Graduate student Awet Weldemichael survived war, famine and political upheaval in his adopted homelands. Now his Ph.D. studies are building new understanding of the turmoil that has shaped his world.

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Awet Weldemichael was born in the middle of a 30-year war of independence. His homeland of Eritrea had been struggling since 1961 for freedom from Ethiopian rule.

Just 10 months after his birth, his family was forced to evacuate its hometown of Tessenei and flee to the neighboring Sudan. It was there that Weldemichael spent his childhood. Though he lived during the 1980s in a refugee camp of sorts, Weldemichael did not consider it such a bad place. There was land where the Eritreans could farm, they could start businesses, there was even relatively clean water.

"For people like me who knew nothing else, it was home," said Weldemichael.

But Sudan was both home and not home at the same time. Weldemichael and his family were Christians living in a Muslim country that was working to implement Islamic law (Shari'a). There were instances where he heard himself and his community referred to derogatively as outsiders, refugees.

"These were all reminders that our home in Sudan was not really Home -- that Home was someplace to which we had not yet gone," recalled Weldemichael.

Surviving was not always easy. Weldemichael endured the famine that spread throughout Northeast Africa in the 1980s, as well as a tidal wave of diseases that washed over rural Sudan a few years later.

"There is nothing I can take credit for in this," said Weldemichael. "It was just miraculous."

A series of miracles may have saved him from war, famine and disease, but Weldemichael took fate into his own hands when the war ended in 1991. Weldemichael and his older sister led the family's return to the home country he knew only from stories.

After graduating from his Eritrean high school, Weldemichael enrolled at the University of Asmara. He was studying law, which is taught in Eritrea as an undergraduate degree, but felt under qualified for being either a judge or a lawyer.

"I felt like I needed to know more about myself and my environment before I could defend someone or judge another," explained Weldemichael.

This quest for knowledge has guided his steps ever since, first to the University of Addis Ababa in the Ethiopian capital where Weldemichael hoped to embark on a journey of self-discovery. Given his early life experiences, it would have been tempting to blame the Ethiopians for the troubles he had endured, but Weldemichael felt such blame would be ultimately self-destructive.

"I had to find peace within myself," he said. "Instead of pointing a finger at someone else, I wanted to know Ethiopia and the Ethiopians up close rather than just considering them as my enemies."

Weldemichael enrolled as a history major in Addis Ababa. His quest to understand the actions of Ethiopians in Eritrea led to studies of the Eritrean independence war. In 1998, less than a week before graduation exams, a border war broke out between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Weldemichael and the other Eritrean students studying in Ethiopia were dismissed from their schools and deported to their home country.

Back at the University of Asmara, the chairman of the history department was a UCLA alumnus who allowed Weldemichael to take the necessary exams for his degree and then nominated him for a U.S. Agency for International Development fellowship to complete a masters degree in African Studies at UCLA. Though Weldemichael admits he was initially skeptical at the notion of flying thousands of miles away from Africa in order to study Africa, he said he has been won over by the scholarship, mentoring, guidance and overall research environment he has found at UCLA.

The admiration has been mutual. Weldemichael so impressed his history professors that he was recruited into the department's Ph.D. program and was awarded the Herma and Celia Wise Fellowship. The department pays Weldemichael's non-resident tuition, while another grant from the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program helps to support his work comparing the strategies of the independence movements in Eritrea and the former Indonesian territory of East Timor.

Weldemichael's Ph.D. advisors speak in glowing terms of their protégé.

"The remarkable thing about Awet is that he has the intellectual curiosity and also intellectual courage beyond that of many full-fledged academics," said Geoffrey Robinson, a professor of history who specializes in Southeast Asian history and serves as one of the co-chairs on Weldemichael's Ph.D. committee.

In order to properly conduct their research, historians must have a good grasp of the languages in the societies they wish to study. For that reason alone, many historians, even those interested in comparative history, tend to stick to one region. To formulate his research, Weldemichael built a background in Southeast Asian history from the ground up and studied Indonesian and Portuguese, two relevant languages for East Timor.

"I cannot think of anyone else who has put Northeast Africa and Southeast Asia together in quite this way," said Ned Alpers, chair of the history department, expert in East African history and the other co-chair of Weldemichael's Ph.D. committee.

Why would anyone take on such a daunting Ph.D. project? Robinson believes that Awet is looking for answers, trying to figure out why two small countries -- first colonized by Europeans, then recolonized by neighboring regional powers, then ravaged by long wars of independence -- turned out so differently. Eritrea has developed into an autocratic single-party state, while East Timor has so far managed to implement a multiparty democracy.

"This is not simply an academic exercise for him," says Robinson. "Awet has lived this history in his lifetime. He has seen his country go to war, fight for and win its independence, only to sink into authoritarian rule. The questions that Awet poses are not just theoretical. They are real questions about problems that have real world consequences."

Weldemichael thinks he would like to teach, advise government leaders on policy and continue his research into the repercussions of armed conflict.

Every once in a while, when he looks up from his computer amid his peaceful community of scholars, Weldemichael marvels at the turns his life has taken.

"This kid starting out as a nobody survived war, famine and all sorts of hardships to get one of the best scholarship packages at one of the most prestigious public schools in one of the strongest, wealthiest countries in the world," said Weldemichael. "It's like a Cinderella story, so to speak."