Page 32 - South Mississippi Living - September, 2015

PEOPLE fellowship
A MAN
Pascagoula man hopes to help Mississippi by studying Germany’s economy
story by Susan Ruddiman Pphoto courtesy of Deeneaus Polk
PASCAGOULA NATIVE DEENEAUS POLK is the first Mississippian to receive the German Chancellor Fellowship.
ascagoula native Deeneaus Polk, 28, probably doesn’t remember the first time he was in Germany as a toddler, but he certainly hasn’t forgotten his other visits years later. Now he is in Bonn, Germany, as the first Mississippian to receive the German Chancellor Fellowship. He
was among 50 fellows selected from Brazil, Russia, India, China and the United States who are interested in leadership in the areas of politics, economics, media, administration and culture.
Polk’s mother, Jacqueline Ford, had lived in Germany years earlier as a military spouse and a young mother, and it was
an experience she never forgot. She returned to her native Pascagoula and found herself single, raising Deeneaus and his younger sister and brother, Demetra and Desmond. She has since remarried Lee Ford, a man Polk calls his father.
“Deen started working so young. He wanted to be the man of the family. It was a struggle, and though I didn’t want my children to see me struggle, I think it’s made a brighter future for them and made them push harder,” Ford said.
Sometimes she juggled three jobs. Ford said her son was shy. Polk said he wasn’t the smartest or best spoken child in his neighborhood, but he had a certain amount of luck to push him along the way.
His first break came at Pascagoula High School when all the language classes were full except for German. He took the class under Tracy Case Koslowski where she told him about the U.S. State Department funded Congress-Bundestag Scholarship which pays for the airfare for high school students to live with host families in Germany for a year. Polk applied and was accepted into the program.
“To be honest, I thought he wasn’t going. Then the plans started getting ahead of me, so I had to catch up. I saw the light in his eyes. It was something Deen really wanted to do,” Koslowski said. “The experience opened him up so much.”
Polk lived in Drakel his junior year of high school where he was the only black person. In this “sea of white, I really found myself and who I am,” he said.
32 SOUTH MISSISSIPPI Living • September 2015
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