“1 in 3 urban
youth display the symptoms of mild to severe PTSD. And when you compare that
data to the military data what you find is urban youth are actually twice as
likely as soldiers returning from Iraq to get PTSD.”
This presentation is crucial to educators interested in the future and empowerment of inner-city youth of color. View the entire video here.
In the name of God, the most beneficent, the most merciful.
Before I start, may I ask for some quiet – please pay attention to what youth is asking here.
Dear sisters and brothers, world leaders, please look up, because the future generation is raising their voice.
Today, we are 193 young people representing billions more. Each lantern we hold represents the hope we feel for our future because of the commitments you have made to the Global Goals.
In my life, I have experienced terrorism, displacement and denial from education. And these are the tragedies that millions of children are still suffering.
That shocking and heart-breaking photo of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi lying dead on a sea shore. The parents of the girls abducted by Boko Haram, with tears flooding from their eyes. And little children on the Syrian border with no home, no hope, force us to ask: how many more will we see killed, being rejected, neglected, being homeless? How many more?
The world needs a change. It cannot change itself. It is me, it is you, it is all of us who have to bring that change.
Dear world leaders, dear brothers and sisters,
Education is not a privilege. Education is a right. Education is peace.
Promise peace to all children, in Pakistan, in India, in Syria and in every corner of the world. Promise peace and prosperity.
Promise an education to my brave sister Salam and all refugee children, that wars cannot stop them from learning.
Promise my sister Amina that our sisters abducted by Boko Haram will be brought back and that all girls will be able to study in safety.
Promise us that you will keep your commitments and invest in our future. Promise that every child will have the right to safe, free and quality primary and secondary education.
This is the real investment the world needs and what world leaders must do.
I am hopeful that we all, and the United Nations will be united in the goal of education and peace. And that we will make this world not just a better place but the best place to live.
Education is hope. Education is peace.
Thank you.
Share that you stand #withMalala for girls’ education.
IRVING — Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday.
Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case.
So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock.
In the meantime, Ahmed’s been suspended, his father is upset and the Council on American-Islamic Relations is once again eyeing claims of Islamophobia in Irving.
Box of circuit boards
A box full of circuit boards sits at the foot of Ahmed’s small bed in central Irving. His door marks the border where the Mohamed family’s cramped but lavishly decorated house begins to look like the back room at RadioShack.
“Here in high school, none of the teachers know what I can do,” Ahmed said, fiddling with a cable while a soldering iron dangled from the shelf behind him.
He loved robotics club in middle school and was searching for a similar niche in his first few weeks of high school.
So he decided to do what he’s always done: He built something.
Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front.
He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for.
“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’”
He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward.
“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said.
“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’”
The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back.
They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.”
Ahmed felt suddenly conscious of his brown skin and his name — one of the most common in the Muslim religion. But the police kept him busy with questions.
The bell rang at least twice, he said, while the officers searched his belongings and questioned his intentions. The principal threatened to expel him if he didn’t make a written statement, he said.
“They were like, ‘So you tried to make a bomb?’” Ahmed said.
“I told them no, I was trying to make a clock.”
“He said, ‘It looks like a movie bomb to me.’”
Police skepticism
Ahmed never claimed his device was anything but a clock, said police spokesman James McLellan. And police have no reason to think it was dangerous. But officers still didn’t believe Ahmed was giving them the whole story.
“We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation.”
Asked what broader explanation the boy could have given, the spokesman explained:
“It could reasonably be mistaken as a device if left in a bathroom or under a car. The concern was, what was this thing built for? Do we take him into custody?”
Police led Ahmed out of MacArthur about 3 p.m., his hands cuffed behind him and an officer on each arm. A few students gaped in the halls. He remembers the shocked expression of his student counselor — the one “who knows I’m a good boy.”
Ahmed was spared the inside of a cell. The police sent him out of the juvenile detention center to meet his parents shortly after taking his fingerprints.
They’re still investigating the case, and Ahmed hasn’t been back to school. His family said the principal suspended him for three days.
“They thought, ‘How could someone like this build something like this unless it’s a threat?’” Ahmed said.
An Irving ISD statement gave no details about the case, citing student privacy laws.
‘Invent good things’
“He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” said Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan and occasionally returns there to run for president. “But because his name is Mohamed and because of Sept. 11, I think my son got mistreated.”
Mohamed is familiar with anti-Islamic politics. He once made national headlines for debating a Florida pastor who burned a Quran.
But he wasn’t paying much attention this summer when Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne became a national celebrity in anti-Islamic circles, fueling rumors in speeches that the religious minority was plotting to usurp American laws.
However, the Council on American-Islamic Relations took note.
“This all raises a red flag for us: how Irving’s government entities are operating in the current climate,” said Alia Salem, who directs the council’s North Texas chapter and has spoken to lawyers about Ahmed’s arrest.
“We’re still investigating,” she said, “but it seems pretty egregious.”
Meanwhile, Ahmed is sitting home in his bedroom, tinkering with old gears and electrical converters, pronouncing words like “ethnicity” for what sounds like the first time.
He’s vowed never to take an invention to school again.
Thank you, Janet Mock. This is what we need to be seeing. Right now, aside from Mock’s segments, violence against trans women of color doesn’t exist on cable news. And that’s simply unacceptable.
#hbd Ann Richards, former feminist governor of Texas and the 1st woman elected to the position in her own right. She once said: “I did not want my tombstone to read ‘She kept a really clean house.’ I think I’d like them to remember me saying ‘She opened the government to everyone.’”
Amrita Sher-gilis considered one of the most important womenpainters of 20th Century India. Known for her paintings of women, as well asher many affairs with both men and women, she is sometimes known as ‘India’sFrida Kahlo.’
Born to a Punjabi Sikh aristocrat and a Hungarian Jewishopera singer, Sher-gil learned to paint at age eight. She studied in Florenceand Paris, and was influenced by European painters of the time, like Cezanneand Gauguin.
After returning to India in 1936, she was inspired by the
Bengal School of Art, and toured South India, where she found her calling- to
paint the lives of Indian people, particularly villagers and women.
Just days before the opening of her first major solo show,
Sher-gil became suddenly ill and died. She left behind a large body of work, which
the Government of India has declared a National Treasure, and her legacy has
influenced generations of Indian artists.
(The portrait is approx. 9″ x 12″ and is available here). I’ve also included some of her paintings in this post.
“I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.”
On her NASA calculations:
“Early on, when they said they wanted the capsule to come down at a certain place, they were trying to compute when it should start. I said, ‘Let me do it. You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I’ll do it backwards and tell you when to take off.’ That was my forte.”
Katherine really stood out in her field because she was the only woman who asked questions.
“The women did what they were told to do,” she explained. “They didn’t ask questions or take the task any further. I asked questions; I wanted to know why.“
In 2011, when asked if she still counts things:
“Oh, yes. And things have to be parallel. I see a picture right now that’s not parallel, so I’m going to go straighten it. Things must be in order.”
“For decades, the Boy Scouts of America’s ban on gay adults has stood as a towering example of explicit, institutional homophobia in one of America’s most important and recognizable civic organizations.”
