INCREDIBLE OBSTACLES TO SUCCEED IN SCHOOL AND LIFE

STORY BY CHRISTINA HUGHES BABB | PHOTOS BY DANNY FULGENCIO

Growing up, earning good grades, pursuing a talent and gaining college acceptance is tough, but imagine doing it all in the face of abject poverty or an incurable disability or while you are the primary caretaker for a dying parent and your younger siblings. Such circumstances can become an excuse for teens to escape down a destructive, pain-numbing path. For a few Lake Highlands seniors who will graduate this month, however, hardship is reason to strive for a better future. Their determination, support from teachers and administrators, and, perhaps, the ironwill derived from a fight for survival has driven them to remarkable success.

At an age when most girls are experiencing a first crush or attempts at lipstick, Ksanet Seghid was emigrating from her country — Eritrea, in the horn of Africa, which was in the midst of political upheaval and religious oppression — to a place where the language and culture were a mystery; she was leaving behind her father and every friend she knew, save her two younger sisters, Bethlehem and Abighail.

Ksanet’s mom was experiencing health problems. A midwife by trade, she had observed first-hand the inadequate healthcare system in Eritrea.

America offered better medical-care opportunities as well as freedom to practice their Pentecostal faith, which was illegal in Eritrea.

So the family entered the Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery, a program to help residents of qualifying countries obtain American residency, and was accepted.

Ksanet’s first American school, in Wylie, Texas, was a nightmare, she says.

“We didn’t know English, and [the other kids] made fun of us — made fun of our accents, made fun of my sister and me when we talked to each other in our language.”

With a sad smile and downturned eyes, she recalls, “They said we were monkeys from the jungle. It didn’t even make sense.”

Things improved when the girls moved to an apartment in Lake Highlands. At more diverse Forest Meadow Junior High, they made friends. And at Lake Highlands High School, Ksanet embraced every academic opportunity possible; she had decided as a child walking the halls of Eritrean hospitals with her mother that she wanted to attend medical school someday.

She enrolled in Advanced Placement courses and joined the track team.

But things unraveled when her mom was diagnosed with bone cancer.

Teenage Ksanet became her family’s main caretaker. She supervised her sisters, cooked, kept house and nursed her mom. Members of their Eritrean Baptist Church helped the family the best they knew how.

But Ksanet cries when she recalls the day church members rushed her mom off to the hospital and refused to tell her what was going on.

“They thought they were protecting me from something, so they would not tell me anything. Then, when I finally saw what had happened, I was shocked.”

Doctors had amputated Ksanet’s mother’s leg.

From there, things only got worse. “She got so skinny,” Ksanet says, her voice cracking.

“She went from this beautiful woman to [long pause] a skeleton. Her hair fell out,” says Ksanet, absently touching her own thick locks. “She couldn’t work or even move, or anything.”

The next year was the worst. Her mom was bedridden, swollen from head to toe; she could not so much as use the bathroom on her own.

The girls longed, emotionally, for their once strong and vibrant mother.

“My sisters missed her and wanted to talk to her, but she was so tired and sometimes couldn’t speak at all.”

Last year a hospice nurse began coming to their apartment, “but only in the mornings, like to change sheets,” Ksanet says; someone had to be with her the rest of the day. During that period Ksanet spent two school days a week at home and missed all her track meets. She says school administrators understood the situation and made arrangements regarding attendance. A neighbor/church member came the other days. On those days, Ksanet attended classes and track practice, then came home and cooked, and finally studied from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m.

Just when Ksanet thought she would break, her father appeared, having acquired a temporary visa.

It was a godsend, Ksanet says. “I just don’t know how I would have gotten through it without him,” she says.

Ksanet’s 44-year-old mother died on a Sunday morning in winter 2013.

Ksanet had to stifle her own pain as she consoled her sisters.

“I tried to act OK, to look strong, for them,” she says. “But I did not feel OK. I was really, really sad.”

Her father, the church and Lake Highlands High School personnel sustained Ksanet.

“I nearly failed the six weeks when my mom died, but my teachers helped me. My counselor Shannon Rodriguez would sit and listen to me; I could talk to her. I had friends now at school, who also went to my church, and they prayed with me. My mom and dad had introduced me to my faith, and it is what brought us here. I know if I did not have it I would not have hope. And I know my mom was comforted by faith, too. She knew she was going to go. I heard her sing and pray to God to accept her soul a few days before she died.”

