After escaping war and persecution: high school

LANSING - The story problem involved cheetahs.

Keith Smith and Nasim Mohammad discussed exponents and variables and how to calculate the change in the population of the world's fastest land animal. 

Mohammad wore a gray button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He was born in Afghanistan, where cheetahs haven't been seen since the 1950s. He's been in Lansing for 13 months. 

He pulled out his smartphone to check his work.

Smith, one of a handful of volunteer teachers at the Global Institute of Lansing, rose from his chair to retrieve a calculator.

“You can’t have part of a cheetah, remember,” he said.

Mohammad left school in the fourth grade. It was around the time that the Taliban took power in Ghazni Province, his home.

He wanted to keep his mother safe, to be her guardian.

“I couldn’t keep studying while helping her,” he said.

He's 32 now. He fled Afghanistan for a refugee camp in Indonesia, where he stayed for three years. He arrived in Lansing last spring, on a Thursday at the end of May.

Which is how he came to be seated among a dozen students in the basement of Lansing’s First Presbyterian Church.

More:

Putnam: Refugees tell their stories of fear and triumph

Refugee resettlement in Lansing on steep decline

700 MSU faculty, staff say they won't help federal immigration officials

Many Global Institute students have lived through conflicts that their American-born counterparts only see on the news.

They are from Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and 13 other countries: adult refugees and immigrants who are too old to go into the public school system, but held back by the lack of a high school degree.  

The Global Institute of Lansing is a non-profit set up six years ago to help them get one.

The path to graduation

More than 16,000 refugees have been resettled in the Lansing region over the past four decades. Nearly 7,000 of those have arrived in the past 15 years, according to data from the State Department.

Paula Frantz, who had worked for the Lansing School District as a parent involvement coordinator, noticed a problem.

Refugees who arrived in their late teens often didn't have enough eligible years to finish at a public high school — state law prevents schools from collecting funding for students over the age of 20 — and obtaining a GED was daunting for those with limited English skills. 

Frantz started a program serving older students through Presbyterian Church of Okemos, then found out about the Global Institute, which had just begun operations, backed by a task force of representatives from St. Vincent Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services of Michigan and Lansing Community College, as well as local foster parents.

The programs joined. Frantz became the Global Institute's executive director. The organization received enough support from local churches to get the ball rolling. 

Today, more than 150 students from 22 countries have taken classes at the Global Institute. Sixty have earned high school diplomas. The oldest graduate was 61.

Students greet each other as they slowly fill the room for the start of morning classes, their English bearing the accents of a dozen other languages. 

Some favor burkas or other clothing from their native countries, most dress casually, T-shirt and blue jeans.

There is a whiteboard where weekly schedules are posted and a poster tacked with pictures of past graduates and three clusters of white folding tables where students work with volunteer teachers. 

Schoolwork is completed on laptops, allowing students to move freely between subjects and tutors as needed. They can also work at home. Tests have to be taken on-site. 

“Because it’s self-paced, some days we might have 15 students here taking 15 different classes,” said Frantz.

The diploma GIL students earn is just like those distributed by local high schools. Their diploma comes from James Madison High School, an online program developed by Ashworth College, of Georgia.

Five students are expected to graduate Monday.

Lagu Joseph Rekpe will be among them.

Reaching higher

Rekpe grew up in Sudan amid a war that killed 2 million of his countrymen, most through starvation or drought.

His family was among the millions displaced by the conflict, which ultimately split Sudan in two.

Most of Rekpe’s formal education took place in refugee camps.

“I never got a chance to get an education or finish high school,” the 39-year-old said.

Rekpe came alone to the U.S. and resettled in Lansing in 2001.

“It was a different culture, different people," he said. 

He recalls thinking, "Everything’s different here." 

He took some English classes at Lansing Community College, but his focus was on getting work and sending money back to his family.

His mother and four siblings live in South Sudan, which gained its independence from Sudan in 2011, five years after the Sudanese civil war ended.

“Since I came, I’ve been working because I came to this country by myself and had no other people to rely on,” Rekpe said. “The only thing taught to me was it was good to have a job to support myself and family, to provide the basic necessities.”

And so he worked in a Meijer warehouse for more than a decade. Then, Rekpe said, he had a revelation: The basic necessities were no longer enough.

“I looked at myself and thought, 'There are better things I can do through education,'” he said.

