Oprah Reflects On Academy for Girls' First Graduation
Oprah Winfrey is set to graduate the first class of her Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls on Saturday, a 10-year journey that has been filled with tears, trials and triumph, she told ABC News' Diane Sawyer.
"I've learned so much. ... I would do it differently but the fact that we are here is a triumph," Winfrey said in a wide-ranging interview that touched on her own future in TV.
"This has been a journey of 8,000 miles," she said this morning. "Tomorrow, for me, is about celebrating the journey this has been."
Watch "World News" tonight at 6:30 ET to see Diane Sawyer's interview with Oprah Winfrey.
In January 2007, the talk show host opened the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls on 52 acres in the small town of Henley-on-Klip, south of Johannesburg, South Africa. It took $40 million and six years to build.
At the time, Winfrey called the school -- a promise to herself and to former South African President Nelson Mandela -- "the fulfullment of my work on Earth."
Of the nearly 3,000 applicants, 152 of the country's brightest young girls were selected to attend the boarding school. 72 students will be graduating on Saturday and the school currently has around 400 students.
Winfrey said today that despite their traumatic backgrounds -- pocked with poverty, AIDS, rape, disease and death -- the students pushed forward and succeeded. All of them are headed to college, with 10 percent bound for a U.S. university.
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'I Promise I'll Make You Proud'
She said she has few concerns about the young women as they started a new chapter in their lives.
Winfrey, who after 25 years ended "The Oprah Winfrey Show" in May 2011, also touched on her struggling cable network OWN and her new weekly primetime show, "Oprah's Next Chapter."
She said that building the network was like "trying to turn a ship around in the middle of a, you know, small canal" and acknowledged that if she could start over, she'd make some adjustments.
"If I had to that all over again, I would not make the mistake of making the big announcement," she said. "I would try to quietly build one night at a time."