You wouldn't know it looking at her now, but just five months ago, Yirui Wei, 22, was fighting for her life. Wei was swimming in the pool at Tara Apartments where she lived last June when she began to drown. By the time help arrived, she was already seriously injured.

"Yirui was in the ICU for, I think, more than six weeks and most of the time she was in very critical condition and it wasn't clear whether she was going to survive or not," Wei's advisor Lesa Beamer said. "She pulled through and it was about the same time that we realized that she was gonna make it that we also realized that her student insurance money had run out."

Beamer and Wei's friends banded together to help pay for Wei's hospital bills, a month of in-patient rehabilitation and additional out-patient hearing and speech therapies. So far the group has raised more than $30,000. Beamer says the group had to act fast.

"The brain begins to re-wire as soon as she woke up her brain was starting to re-wire," she said. "And so we didn't have any time to waste."

Wei is now attending classes and back working part time in the laboratory where she is conducting research for her Ph.D. Her recovery, peers say, is nothing short of miraculous.

"She's very much like she was before the accident," Beamer said.

But she's not complaining.

"Everything was easy, no hard part," Wei said.

Beamer says she hopes Friday night's fundraiser will be the last they need to pay all of Wei's bills.

For an international student, services like 911 can be foreign. That's why MU's International Center offers services to ease the transition into American culture.

"We don't try to scare them, on their first day here we don't want them to think they're in a battle zone," International Center Assistant Director David Currey said. "But at the same time to do try to address a lot of the emergency issues, even to the extent of explaining 911."

Currey's commitment to international students runs beyond orientation. He and his family band, known as "Curreykorn" performed at Friday night's fundraiser. The goal is not only to help Wei get better, but to prevent sad accidents like hers from happening again.

"I'm not sad," Wei said. It's lucky I'm alive."