation, and said, ‘That’s where I’m going to go.” But getting here wasn’t so simple. Boys and Girls Country provided college assistance to residents, but not enough to cover the costs of Baylor. With few solid options, her dream could have died. But a miraculous gift ensured that it didn’t.
When Rebekkah gave a speech at a fundraising dinner for Boys and Girls Country her senior year of high school, she boldly spoke of her desire to attend Baylor. What she didn’t know was that a Baylor Regent was there that night, and her story had resonated in a powerful way.
Not long after that speech, Rebekkah got a call from Baylor. “I’d been getting calls from a lot of colleges, and I thought it was just a normal call,” she remembers. “They said, ‘We have some really good news.’ I expected it just to be standard. But they said, ‘Someone has agreed to pay for your school.’ It took me a minute and I felt like, ‘Wait… Really?’ And then I wanted to run around the whole campus and yell, ‘It’s happening! It’s happening!’”
The donor’s identity remains anonymous, and Rebekkah still does not know the identity of her benefactor. But as she approaches her final semester at Baylor and prepares for a career in corporate communications, she finds herself eternally grateful and eternally aware of how different her life could have turned out.
“Every day,” she says. “Every day I think of it. I’m so thankful. What if I hadn’t found Boys and Girls Country? What if I hadn’t come to Baylor?”
Beyond that — what if an anonymous donor hadn’t been moved to action? We’ll be hearing a lot about gifts in the month ahead. But for Rebekkah (pictured above with her boyfriend, a fellow Baylor student), nothing will compare to a gift from a person she’s never met, but who changed her life — and inspired other lives, too.
“Whenever I go back now,” Rebekkah reflects, “students come up to me — and this never used to happen — but now they’ve seen me come here. And they come up to me and say, ‘We want to go to Baylor, too.’”
Sic ’em, Rebekkah!