FINDING
THE AMERICAN
DREAM
In Clarkston, Ga., the "Ellis Island of the South," a Georgia State English professor and an alumnus, a Syrian Kurd, have teamed up to help young refugees navigate one of the most daunting parts of life in a new country — getting into college.
FINDING
THE AMERICAN
DREAM
In Clarkston, Ga., the “Ellis Island of the South,” a Georgia State English professor and an alumnus, a Syrian Kurd, have teamed up to help young refugees navigate one of the most daunting parts of life in a new country — getting into college.
FINDING
THE AMERICAN
DREAM
In Clarkston, Ga., the “Ellis Island of the South,” a Georgia State English professor and an alumnus, a Syrian Kurd, have teamed up to help young refugees navigate one of the most daunting parts of life in a new country — getting into college.
IN THE CHECKOUT LINE OF AN IRAQI GROCERY STORE OUTSIDE ATLANTA, MARY HELEN O’CONNOR STOOD OUT.
Over 6 feet tall in heels, with pale skin and a Southern accent, O’Connor waited alongside two Syrian women, a mother and daughter. She’d met them just few weeks earlier after a colleague alerted her to the pair, who were struggling to acclimate to their new country. O’Connor had driven to their apartment and knocked on the door with an offer of neighborly assistance, and today she had given them a ride to buy Halal meat.
Heval Kelli (B.A. ’08) was also in line at Al-Salam International. A Kurd from Syria who had come to the U.S. 15 years earlier, Kelli struck up a conversation with O’Connor in English as everyone around them chattered in Arabic.
Kelli discovered that O’Connor was an assistant professor at Perimeter College’s campus in Clarkston, a resettlement hub for refugees that contains the most diverse square mile in America. They exchanged contact information and shared stories. She talked about helping refugees in her classroom and in the community get settled in their new metro Atlanta homes.
Kelli — now a cardiology Fellow at Emory University — told her how difficult it had been to find his way to college after arriving in the country at age 18, a journey shared by many of O’Connor’s students.
“I was a 12th grader with limited English skills, no knowledge of the American educational system and a 40-hour-a-week job to support my family,” Kelli remembers of those first few months in the U.S.
Now, he wanted to help others gain access to higher education and fulfill the dreams they had for life in America — which was exactly what O’Connor wanted to hear.
Over 6 feet tall in heels, with pale skin and a Southern accent, O’Connor waited alongside two Syrian women, a mother and daughter. She’d met them just few weeks earlier after a colleague alerted her to the pair, who were struggling to acclimate to their new country. O’Connor had driven to their apartment and knocked on the door with an offer of neighborly assistance, and today she had given them a ride to buy Halal meat.
Heval Kelli (B.A. ’08) was also in line at Al-Salam International. A Kurd from Syria who had come to the U.S. 15 years earlier, Kelli struck up a conversation with O’Connor in English as everyone around them chattered in Arabic.
Kelli discovered that O’Connor was an assistant professor at Perimeter College’s campus in Clarkston, a resettlement hub for refugees that contains the most diverse square mile in America. They exchanged contact information and shared stories. She talked about helping refugees in her classroom and in the community get settled in their new metro Atlanta homes.
Kelli — now a cardiology Fellow at Emory University — told her how difficult it had been to find his way to college after arriving in the country at age 18, a journey shared by many of O’Connor’s students.
“I was a 12th grader with limited English skills, no knowledge of the American educational system and a 40-hour-a-week job to support my family,” Kelli remembers of those first few months in the U.S.
Now, he wanted to help others gain access to higher education and fulfill the dreams they had for life in America — which was exactly what O’Connor wanted to hear.
After a chance meeting in this Clarkston grocery store, Mary Helen O’Connor and Dr. Heval Kelli discovered they shared a commitment to uplift the refugee community. Today, the mentoring program they founded is helping immigrants gain access to college.
After a chance meeting in this Clarkston grocery store, Mary Helen O’Connor and Dr. Heval Kelli discovered they shared a commitment to uplift the refugee community. Today, the mentoring program they founded is helping immigrants gain access to college.
