Adair Powers remembers the river trip she took with a few friends last summer. They were nowhere near a hospital when her heartbeat started to race. She was having an episode.
Powers was born with a heart condition called supraventricular tachycardia – a condition that speeds up her heart rate to dangerous levels when it strikes, leaving her feeling sick, tired and extremely drained. “When I had one, I would just cross my fingers and hope it would go away,” she says.
She looked down from the rocks where she stood into the cool water of the river. She thought about the odd remedies that slowed her heart in the past – standing on her head or getting dunked in ice water.
“I think that I’ll probably have to work harder for most of my life, but that just comes with it, and it’s fine,” Powers says.
That’s when she decided to jump in, praying all the while that her heart would slow down. It worked, much to her relief.
Powers has learned to deal with her condition and recently had surgery in order to fix it. But it’s not the only difficulty she’s faced. Coming from a low-income family and being raised by a single mother has also helped shape Powers into the hard-working person she is today.
As she and her three siblings grew up, Powers’ mother, Elizabeth Zauner, worked hard to make ends meet. The father wasn’t really in the picture and Zauner has had to work as a nanny and a freelance architect to bring in money. Technically, she’s unemployed and the family receives public assistance.
Zauner tries to save as much money as possible. The family shops almost exclusively at Goodwill and has been on food stamps for four years.
Powers was born Jan. 28, 1996, the second-to-last of the four kids. Her given name is Christian. The two older siblings are girls and they hadn’t planned on having another child. They had a boy four years later.
Her parents got divorced when she was five. Other than child support, her father hasn’t been there financially for the family. After the divorce, Zauner remembers how hectic things got as the sole parent of the household. All four kids were at different schools, she recalls. “I don’t remember how I did it,” she says.
Powers’ grandparents moved up from Corvallis to help with the kids. “They’ve been a huge part of the kids’ lives, and I’m extremely lucky for that,” says Zauner.
Growing up, Powers never felt like she was below anyone because she didn’t have money like other kids did. Seeing her peers in expensive clothes didn’t always bother her. “I’m always a little bit jealous of people who can shop at, like, Nordstrom,” says Powers. “But it’s not something I define myself by, how I look and how I dress.”
“It’s not something I’m ashamed of,” she says.
Regardless of financial insecurity, Powers never felt discouraged. She says despite the fact that her father’s been out of the picture, her mother has been supportive, loving, inspiring and dedicated to keeping a roof over their heads.
For as long as Powers can remember, her mom has rented out their basement to exchange students in order to support the family financially. Zauner was also concerned about her children’s safety. “There were four kids and I wanted another adult in the house,” she says.
The first three exchange students were Japanese nurses going through a program at Oregon Health & Science University. “I figured, ‘Well, they’re adults, they’re in their 30s. They’ll be good in emergencies,’” she recalls.
The house has been full of people from around the world ever since. German. French. Taiwanese. Spanish. “I’ve had so many exchange students I can’t even give you a number,” Powers says, laughing.
Zauner has worked hard to keep the family comfortable despite their financial status. “I had a good childhood,” says Powers. Finding opportunities to do fun things was also important for the family.
Zauner auditioned Powers and her older sisters for modeling gigs when they were younger. It helped bring in some extra money for the family. Powers started as a catalogue model for Meier & Frank. After that, she tagged along to her sister Abby’s regular acting classes.
“Modeling was too boring for me,” Powers explains. “I needed more fun and interactive stuff so I started going to my sister’s acting classes and I thought it was the coolest thing ever, so I got into it.”
She acted in commercials and some independent films, but ultimately decided it wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life and gave it up. “I was doing a lot of things that were really fun for me, but I really wanted to find my priorities,” she says. Powers decided she wanted to focus more on her academics and find out what she was really passionate about.
When she got to Grant, she discovered a program called Minds Matter at the end of her freshman year. It’s a program for high-achieving, low-income students to learn the skills necessary for college and careers, and to get out and learn in the real world.
To qualify for the program, Powers had to fit into three categories – her mother had to have an income less than $30,000 per year; she had to be going into her sophomore year of high school; and she had to have a GPA of 3.2 or above.
She fit all three categories.
“I got into it because it was an opportunity for someone of my financial status, and mainly because I was really interested in being able to travel,” says Powers.
Through the Minds Matter program, Powers was able to experience things that she never thought she’d be able to. In 2012, she went to Brown University for two weeks to study infectious diseases.
“I was really, really nervous,” she recalls. “I remember on the way to the airport I was trembling, thinking that the worst was going to happen, like that the plane was going to be delayed or I was going to miss it,” she says. She got no sleep on the plane, so she slept through orientation. The result? She didn’t know where any of her classes were, didn’t have a dorm mate, and ended up feeling completely lost. Her first day was a disaster. “I freaked out at first, but everything was fine from there,” she says. “I met some really, really nice people.”
