Toupta Boguena is a 40-year old Chadian scholar and graduate of Brigham Young University. In 2003 she founded the Organization for Community Supported Sustainable Agriculture in Chad. She is the daughter of Noida and Yvonne Boguena, and has three siblings, a sister Rose, and brothers David and D'jelda Bougena. She has two children Amir Boguena, and adopted Neloum Bouegena. She recently took in a minister and his wife whose house was destroyed in flooding.
In the early 1980s the Chadian Civil War brought poverty to her once wealthy family. Toupta's father Noida, a college-educated agronomist and ex-government employee, taught in a school with his wife Yvonne. Mass murder of government officials forced the family to evacuate south to the city of Doha. At age fourteen, Toupta saw pigs eating corpses, "It was a horrible sight. After that, I didn't talk much and became very withdrawn." Her parents sent her, her sister Rose, and her brothers David and D'jelda to a refugee camp in Congo where she lived for three and a half years. At age seventeen she returned to Chad and worked in an electric company in the capital N'Djamena. She found her father and paid for his medical treatment as he suffered from high blood pressure and untreated maladies, and found her mother and her siblings in Sarh. "They were so thin I hardly recognized them. They ate practically anything to survive."
In 1985 Toupta received a U.N. scholarship to go to college in the United States. Her father told her to "go to America but make sure you come home [to help]." The next day her father went into a coma and died. She went to the capital and then to the University of Arizona in the United States. She earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture in 1991 and a master's degree in agronomy and plant genetics in 1994. She became a Mormon and got her doctorate in botany in August 2003. She currently teaches plant science at the University of N'Djamena and has a second part-time job as a translator. She works with volunteers to help eight villages in the Lagone River region become self-sufficient.
"I don't want to run away from it. I'm no better than anyone living [in Chad]. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to learn and make informed decisions in life that was not offered to others. I can't turn my back on them."