A coworker had told him about the Global Institute of Lansing. He visited and decided it was the best path forward.

He remembers liking math during his lessons in the refugee camps, but it’s been tough recovering that skill set.

“I guess it’s because I took too long not going to school,” he said.

Rekpe is set to receive his diploma Monday. He wants to go to college after graduation but doesn’t know where or what he will study. It doesn’t seem to worry him much.

“I know God has picked a college already. My name is already there.”

Completing the circle

The Global Institute bridges the gap between resettling refugees and helping them find fulfilling jobs, according to Judi Harris, director of refugee services with St. Vincent. 

Life without a high school diploma is “immensely difficult,” she said, particularly for refugees. “Having that high school diploma in their hands opens up a lot of doors."

Harris estimates St. Vincent has referred a few hundred refugees to Global Institute in the past six years. While it doesn’t provide financial assistance, St. Vincent collaborates on grants in support of programs for refugees.

All Global Institute employees, Frantz included, are unpaid volunteers. The basement space at the church is provided at no cost.

A fundraising campaign last fall raised about $5,500 to pay student fees for Ashworth College’s high school program. Students are asked to pay a $50 deposit at the start. The school picks up the rest.

Frantz said she doesn’t have to worry about getting students into seats. The referrals from St. Vincent and word of mouth are enough.

“I’ve never had to advertise for students, which is great,” she said. “We have siblings or cousins or neighbors of other students who have been through the program, so it definitely travels within their communities.”

Art school

Razmin Ahmadzadah is a 19-year-old artist with an interest in visual effects. He's set to graduate Monday and has already applied to art school in California in hopes of breaking into the film industry.

Because he didn’t have toys growing up in Afghanistan, Ahmadzadah’s mother would entertain him by drawing pictures.

He left Afghanistan for Iran in his early teens, finding work in construction, living inside the very buildings he was helping to erect.

At night, he’d take some classes and work on his drawings. But he was caught, sent back.

An uncle helped him leave the country a second time. He sought refugee status and arrived by himself in the U.S. in the latter part of 2015.

Ahmadzadah recently told his story for a project called Refuge Lansing, an exhibit on the lives of refugees in the Lansing area. The photograph used in the exhibit shows him surrounded by hand-drawn portraits, among them photorealistic renderings of Al Pacino and Johnny Depp. 

The rest of his family wants to be with him, Ahmadzadah said last week, but he is doubtful that will happen soon.

“There’s no real way to get them here,” he said.

The next step

Sadick Amir graduated from the Global Institute in 2016. It was his second high school diploma. He earned the first in his native Ghana.

But getting the American equivalent was essential to achieving his goal. 

“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor,” Amir said. “But it is much more difficult to be a doctor in Ghana.”

He’s just finished his first year at Michigan State University, where he's studying biochemistry and molecular biology.

He's already worn a Spartan green cap and gown once. Thanks to a donation from MSU a few years ago, Global Institute students don caps and gowns and walk in procession like their teenage contemporaries.

"It’s an amazing event,” Harris said of graduation. “You have mothers crying for students who are so proud of themselves and their accomplishments. It’s just the greatest thing.”

And the students are invited to speak if they wish.

“We would do the whole shebang if we only had one student,” Frantz said. “Each student deserves recognition and the feeling of accomplishment. They did high school in a different language.”

Contact Lansing State Journal education reporter RJ Wolcott at (517) 377-1026 or rwolcott@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @wolcottr.

World Refugee Awareness Week

World Refugee Awareness Week this year begins Saturday with the Welcoming the Stranger 5K fun run at Hawk Island Park. A graduation ceremony for students of the Global Institute of Lansing is planned for 11 a.m. Monday at Lansing’s First Presbyterian Church, 510 W. Ottawa St. Other events planned include a garden tour and potluck at North School Garden, 333 E. Miller Road, at 6 p.m. Wednesday and the unveiling of a new peace pole outside St. Casimir Parish, 815 Sparrow Ave. at 11 a.m. Friday. For more information on local World Refugee Awareness Week events, visit stvcc.org/eventscpt/wraw.

Supporting the Global Institute of Lansing

For more information on the Global Institute of Lansing, including how to make a donation, visit www.globalinstitutelansing.org.

Refuge Lansing

To read more of the stories highlighted by the Refuge Lansing project, visit refugelansing.us.