Indiana Daily Student
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REGION
Monday, May 2, 2016 idsnews.com
Editors Alexa Chryssovergis & Lindsay Moore region@idsnews.com
Muslim convert found love, faith in Read By Cody Thompson Comthomp@indiana.edu @CodyMichael3
When Anna Maidi thinks about her life, she realizes it is split into two very distinct times. Her transition from the previous life to the new one is culminated around one clear moment. It starts with a goofy 19-year-old, the Hoosier Café in Read residence hall and a bottle of juice. The 19-year-old was Chabane Maidi, Anna’s now-husband. Hoosier Café is where they met in 2006 when Anna was 18 and a freshman at IU. The bottle of juice is what he was carrying when he changed her life. The memory is so vivid to Anna because Chabane influenced her to convert to Islam during a time when the religion was heavily stigmatized in the United States, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks. She wasn’t religious. She believed in God, she said. She believed He existed, but that was as far as her beliefs extended. Chabane was a devout Muslim, however. Anna said she saw how strongly he felt about his religion and the Quran, so she tried to read it for him. As a college student, Anna didn’t particularly have time to read the holy book from cover to cover as she had intended. Then she was offered an internship in France in 2009. While she was there, she began to read more often and said she found the truth. She officially converted during her last week
before coming back to the United States. She didn’t tell Chabane when she returned — not right away. “I wanted it to be just me and God for a minute,” she said. “When I told Chabane, I knew it would be ours, and I wanted it to be mine for just a little while.” After marrying, Chabane and Anna had two children. One is 3 years old, and the other is 20 months old. “I see more beauty in the world,” Anna said. “I feel as if I’m more myself than I ever could have been.” Anna made a slow transition to Islam, she said. Her subtle alterations, she said, shielded her from major forms of discrimination. One choice she did make that wasn’t subtle was the decision to wear a hijab and is something she has to think about on daily basis, she said. Anna said at this point she hardly looks in the mirror when she leaves her home, but she is consciously aware of stares when she covers her head with her hijab. “Uncovered, I go about my business,” Anna said. “When I am covered, I see people staring at me, and I have to wonder, ‘Do they hate me?’ Sometimes when someone approaches you, you get worried.” So few things were important to Anna before meeting Chabane, she said. However, one thing that was important to her was her family, who were open and supportive of her conversion, she said.
Her family, she said, always raised her to be openminded. She said they were raised Christian but are not devoutly religious anymore. Some of Anna’s friends from high school asked her questions about her conversion such as ‘What does that mean?’ or ‘What exactly do you believe in now?’ They didn’t do this in an accusatory way, but just out of curiosity, she said. After she explained her reasons and beliefs to them, they understood and were accepting, she said. While her friends expressed acceptance, not everyone in the country is as open-minded — Anna said it depends on the person. There are four types of people, Anna said. The first are the people who act as allies to Muslims, she said, and they realize Muslims in America are Americans. They realize it’s not even a bubble, but they are just like everybody else, she said. The second group of people, she said, are those who don’t know exactly how they feel but are worried because of what they have seen in the media. Third are those who hate Muslims blindly without ever looking into their real beliefs, she said. Finally, the most dangerous group, she said, are those who hate Muslims because they think they are educated on who Muslims are. “They made themselves experts on hating Muslims, and that’s why it’s impor-
TAE-GYUN KIM | IDS
Anna Maidi talks about her experience since she has converted to Islam on Thursday at Southeast Park. When Maidi was a freshman at IU, she met her now-husband Chabane. Maidi was introduced to Islam by Chabane and fully converted during her study abroad trip in France three years later. She has two children and is active in the local Islamic community.
“Meeting a Muslim will tell you a lot more about who we are than reading the Quran.” Anna Maidi, Muslim convert
tant to get to know Muslims, not Islam,” Anna said. “Meeting a Muslim will tell you a lot more about who we are than reading the Quran.” Anna was 14 on Sept. 11. 2001, and she was busy taking her ISTEP exams, so she didn’t find out until after she was finished. Because she was so young, she said she didn’t understand the political issues with what happened.
She said it was a horrible tragedy, and now that she’s older and understands the world more, she has noticed an otherization of Muslims since then. But because she was so young, she said Islamaphobia went over her head. Now, Anna reads the Quran, serves on the executive board at the local Islamic center and types Insha’Allah, which means God willing, at the end of
many emails and texts. She is also married, is a college graduate, has two kids, spends time with her family and goes to the park with her children. “I’m a real grown up now,” she said. “I have kids. That’s part of me being a Muslim, making these choices that have stuck with me. I thank God all the time that I found Chabane, because without him, where would I be?”
Startup business Bellhops makes moving out easier By Melanie Metzman mmetzman@indiana.edu @melanie_metzman
When Cameron Doody and Stephen Vlahos noticed freshman parents hated moving their children in and out of the dorms, they were inspired to create Bellhops. Doody and Vlahos started the company as Campus Bellhops working campusonly jobs. In 2013, the two relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee, changed the company name to Bellhops and expanded business to go beyond the college campus and include residential and commercial moving jobs.
Today, Bellhops is a startup moving company that connects college students with small- to medium-sized moving and lifting jobs. The company employs more than 6,000 contracted college students. Bellhops services are available in 90 cities, including Bloomington, Indianapolis and West Lafayette, Indiana, and jobs can be booked through the Bellhops app or website. “We’re the option between booking the traditional moving company and begging your friends for help,” David Martin, Bellhops’ communication director, said. Bellhops has been de-
scribed as the Uber of moving, Martin said. Student employees receive a notification from the Bellhops app with details of the date, location and size of a moving job when a customer schedules a move, just like Uber, he said. Today, dorm moves make up only 5 percent of Bellhops’ business, Martin said, but the company is growing dramatically. In the Indianapolis market, Bellhops saw numbers in April they were not experiencing until June or July 2015, Martin said. This is particularly significant because June through August is peak moving season, so see-
ing higher numbers earlier in the year bodes well for the future, he said. Last year, Bellhops’ business grew by more than twofold in Bloomington, so the company is looking to hire 100 more Bloomington-area college students to assist with the summer moving season, Matt Patterson, Bellhops chief operations officer, said in a press release. “Thanks to mushrooming demand, we must drastically increase the number of bellhops we have in the field,” Patterson said in the release. “It’s that simple.” Because Bellhops employment is contract based, it provides many benefits
for college students, such as the ability to make their own schedule, Martin said. Employees can also take the job wherever they go by adjusting their location in the app, Martin said. “We have students who do road trips and do Bellhops jobs for beer money as they’re driving across the continent,” Martin said. Bellhops employs more women than the average moving company, Martin said. “We still have females in the single digits, but it’s moving from less than 2 percent to 6 to 7 percent,” Martin said. “I think this says a lot about Bellhops.”
Currently, Bellhops does not provide transportation services, but Martin said the company hopes to expand to provide full-service moving options in the future. Martin said he attributes the company’s success to their belief no job is too big or too small. “We’ll help someone move in the summer and we’ll get a call back around the holidays to help get their holiday stuff lugged out of the attic,” Martin said. “You can’t get a moving company to help you get a Christmas tree out of the attic or clean out their garage, but that’s what our customers come back to us for.”
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