Nadra Mohamed, a senior at Mission High School in the heart of San Francisco, was born in Eritrea, which is next to Ethiopia in East Africa. Her family fled strife there and came to the U.S. in 2012. Along the way, she made stops in Sudan and Kenya and had to skip four years of school.
Next month, she and her schoolmates are visiting the rest of the world. Mohamed and 15 other Mission students, accompanied by two faculty members, have just raised enough cash — more than $25,000 — to fly to Geneva, Switzerland, for an international “Model United Nations” conference, a gathering of kids from around the world.
You might know Model U.N. as an extracurricular club in high school. Students adopt a country and make policy arguments on its behalf at regional gatherings, a cross between debate and international studies.
Thanks to $16,000 raised through the tech firm Dropbox, plus several thousand more from an ongoing Gofundme and by selling snacks at school events, they now have enough for plane tickets. (They still need several thousand dollars more for expenses and necessities like food.)
How they’ve gotten this far, like many immigrant stories, is one of a little good luck and a lot of hard work. A French exchange student spending a year at Mission took a class on critical thinking and social change with Fakhra Shah. She loved it so much she insisted her mother, visiting from France, meet Shah. They hit it off — and the mother happened to be the director of a Model U.N. group.
That planted the seed of the idea, says Shah. When a group of French-Swiss students came to California for a Model U.N. conference early this year, they donated their pocket money; instead of going on a Bay cruise and dinner, they gave Shah’s students seed funding, and an improbable trip suddenly had a glimmer of a chance.
The story continues to reverberate across continents. Shah’s student Kenan Mirou, who fled Syria for the U.S. in 2013, has been asked to give the conference’s opening address.
Surveyed earlier this decade, Mission’s 925 students, many undocumented, held 47 different passports — one of the most diverse high schools in the country.
Mission High doesn’t have a Model U.N. club, but the school is practically a United Nations itself. Surveyed earlier this decade, Mission’s 925 students, many undocumented, held 47 different passports — one of the most diverse high schools in the country, according to the book Mission High, whose author Kristina Rizga embedded herself at the school for five years.
The kids going to Geneva (or their parents) hail from all over, including Syria, Guatemala, the Philippines, Mexico, and Yemen.
Mohamed is representing Nigeria. Her assignment is to present ideas for more sustainable urban development. The students work during lunch and stay after school, reading Model U.N. materials and doing research. “It surprised me that there’s a housing crisis and a shortage of schools,” says Mohamed.
Marvin Zita was born and raised on 21st Street, not too far from Mission High. His parents came to the U.S. from the Philippines in the 1990s. He’s been assigned to represent Tunisia, and he’s learning about copyright infringement of street art as well as how to combat gender-based violence in schools. “The topics are really specific and hard to research,” says Zita. “But we’re ready for Geneva.”
Their breakneck education to prepare for Geneva hasn’t been limited to geopolitics and research skills. They’ve had practice presenting their work in public forums on a trip earlier this year to Santa Rosa High School and making fundraising pitches to tech workers. (The Dropbox pitch was obviously successful; the Dropbox employee who coordinated the help did not respond to a request for comment.)
The students are already attuned to others’ problems and curious about the world. Zita admits he didn’t connect with teachers and never cared much about education until he chanced into Shah’s critical thinking class as a sophomore. Now he wants to do something about his neighborhood’s gentrification and, whenever possible, tries to steer his football teammates away from the toxic machismo of sports culture. (Zita plays on the Mission football team.) “I’m telling them things they don’t want to listen to, trying to make them aware of their vocabulary,” he says, like calling each other “the p-word” in practice. He admits he has to pick his battles.
Mohamed, who says she was “unable to understand” when she arrived in the States, now tutors English learners and others. She heard about Shah’s social justice class from her older siblings: “I get to be myself in that class, express myself, learn about my own culture — I’m Muslim. Everyone is welcome. All voices are heard.”
Shah, who has been a full time teacher at Mission for five years, attracted national attention after the 2016 election. Her memo addressing potential discussions with students about Donald Trump’s racist, sexist campaign was distributed through the San Francisco teachers union and amplified by the media as an “anti-Trump lesson plan.” It soon became an alt-right trollfest, with her name and the school phone number posted on a Nazi website. “They called me a Paki mutant, an Islamic terrorist, and other things that are blocked by our school’s wi-fi filter,” Shah says with a laugh. (Her parents were from Pakistan. She was born in the East Bay town of West Pittsburg, now called Bay Point.)
The best revenge, she says, is taking her diverse group of students, including three Muslims, to the United Nations. Which brings up the question: Is she worried about hassles going through customs? There have been some logistical visa twists, in part because they’re staying with families in France but attending a conference in Switzerland. “But we have lawyers on standby,” says Shah.
We couldn’t obtain a snippet of the speech that Mirou, the student from Syria, is writing for the opening ceremony; but if it’s anything like the bio he wrote for the group’s fundraising effort, it’s bound to be a knockout.
I am Kenan Osama Mirou, a 17-year-old Syrian immigrant. I moved to the U.S. in 2013 when an armed group attempted to kidnap my father and I. Since then I have published stories about my life that have gotten attention from outside of the country and was taken to Scotland to tell my story on a nationwide heard podcast. I owe all my successes to my mother who is waiting to see me shine while she suffers a challenging life in a war-torn country. My wish is to be able to change as much as I can of my country’s destiny by spreading awareness and stories of the continuous violence that is affecting my people. I will not let my life pass without benefiting and nourishing the jasmine flower roots that have given me the strength and courage to start over and stay strong.
