Former Gibsons resident Alexandra Molina knew her luck had changed while she sat waiting to hear if she had been chosen to appear on Oprah Winfrey's Wildest Dreams Come True show last year.
"I was sitting on this bench and at my feet was this patch of clovers. I had spent hours as a kid searching for four-leaf clovers, but this time I just reached down and picked one right away," she remembered fondly.
What followed seconds after that was a visit from super-model Tyra Banks who gave her the good news: she would not only appear on Oprah's show but receive the makeover she desperately wanted, a $10,000 shopping spree, a new car and $78,000 to go to school.
It was a big dream for a kid who spent much of her life on the streets in Vancouver and later in California.
"I always dreamed big. I even dreamed I would meet Oprah some day. There's a picture of me when I was 14 here on the Coast holding a picture of Oprah's magazine on the pier. I always believed in myself and my dreams," Molina said while in the hallway of her old high school this week.
She was on the Coast during her spring break from college in California and was asked to speak to students in teacher Gail Nielsen's class at Elphinstone Secondary School.
Nielsen worked with Molina while she was attending school there and recognized her triumph over adversity as something worth sharing with this year's class of students.
Molina's past includes a messy public divorce of her parents, an abusive father, years spent in foster homes and surviving on the streets. But she always had a drive to succeed.
"No woman in my family had ever graduated from high school. I had this goal that I would be the first one," she said.That goal was achieved though not without substantial help from teachers and counsellors along the way. "I was always open about what was going on in my life. I talked about it with my teachers and counsellors and they helped me through a lot of that," she said.
She had her diploma but no real plan for the future and no funding to make her dreams of going to college and "making something" of herself come true.
She moved to California in search of a better life but found things were worse, with stabbings outside the shelter she stayed at and gunshots heard almost nightly.
"It was scary for a kid from the Coast," she admitted.
One early morning while living on the streets in California, Molina happened across a contest run by Oprah that would grant a makeover to a deserving college student.
At that time, Molina thought she had secured government funding to go to school, but later she found it fell through.
"So I wrote this letter to Oprah at 4 a.m. just telling her everything I'd been through and how much I wanted a makeover," Molina said.
Soon she was being interviewed by Oprah's staff, and in one hour-long show, her life was given a giant push in the right direction.
"I was overwhelmed. It was amazing," she said.
Soon she was referring to Oprah as a friend and going to Tyra Banks' house for Christmas. Her fame grew as other media outlets interviewed her and word of her friendship with the stars grew.
But Molina's hard work was far from over. She would enroll in a top university only to find she didn't have the skills needed to succeed.
"I found out I had a learning disability I was not aware of at the time. I was working really, really hard but not doing very well. When they evaluated me, they found that in reading, math, science and history, I was at the level of someone who was 12 years old," she told students in Nielsen's class.
She ended up transferring to a college where the $78,000 scholarship will last much longer and sought out resources to help her succeed.
"There are a lot of resources on my campus to help me with all the things I didn't have the chance to learn in high school. During high school my life was really unstable, and it made school a lot harder than it needed to be," she said.
With the help of teachers and tutors, Molina is now excelling in college with an overall B average. She's currently taking philosophy, history, journalism and personal development with dreams of becoming a child psychologist.
"Now I'm leaning toward maybe getting my PhD, but whatever I do, I want to help people. I feel like I have been given so much and I can't keep it unless I give back," she said.
She's been true to that motto, sharing her shopping spree with friends and kids at the shelter she used to call home, travelling to give encouraging talks to teens when she can and even becoming a show-and-tell item for a little girl she used to babysit on the Coast.
"That's what I'm doing tomorrow, going to show and tell," she smiled.
Students in Nielsen's class had many questions about being friends with Oprah and Tyra Banks, but Molina hopes they heard the real message she was trying to convey.
"Don't ever give up. Chase your dreams and always believe in yourself, and you can overcome anything," she said.