ON SEPT. 25, 2001, Heval Kelli set foot in the U.S. for the first time. He had come with his parents and younger brother through a refugee resettlement program that placed them in Clarkston.
“We didn’t know anybody, and it was right after 9/11,” Kelli recalls. “But we were so thankful to be here.”
It was the second time he and his family had sought refuge in a new country. Six years earlier, they fled Syria in the wake of a crackdown against Kurds. After Kelli’s father was arrested and the family threatened by police, they paid a smuggler to get them out of the country and ended up in Germany.
But life there wasn’t easy.
“I didn’t know the language, and there was no one to teach me,” Kelli recalls. “I went from an honors student in Syria to a kid with bad grades who was getting in fights.”
His family also had to renew their status as asylum-seekers every six months, with no guarantee of permanent residence.
“In Syria, we had a good life, but we couldn’t stay because it wasn’t safe. In Germany, we had safety, but there was no security,” Kelli says. “We were just moving from one refugee camp to another.”
Kelli, a quick study, eventually earned entry into the highest-level secondary school in Germany. Then a year before graduation, he learned that — after two years of undergoing extreme vetting — his family was moving to America.
As soon as they arrived, the clock was ticking. The resettlement agency found them a place to live and paid for three months’ rent. After that, they were on their own.
“You’ve got to learn the language, get a driver’s license, find a job,” Kelli says. “My mom was a housewife, she wore a hijab, she didn’t speak English. Finding a job post-9/11 was impossible for her. Meanwhile, my dad had heart disease and couldn’t work.”
He enrolled as a senior at Clarkston High School and found a job washing dishes at a Mediterranean restaurant near Emory University. He had just one year to absorb the language, pass all his courses, take the SAT and complete his college applications. On his own, it would have been impossible. Luckily, he had help.
There was Ms. Freni, his English as a Second Language teacher, who spent extra time helping Kelli hone his English. There was Jean-Pierre, a refugee from Rwanda who had arrived in America the year before, who showed him how to apply to college and get an in-state tuition waiver. There was his brother’s soccer coach, who spoke German and helped get his transcripts from Germany translated correctly.
“I think about this all the time: ‘What if I never had any one of these people?’” Kelli says. “But that’s what makes America so special. It’s not necessarily the opportunities and the success and all that. It’s this constellation of love and support without an incentive or agenda.”
In August 2002, just 11 months after he arrived in the U.S., Kelli enrolled as an undergraduate at Georgia State. His biology teacher, Hanan El-Mayas, was impressed by how well he adapted to college life.
“He grasps concepts very quickly, and he works hard,” she says. “He projected this strength and confidence. It was like he was saying, ‘I have to survive, and that’s what I’m going to do.’”
He became an American citizen the same year he graduated summa cum laude and enrolled in medical school two years later.
“That’s what makes America special. It’s not necessarily the opportunities and the success and all that. It’s this constellation of love and support without an incentive or agenda."
– Heval Kelli
MARY HELEN O’CONNOR grew up Roman Catholic in central Florida. As a kid, she was close with her next-door neighbors, Joe and Marion Brechner, a Jewish couple who had each fled Eastern Europe with their families as children.
“I grew up with a very strong sense of what Ellis Island was, what it meant to them, and how the United States was built as a haven and for immigrants and refugees,” she says.
After earning a journalism degree from the University of Florida and a master’s in English education from Agnes Scott College, O’Connor began teaching English at Perimeter College while pursuing her doctorate at Georgia State. In 2007, she was grading essays for her freshman composition class when a student’s words leapt up at her.
“The essay began, ‘I was born in a small village in Sudan. Militiamen burned my village and killed my parents, and I had to run away,’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘Whoa. What is this?’”
The writer was one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, a group of more than 40,000 Sudanese boys orphaned or expelled from the country during the African country’s second civil war, many of whom resettled in the U.S. Reading about his experiences woke her up to the plight faced by many of her students.
