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We can all take a collective breath. This election cycle has come to an end. Your candidate may or may not have won. Political ads will be replaced with holiday buying ads, but what about first-time voters. What did they think?
One day I found my neighbor, Hassan Alyasiri, testing the mailbox. It was broken and he mused out loud that important mail was at risk – like passports. Later, I learned that he was expecting his first American passport. He and his two adult children, Nora and Mohammed, had been sworn in as citizens in Baltimore. When asked if they felt differently after taking the oath, daughter Nora said, “I always felt like a citizen even with my Green Card. I felt like I belonged here.” Son Ali, a 2020 graduate of Eleanor
Roosevelt High School and the 9-year-old twins, Tuqa and Zainab, all under 18, will qualify for citizenship by filling out an N-600 form. Wife Batool is studying to improve her English for her citizenship test.
The family immigrated from Iraq. Hassan’s educated family was no shield against the impact of war under Saddam Hussein. No jobs; no future. He worked as a barber and then as an interpreter for the American troops. “Of the 11 men who served the American troops with me, only one other man survived. It makes me sad,” and he dropped his gaze. After Batool’s brother was killed going about his daily activities, it spurred their decision to emigrate. “We wanted more for our five children,” Batool explained through an interpreter.
The family was paired with a resettlement organization that sent them to Maryland. When they inquired as to where the best high school was, they were told Eleanor Roosevelt and the family settled in Franklin Park in Greenbelt.
I asked Nora, a 2017 graduate, and Mohammed, a 2018 graduate of Eleanor Roosevelt, about the adjustment of going to a new school and the language barrier. “We studied English every day in Iraq. We learned 10 verbs and 10 adjectives every day,” he recalls. “By the time I was 10, I could speak fluently.” Nora shared that at Eleanor Roosevelt, there is a multi-cultural atmosphere. “There’s a club for everyone,” so she joined the Muslim Student Association. There was one sticking point, she was in an ESOL class – English for Speakers of Other Languages – and she didn’t feel academically challenged. “I crammed all summer. I read lots of literature and tested out.” She credits her ESOL teacher with encouraging her. She is currently a student at the University of Maryland studying biology and hoping to eventually study medicine.
Mohammed is a student at Prince George’s Community College where he is studying computer engineering. He will complete his studies and then look for a job in his field to get real-life experience. This fall, brother Ali makes the third Alyasiri to continue his studies at Prince George’s Community College.
Both brothers and sister have been listening to the news reports and have been making up their minds for whom they wish to vote. Hassan asked clarifying questions about his ballot to help him make a decision.
“In Iraq we were taught the government is wonderful. But there was no opportunity to vote,” states Hassan. Asked what was informing his voting decisions, Mohammed said, “My goal is to live in peace. You have this tag above your name and people use it as an excuse to tear people apart. Bad people do bad things in the name of … [whatever]. I don’t know who they voted for. What I do know is that as flawed as this thing we call democracy is, we have elections, local and national, to improve it and make it stronger. It may always be a work in progress, but ‘We the People’ must mean all the people.”