But on the trip, Powers proved something to herself. Going to Brown “gave me the bravery to go outside the U.S.,” she says.
Last year, she spent a few weeks in Barcelona to study Spanish. Her cab driver spoke no English, and she stayed in an apartment in the middle of Barcelona with eight other people. “It was a very different lifestyle. Everyone was very relaxed,” she remembers.
This past summer, she traveled to Thailand where she was trained to do medical checkups on patients in the town of Udon Thani. It wasn’t part of the Minds Matter program, so she had to raise money for a plane ticket and apply for a grant for the tuition.
“I felt like Barcelona was more of a vacation, studying Spanish, and doing teenager stuff,” Powers says. “Going to Thailand, it was like: work nonstop.” In Udon Thani, Powers worked with laborers in the rice fields, Thai government officials and kids in a rundown orphanage. She and the others in the program were also prepped in wilderness training, first aid and CPR.
“The way they live is so, so different,” she says. “They work in the rice fields all day and they have basically nothing. You don’t really understand until you’re there.”
The trips through Minds Matter would have cost approximately $3,000 each plus airfare, food and books, making them out of reach for Powers.
Not only has she been able to travel through Minds Matter, but Powers also takes advantage of the program’s free school tutoring. In recent months, she and other students have been consumed by academic studies.
When students join the program, they are paired up with mentors. Powers’ mentor, Emily Clark, has been coaching her through school for three years. “She’s really ahead of the pack,” says Clark. “I think she’s been ready since sophomore year to go to college.”
In Powers’ time at Minds Matter, Clark has noticed her grow as an individual. “I think she’s definitely grown in terms of her confidence levels and her abilities,” she says.
When asked about her high school career, Powers laughs and says: “It’s been busy.”She volunteers at Providence Portland Medical Center every Wednesday in the cancer center, helping people who need transfusions or shots, or who have imbalances in their blood. She helps by making them feel comfortable in the hospital setting. “You get a taste of what it’s like to be in any sort of medically related jobs,” says Powers. “You get a pretty good look into what it’s like to be a nurse. You have to have extreme patience and kindness. It’s a very, very difficult job from what I’ve seen. I don’t think I’m going to be a nurse.”
If she opts not to go into the medical field, she might pursue her interest in politics. Either way, she’s focused on making change. At Grant this year, Powers is one of four site council representatives, as well as the vice president of UNICEF club. “She’s really dedicated, and she’s really excited about it,” says Ryen Parno, the president of the club. High school is going smoothly for Powers, but last month she faced a kink in the road. She woke up rather terrified and quite grumpy on the morning of Nov. 22. It was the morning she was going in for laser surgery to correct her heart ailment. “I was totally freaked out. I was actually convinced I was going to die,” she says.
Just days after the operation, though, there was no trace of Powers’ ordeal. If you saw her walking down the halls of Grant, you wouldn’t suspect a thing out of the ordinary.
At home, her surroundings don’t quite fit the notion of a family struggling with poverty. She lives in a Portland Craftsman house in Laurelhurst. Walk in and you’ll see tons of neatly arranged, framed baby pictures sitting on a shelf in the living room. A Japanese student and a Taiwanese student call the place home right now, as well as Powers’ neighbor and her daughter, who recently moved in with the family after a divorce.
Powers, her mom, and three siblings make nine total living under one roof.
The stairs creak, and you can usually hear cats purring, a dog barking, someone whistling or kids play-fighting. Occasionally, Powers’ brother Zach – the baby of the family – will be playing the Billy Joel song “Vienna” on the piano.
The kitchen may smell like Chinese custard, the handiwork of one of the exchange students currently living there.
“Everyone in the family expects great things” of Powers, says Zauner. “If there was one thing I could change about her it would be that she could see how amazing she really is because I don’t think she does.” Powers has many interests when it comes to college and her future career, but she ultimately sees herself working in the medical field. “I’ve done a lot of things that have to do with medicine, I had this idea that I wanted to be a doctor for a long time,” she says. Her interest in the medical field stems partly from her grandfather, Christian Zauner, who is especially close with Powers. “Me and my grandfather have a lot of the same outlooks,” Powers explains. “I think he sees a lot of himself in me.”
Her grandfather, 83, speaks seven languages, attended medical school and was in the U.S. Navy. “He’s led a very inspirational life,” says Powers. However, in the last few years he has been in hospice care with cancer. “It’s been a tough ride,” Powers says. Powers is working hard this year to get to college.
She’s applied to a number of schools, including University of Pennsylvania, Tulane University, Boston University, Cornell University, Vassar College, Duke University and her dream school: Stanford University. “I’m applying to a lot of schools that are really, really competitive and that I probably won’t get into,” she laughs. “But I’m doing it because I kind of feel like if I looked back years from now, I’d be really disappointed in myself if I didn’t try for those schools I’ve been working towards my whole high school career.
“I’m trying to figure out how I can make the most impact,” Powers says. ♦