“He was the first student who taught me what it means to be a refugee — and what it means to be a refugee in Clarkston, Georgia, in my class,” O’Connor says.
After that, she began to consider how educators could better serve new immigrants and refugees, making it the focus of her doctoral thesis.
“At Perimeter, I might have 27 kids from a dozen different countries in each class,” she says. “That’s crazy, but it’s also exciting, and I love it.”
Through her church, O’Connor adopted refugee families who were new to the community. One year, it was a Somali family of 10. Another year, an Afghan family of six. O’Connor collected furniture donations, helped fill out food stamp applications and taught teenagers to drive.
On campus, she gained a reputation as someone who could troubleshoot problems for immigrants. Her students began to come to her for advice, particularly about gaining access to college.
“Kids would line up outside my door, saying, ‘My sister can’t get in [to college], and I don’t know why’ or ‘They told my friend she has to pay out-of-state tuition, but she lives here,’” she says. “Navigating administrative issues can be very difficult. How many test scores do you need? What if you have a transcript from a foreign high school? What if you just got your GED? You’d like to think there’s a one-size-fits-all checklist so you can just say, ‘Here’s what you have to do.’ But it’s not that simple.”
When Kelli saw the work she was doing, he convinced her they needed to create a bigger, more structured program to help would-be students knock down obstacles to higher education.
“He said, ‘We need to figure out a way to duplicate or expand the work you’re doing. Because you’re just one person,’” O’Connor says.
He told her about a program he’d started called the Young Physicians Initiative, which mentored immigrant and low-income high school students who were interested in becoming doctors. Kelli thought they could develop a similar mentoring program to help guide refugees into college.
Khawla Al Abdullah (right) receives mentorship through the MINA program, and hopes to one day study nursing at Perimeter College. She and her mother Aisha (left) sought refuge in the U.S. two years ago after fleeing the war in Syria.
THE MENTORING INITIATIVE FOR NEW AMERICANS (MINA) was established in 2016.
That year, O’Connor was named the senior faculty associate for Perimeter College at Georgia State’s Office of International Initiatives. The new role made her responsible for the international profile of the college and allowed her to devote energy toward the establishment of MINA with Kelli.
O’Connor knew that academic research showed college applicants — and immigrants in particular — prefer so-called “hot” information (delivered by people in their social network) over “cold” information (delivered by official sources or institutions). So, they started by recruiting students, many of them refugees themselves, from Georgia State and other metro Atlanta universities to serve as peer mentors.
“We thought, ‘Why don’t we take that experience I had with Jean-Pierre and make it into a model?’” says Kelli.
Mentors and mentees keep in close contact and attend monthly summits, each focused on a particular part of the college process, such as taking placement tests, filling out financial aid applications or choosing a major. A network of mentors is available to each mentee, which O’Connor has found works better than the one-on-one approach.
“The person who’s really good at preparing for the math portion of the SAT isn’t necessarily the same person who knows a lot about the TOEFL [Teaching of English as a Foreign Language, a standardized test that measures English language ability],” O’Connor notes. “And there may be a third person who understands how to navigate financial aid because his or her package was similar to yours.”
One of the first people to sign up as a mentor was Shahad Waheeb, a Syrian refugee who graduated with an associate degree in chemistry from Perimeter College in 2017 and is now pursuing her bachelor’s degree on Georgia State’s downtown campus. For her, it was a way to offer the kind of assistance she desperately needed when she arrived in the U.S. in 2013.
“I finished high school in 2012 and was admitted to Damascus University, but my parents wouldn’t let me attend because the Syrian government was bombing university campuses at the time,” says Waheeb. “They were afraid I would die.”
Waheeb was eager to resume her studies in America, but the college application process seemed murky. Some people told her that schools would not accept her Syrian diploma. Others warned her that if her English wasn’t strong enough and she failed her classes, she’d have to pay a penalty to the government if she received financial aid.
“The system here is different from the one in Damascus, and I wished I had someone who had been in my situation to advise me,” she says. “I wanted to help other students who were struggling as much as I had. It didn’t matter if they were from my country or from somewhere else. I wanted to help.”
