Immigrant youth to share stories
Muslim Film fest to include discussion of experiences
Sana Shakir hasn’t experienced the trauma and persecution of some of the students featured in “Refugee Kids,” the documentary that will be shown Sunday as part of the Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival, but she knows what it’s like to be an immigrant child in the United States.
She arrived at age 8 with her family from Jordan after living in Iraq, not knowing how to speak or write English. Today, at 17, she knows English so well she excels in competitive forensics at Oak Creek High School. And while acknowledging she puts up with second looks and occasional comments about her hijab, or head scarf, Shakir has found the U.S. to be a place where she can thrive.
“I think it’s great,” she said Saturday. “The safety of it, and how accepting people are, how amazing everything is. There’s so many opportunities and things you could do here.”
Shakir will take part in a panel discussion with other immigrant teens after the 3 p.m. Sunday free screening of the film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Union Cinema.
The documentary follows students at a New York City summer program for children seeking asylum from the world’s most volatile conflicts. It tells stories of how they escaped war and danger en route to settling in the United States.
Laura Vargo, a bilingual multicultural education teacher leader for Milwaukee Public Schools, called the film “really brilliant.” She saw it last week, along with students
from four MPS schools.
“I can’t speak highly enough about it,” Vargo said. “It ... showed very heavy experiences, very real experiences for many of our kids. It was both accurate and yet optimistic and hopeful.”
Nurhayati Ali, 16, a junior at Salam School in Milwaukee, also will take part in the panel.
A Rohingya Muslim, Ali’s family escaped persecution in Burma, fleeing first to Malaysia before arriving in the U.S. before she was 2 years old.
Ali has seen the political rhetoric about Muslims worsen over the years. But she wants to be a physician and knows she has opportunities in the U.S. that she would not in Burma.
“I’m really thankful I’m here,” she said.
Shakir, whose Iraqi father was a language interpreter in Iraq, said she misses the closeness of family culture in that country. She experienced it again during a summer visit in 2014, which include Ramadan.
“Everyone was so cohesive and together,” she said. “I just really loved that part of it.”
But the realities of daily living, such as security checkpoints and lack of electricity, made life difficult.
Here in the U.S., she says, she lives the life of an American girl. She plays tennis, enjoys the public speaking and camaraderie of forensics, and is a member of the school Spanish club. As a high school junior, she’s starting to look into colleges, with the hope of studying chemistry or biology.
“I’m really just grateful to be here and get to know so many awesome people and be able to do so many different things that I probably wouldn’t be able to do back in Iraq,” she said.