Running and writing also provide Ksanet some relief.

Though she didn’t know a word of English a few years ago, it now is one of her favorite subjects, thanks to inspirational teachers such as coach Misty Benson, she says.

“I love writing,” she says. “I like it because — well, you can talk and get your problems out there, but when you talk to people, they usually say something back, and sometimes what they say doesn’t make things better — when you write, writing doesn’t talk back.”

Benson says the idea of being an inspiration to Ksanet is gratifying but backward.

“It is she who inspires me. To be the family caretaker, deal with the loss of a parent and still work so hard in rigorous classes — and mine is tough — is extraordinary, but Ksanet is also such a sweet, sweet girl,” Benson says. “She has always been so polite and shows her beautiful smile when she comes into your room or when you pass her in the hallways. Ksanet is that reallife example of someone who is beautiful both inside and out … she has persevered through all odds with such grace and poise it brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it.”

Ksanet continued improving academically. Joining the AVID organization her senior year helped her navigate the world of college and scholarship applications, entrance exams and financial-aid paperwork, among other things, she says. She recently was accepted to Texas Women’s University, where she will enroll in the nursing program.

“I want to be like my mom. She used to take me with her to the hospitals. I saw people needing help. She told me how badly doctors and nurses were needed. At first I thought I would become a doctor and then go back to Eritrea, but now I know they are needed in many places, like Parkland Hospital.”

Ksanet says she had many conversations with patients in the beds next to her mom’s during stints at Parkland. She sometimes wrote about their stories in a private notebook, she says.

After graduation, when the time comes to move to the college campus, Ksanet and her sisters will miss one another. But Ksanet says she knows the best thing she can possibly do for them is pave the way.

“Like my mom always said, do not make any excuses — an education is the most powerful tool we can obtain.”

Does your congregation have a heart for weaving?

Faith Inclusion Network of Dallas

Building Inclusion in Our Faith Communities

We’re here to help faith-based communities FIND ways to weave inclusion of individuals with special needs into our North Texas congregations.

The Faith Inclusion Network of Dallas (FIND) is a collaborative network of community leaders, organizations and service providers committed to impacting change within faith-based communities and congregations in the ways individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families find opportunities to fully engage socially, emotionally, academically, spiritually and in service to others.

WEAVING INCLUSION INTO OUR FAITH COMMUNITIES

Free Symposium | June 19th and 20th

Julie Chapman | Project Director | Faith Inclusion Network of Dallas 469.206.1657 | jchapman@JFSdallas.org

2nd annuaL

Lake HigHLands art & PLay FestivaL

Monday, May 26 at 8 aM

Lake Highlands Town Center Dallas, Texas register today! www.campsweeney.org/cs5k

One of Ari Solorio’s most poignant pastel sketches depicts a male figure huddled inside a closet. Colorful garments shroud the subject’s face and shoulders; lanky arms clutch knees against chest. Depending on the observer’s take, the scene might illustrate an evasion of some domestic horror or merely a child partaking in a game of hideand-seek.

Ari says he usually doesn’t try to explain his work; he just lets it “speak for itself.”

He does expand on one aspect of the piece — a striped dress-tie hanging from the inside door. “Things like ties, razors — like shaving — those are important to me. I know it is a silly thing, but since my dad wasn’t around, learning to tie a tie or to shave was a big deal.”

At age 7, living in Guadalajara, Jalisco, in Mexico, Ari spent most days unsupervised, caring for his toddler brother while his mother tried to find work. For months on end, he says, they were homeless and slept in cars. Ari’s mother, Mireya Enriquez, an American citizen, finally decided to flee his violent father and the rest of the insufferable situation in Mexico.

They relocated to the Dallas area when Ari was 8, but things weren’t easy here, either. They stayed with family when they first arrived, which meant eight people in a one-bedroom apartment, he says. His mom worked retail, but she moved from job to job, and they moved from one apartment to another, thus from school to school, during the first two years. Ari cannot even recall the number of schools he attended. “It was a lot,” he says with an uneasy laugh. At the time, he spoke no English.

English as a Second Language (ESL) classes helped, but he says he effectively isolated himself from other people until high school. Through art, and eventually through

THROUGH HOMELESSNESS, POVERTY AND TURMOIL,