Through MINA, she was connected with Duha Ghazal, whose family had been driven out of their adopted country of Jordan after Syrian refugees began flooding across the border.
“We’re Syrian, but we’d been living in Jordan for years. After the [Syrian] civil war began, we suddenly weren’t welcome,” says Ghazal, who arrived in the U.S. in November 2016 at age 22. “The last few months we were there, Syrians weren’t even allowed to work.”
Going back to war-torn Syria wasn’t an option, so the family sought help from the International Organization for Migration, which helped arrange resettlement in the U.S. Just before leaving Jordan, Ghazal had completed a two-year degree in architecture and engineering and been accepted to a four-year bachelor’s program. Continuing her education was at the top of her priority list.
Still, like Waheeb, she was confused about the steps she had to take and had a hard time finding clear answers to her questions. Ghazal learned about MINA when O’Connor showed up at her house after a chance meeting with her brother and told her, “We’re going to help get you into school.”
A few months after the family arrived in Clarkston, she attended her first MINA meeting, and in fall 2017, Ghazal enrolled at Georgia State. Last semester she made the dean’s list. She credits the program, and subsequently starting college, with transforming her life in the U.S.
“It felt like a new start, a new beginning. My English got so much better every month. I stopped feeling lonely because I was making new friends,” she says. “College really helps with everything — your social life, your ability to talk and relate to people in this new culture and just feeling part of a community.”
“At Perimeter, I might have 27 kids from a dozen different countries in each class. That’s crazy, but it’s also exciting, and I love it.”
– Mary Helen O’connor
Now, her dream of becoming an architect is back on track, and she plans to apply to architecture school after completing her bachelor’s degree. When she graduates, she’ll be the first in her family to earn a college degree.
“I want to be an educated woman. I want to make my family proud,” Ghazal says. “And everything in Syria is rubble now. I want to help rebuild my home country.” O’Connor says she’s continually amazed by what students in the program are able to accomplish.
“The fact that these young people can come here and be ready for college in a year is remarkable. What if I were suddenly dropped in the middle of Sudan after fleeing my home and had to find a job, go to school and pass a college course in a foreign country? There’s no way,” she says. “But that’s what they do.”
In 2016, the United Nations released a report showing nearly two-thirds of refugee children worldwide are unable to attend any school. Only 1 percent attend college. For young people, landing in a country like the U.S. offers a way to overcome this educational crisis, a path beyond just basic survival. Although that path may be clear and well trod for many Americans born and raised here, it’s often faint and nearly impassable for asylum seekers. With MINA, these students are benefiting from the one thing that can hasten their progress — a guide to show them the way.
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“At Perimeter, I might have 27 kids from a dozen different countries in each class. That’s crazy, but it’s also exciting, and I love it.”
– Mary Helen O’connor
“At Perimeter, I might have 27 kids from a dozen different countries in each class. That’s crazy, but it’s also exciting, and I love it.”
– Mary Helen O’connor
THE MENTORING INITIATIVE FOR NEW AMERICANS (MINA) was established in 2016.
That year, O’Connor was named the senior faculty associate for Perimeter College at Georgia State’s Office of International Initiatives. The new role made her responsible for the international profile of the college and allowed her to devote energy toward the establishment of MINA with Kelli.
O’Connor knew that academic research showed college applicants — and immigrants in particular — prefer so-called “hot” information (delivered by people in their social network) over “cold” information (delivered by official sources or institutions). So, they started by recruiting students, many of them refugees themselves, from Georgia State and other metro Atlanta universities to serve as peer mentors.
“We thought, ‘Why don’t we take that experience I had with Jean-Pierre and make it into a model?’” says Kelli.
Mentors and mentees keep in close contact and attend monthly summits, each focused on a particular part of the college process, such as taking placement tests, filling out financial aid applications or choosing a major. A network of mentors is available to each mentee, which O’Connor has found works better than the one-on-one approach.
