Liz Bowie of The Baltimore Sun delivered a touching look at the lives of refugee students in East Baltimore. She provides such intimate details about the lives of immigrant children, from several countries, that the insights her report reveals about classrooms in the city will, I believe, open your eyes to a new and developing world reality.
Baltimore Sun 3-part series published yesterday about the lives of immigrant students.
In the first part of the series, entitled “Torn Between Two Worlds,” Ms Bowie writes about the life of Narmin Al Eethawi, originally from Baghdad, Iraq, who still has a recurring nightmare from her time in the Iraqi capital in chaos years ago.
“I keep crying, and I’m really scared,” she says. “I don’t want to close my eyes. I feel like something will hurt me.”
But after her journey to America, she’s at least a little safer:
For millions of refugees like Narmin, it is a time of harrowing journeys. An estimated 60 million people, including those now risking their lives to get to Europe, flee war and ethnic conflicts in an unprecedented global migration. Some of those refugees—about 70,000 this year and 100,000 by 2017—will land in the United States, joining tens of thousands of impoverished, undocumented youths from Central America who have arrived in waves over the past two years.
As immigrants flee their home countries due to war or other bad conditions and US schools accept them, the questions will mount as to how well they are being served. How have schools developed the capacity to work with and educate immigrant children?
It is unimaginable to me to leave the US and live anywhere else, but many of these immigrants, and many children, have no other choice. That’s where our schools come in.
