New American Success Stories – Immigrant children shine

April showers bring mayflowers.

What do Mayflowers bring?  Pilgrims/ immigrants and the bad and good things they bring to the United States of America.

While the Pakistani  terrorist who tried to set off a bomb in Times Square was being arraigned, Nihlu Hoque, a “runner” from Bangladesh who has worked for me since 1984 was showing me a letter from the Department of Education.  It informed him and his wife, Farida,   that their daughter Zinedine had been accepted into the Gifted and Talented Child program.  The next day he brought in a letter from  Ethical Culture’s Fieldston school saying that she had been accepted with a full scholarship.

Like many people from Bangladesh, his parents had picked his wife out for him. When he was of age, Nihlu was summoned home to meet his bride to be and it was love at first sight. The wedding was  a sumptuous affair and they settled happily into marriage but Nihlu had to come back to work and cried almost every day for his little Farida.  (Many people of Bangladeshi descent have worked at the restaurant over the years and many marriages had been arranged to not so happy results.)

A year or more later she arrived and Nihlu brought her in to meet us all at the restaurant.  How proudly he showed off his little jewel  who was dressed in a lovely sari, and carried herself with much pride, at once woman and child.  She set about going to school and learned English quickly and loved to play with her schoolmates after school.  Eventually she got pregnant and Zinedine was born.   She has had one or two life-threatening diseases and Farida has nursed her back to health, reading book after book aloud to her.  She laid down the foundation and Zinedine has grown beautifully into a gifted child.

Her little brother will be who he is and may or may not excel at school but he has also grown up listening to his mother read the same books that inspired Zinedine and there is plenty of love in that home to make him feel that he too will succeed.

Another reason to be proud

I’ve known Sophia’s maternal family, the Liconas, since I was a baby so this is a friendship that goes back many generations, but it was only a year  or two ago that I met and was enchanted by Sophia and her sister, Aida, who was named after my mother. These girls have grown up with much intellectual stimulation (their mother is a professor of rhetoric and woman’s studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson and her partner is a documentary filmmaker) but still it is a tremendous achievement for this young Mexican-American young lady to be recruited by several top Ivy League schools with full scholarships.  She has decided to to go to Stanford.

We can expect the same from Aida.  Not only has she won statewide prizes for her interpretation of  a poem called but is a wonderful poem herself.  She also was a reporter at the World Woman’s Congress in Madrid where she wrote this story .  Both girls are politically active as you can see by the attached picture from Rolling Stone Magazine

Jocelyn Zhunio

In January, I got a Facebook friend request from an eighth grader from Reading, Pennsylvania that I was very happy to accept.  I am very interested in what is on the minds of young Hispanics and welcome the opportunity to connect with them.  Jocelyn informed me that she had decided to be a chef and asked for an interview. I tried to set up a telephone appointment but she asked that we meet in person and said that she would contact me as soon as her father could drive the 109 miles from her home  to the city.  I didn’t hear from her in several months and assumed that she had changed her mind but in early May she contacted me and came to see me fully prepared with a list of well-thought out questions and we spent two delightful hours together.  A few days later I got a lovely  note from her thanking me for inspiring her and validating her dream.  Her older brother is studying dentistry, the second boy wants to be an architect.  Her parents immigrated from Ecuador and speak no English yet they have been able to give their children the  confidence and support to fulfill their American dreams.

These young people are the future of the United States of America and they are born of immigrants.