“The person who’s really good at preparing for the math portion of the SAT isn’t necessarily the same person who knows a lot about the TOEFL [Teaching of English as a Foreign Language, a standardized test that measures English language ability],” O’Connor notes. “And there may be a third person who understands how to navigate financial aid because his or her package was similar to yours.”
One of the first people to sign up as a mentor was Shahad Waheeb, a Syrian refugee who graduated with an associate degree in chemistry from Perimeter College in 2017 and is now pursuing her bachelor’s degree on Georgia State’s downtown campus. For her, it was a way to offer the kind of assistance she desperately needed when she arrived in the U.S. in 2013.
“I finished high school in 2012 and was admitted to Damascus University, but my parents wouldn’t let me attend because the Syrian government was bombing university campuses at the time,” says Waheeb. “They were afraid I would die.”
Waheeb was eager to resume her studies in America, but the college application process seemed murky. Some people told her that schools would not accept her Syrian diploma. Others warned her that if her English wasn’t strong enough and she failed her classes, she’d have to pay a penalty to the government if she received financial aid.
“The system here is different from the one in Damascus, and I wished I had someone who had been in my situation to advise me,” she says. “I wanted to help other students who were struggling as much as I had. It didn’t matter if they were from my country or from somewhere else. I wanted to help.”
Through MINA, she was connected with Duha Ghazal, whose family had been driven out of their adopted country of Jordan after Syrian refugees began flooding across the border.
Khawla Al Abdullah (right) receives mentorship through the MINA program, and hopes to one day study nursing at Perimeter College. She and her mother Aisha (left) sought refuge in the U.S. two years ago after fleeing the war in Syria.
“We’re Syrian, but we’d been living in Jordan for years. After the [Syrian] civil war began, we suddenly weren’t welcome,” says Ghazal, who arrived in the U.S. in November 2016 at age 22. “The last few months we were there, Syrians weren’t even allowed to work.”
Going back to war-torn Syria wasn’t an option, so the family sought help from the International Organization for Migration, which helped arrange resettlement in the U.S. Just before leaving Jordan, Ghazal had completed a two-year degree in architecture and engineering and been accepted to a four-year bachelor’s program. Continuing her education was at the top of her priority list.
Still, like Waheeb, she was confused about the steps she had to take and had a hard time finding clear answers to her questions. Ghazal learned about MINA when O’Connor showed up at her house after a chance meeting with her brother and told her, “We’re going to help get you into school.”
A few months after the family arrived in Clarkston, she attended her first MINA meeting, and in fall 2017, Ghazal enrolled at Georgia State. Last semester she made the dean’s list. She credits the program, and subsequently starting college, with transforming her life in the U.S.
“It felt like a new start, a new beginning. My English got so much better every month. I stopped feeling lonely because I was making new friends,” she says. “College really helps with everything — your social life, your ability to talk and relate to people in this new culture and just feeling part of a community.”
Now, her dream of becoming an architect is back on track, and she plans to apply to architecture school after completing her bachelor’s degree. When she graduates, she’ll be the first in her family to earn a college degree.
“I want to be an educated woman. I want to make my family proud,” Ghazal says. “And everything in Syria is rubble now. I want to help rebuild my home country.” O’Connor says she’s continually amazed by what students in the program are able to accomplish.
“The fact that these young people can come here and be ready for college in a year is remarkable. What if I were suddenly dropped in the middle of Sudan after fleeing my home and had to find a job, go to school and pass a college course in a foreign country? There’s no way,” she says. “But that’s what they do.”
In 2016, the United Nations released a report showing nearly two-thirds of refugee children worldwide are unable to attend any school. Only 1 percent attend college. For young people, landing in a country like the U.S. offers a way to overcome this educational crisis, a path beyond just basic survival. Although that path may be clear and well trod for many Americans born and raised here, it’s often faint and nearly impassable for asylum seekers. With MINA, these students are benefiting from the one thing that can hasten their progress — a guide to show them the way.
Photos by Artem Nazarov
