Pupils hear stories of heartbreak, oppression and hope
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Sara Nabi, an Afghan refugee, fled the Taliban to come to America. She told about 300 students Monday about a lawless life in Afghanistan and the value of her new life in this nation of laws, America.
The Catalina High Magnet School student said that if she'd remained in her homeland, "I'd be a wife of some guy I had never met and I would have kids."
She also wouldn't be getting a publicly funded education or planning to go on to college and medical school.
Nabi; Kadar Iman, a native of Somalia; and Ismail Mberwa, also of Somalia, described heart-breaking stories of the killings of family members that drove them to flee their countries.
All three attend Catalina.
Nabi fled Afghanistan to Pakistan and the Somali teens fled to Kenya before coming to Tucson.
Their appearance was part of Law Day 2008, sponsored locally by the Young Lawyers Division of the Pima County Bar Association.
According to the American Bar Association, the event aims to spark discussion of America's "heritage of liberty under law."
The 300 high school and middle school students attended the event at the Pima County Courthouse and Board of Supervisors meeting room downtown.
The students also toured court rooms.
Iman said his mother died when he was 7.
"My dad had four wives at the time," he said. He was the oldest of his father's children.
The family walked for three days from Somalia to Kenya with no water or food, he said.
"My mom died two months later. The genocide in Somalia killed my grandpa, grandma and my sisters," he said. "People were murdered in front of us for no reason. In Somalia, there's no government to solve the problem."
Now, at Catalina, "my new friends and my teachers help me a lot," he said.
Nabi said she left Afghanistan when she was 2.
"The Taliban said they were the law. We had to follow their rules. I saw my uncle die. They hanged him. I lost my dad," she said.
The family walked three days through the mountains to Pakistan, she said, and eventually sought refugee status in America.
Mberwa said he lost his father when he was 6. He wants "to get education so I can go back to my country to make it better."
He described a life on the run evading civil war.
"A lot of people died (in Somalia) because of no food, nothing at all. No place you can cook because you don't know where you can go by nighttime.
"I don't want to go back to my country. I saw a lot of negative things going on," he said.
Tom Volgy, a University of Arizona political science professor and former mayor of Tucson, moderated the discussion. He fled Hungary for the United States in 1959. He told the students, "The rule of law doesn't guarantee everything. If we care enough and we do our jobs well as citizens, we always have opportunity, the opportunity that these young people came here for."
Source: Tucson Citizen, May 06, 2008