This time she did not come with her dog. As the blind student walked across the graduation stage last week you could almost feel the admiration from the thousands in attendance, then the unexpected announcement: "The degree with distinction!"It seems like only yesterday that a timid-looking Louzanne Coetzee joined the university as a first-year student. She was the top special needs student in the country from a school for the blind in Worcester.Louzanne had hardly landed on campus when she came steaming down the 100m race track at the first-year athletics event, and she is now competing for a place in the Special Olympics. You quickly forgot she was blind as she won a prized place on the Student Representative Council, where she is one of its most respected leaders."With distinction!" The applause was deafening.As a girl, Jacqui Middleton's ambitions were crushed when she failed to gain matric with a university entrance pass. A product of a disadvantaged school under apartheid, Jacqui was in fact told she was not university material.In her 40s, now the wife of an emerging farmer in the Free State, Jacqui did the unthinkable. She enrolled as a first-year student and decided to occupy a dorm room with her daughter. Last week this same woman walked across the graduation stage having obtained three degrees in four years, with more than 30 distinctions to her name. In that same week she completed an application form for a prestigious scholarship to do her doctorate in the US.Aneka van der Merwe's mother was stranded in Fort Beaufort. The hardworking single parent was struggling to make ends meet after a run of hard luck with her business. She had to tell her only daughter the bad news - I will not make it to your graduation. The young teacher education student, the first in her family to get a degree, was devastated.So her mother took a loan to buy a bus ticket and travelled to Bloemfontein for the graduation. One of the workers paid for the graduation gown.Aneke finally walked across the graduation stage, her mother in tears in the audience.When Valentino Thabang Ndaba was driven to campus all the way from Amaoti outside Durban by a kind white farmer, she had one goal in mind: to fulfil a promise to her late mother. Shortly after obtaining a qualification in journalism, her mother died in a car accident. Valentino decided to take up the baton and qualify in journalism herself.She rose to the top of her competitive class and grabbed the prized post of news editor of the campus newspaper.Those who knew her story choked up with emotion as she received her BA in journalism."Everyone here has a story," I told the graduation crowd. Which is what Michaela Jade Wilson wanted to share on my Facebook page. "My grandparents emigrated from Portugal with only a Grade 2 education behind their names. I was raised by a single mom who gave up her entire life to see me walk across that stage, Sir. Thank you immensely that I could make my mother's dreams come true [and] for the chance to be the soccer player, dancer, academic and leader that I wanted to be."And then there was that thin, sad-looking Zimbabwean student who came to study without a cent to her name. Her mother had lost her job in Harare and Melatia Nengoshama had nothing but a brilliant mind and a solid determination. But first she had to eat, so she joined the No Student Hungry programme. Within weeks, her face filled out, there was a bright smile, and she had the energy to attend classes.She won one academic distinction after another and last week she obtained her Honours degree with a faculty award for academic excellence.Here's the real story - ordinary South Africans raised funds for her studies, made certain she was fed, enabled her mother to attend graduation and ensured that Melatia felt loved and cared for every single day during her years of study.As xenophobic rage grips parts of the country, we need to keep perspective and share the stories of those millions of South Africans who give us hope by sharing the little they have with the neediest among us, even a poor Zimbabwean, so that graduation days are possible...