AMADOU - A BOY FROM ZENEGAL......

Motivation, inspiration, willpower ... Missing in your life, ? Can't find a way to get ahead, tired of everything, fedup withboredom, lack of imagination, mediocrity?
Amadou, a young boy from ......Zenegal -of all places - transplanted from a third world to a developed sociedy, overcoming a thousand barriers....his story, might give us a lesson to learn from..and a desire to live by.
(from The New York Times, today)


Trip Into Imigration Limbo
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Amadou Ly boarded a train Tuesday for a robotics contest in Atlanta. He had no
ID to get onto a plane.


By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: April 26, 2006
A small, troubled high school in East Harlem seemed an unlikely place to find
students for a nationwide robot-building contest, but when a neighborhood
after-school program started a team last winter, 19 students signed up. One was
Amadou Ly, a senior who had been fending for himself since he was 14.
Skip to next paragraph

Michelle Agins/The New York Times
Kristian Breton held a meeting with his team of robot-builders before they were
to leave for Atlanta. The project had only one computer and no real work space.
Engineering advice came from an elevator mechanic and a machinist's son without
a college degree. But in an upset that astonished its sponsors, the rookie team
from East Harlem won the regional competition last month, beating rivals from
elite schools like Stuyvesant in Manhattan and the Bronx High School of Science
for a chance to compete in the national robotics finals in Atlanta that begins
tomorrow.
Yet for Amadou, who helps operate the robot the team built, success has come at
a price. As the group prepared for the flight to Atlanta today, he was forced to
reveal his secret: He is an illegal immigrant from Senegal, with no ID to allow
him to board a plane. Left here long ago by his mother, he has no way to attend
the college that has accepted him, and only a slim chance to win his two-year
court battle against deportation.
In the end, his fate could hinge on immigration legislation now being debated in
Congress. Several Senate bills include a pathway for successful high school
graduates to earn legal status. But a measure passed by the House of
Representatives would make his presence in the United States a felony, and both
House and Senate bills would curtail the judicial review that allows exceptions
to deportation.
Meanwhile, the team's sponsors scrambled to put him on a train yesterday
afternoon for a separate 18-hour journey to join his teammates from Central Park
East High School at the Georgia Dome. There, more than 8,500 high school
students will participate in the competition, called FIRST (For Inspiration and
Recognition of Science and Technology) by its sponsor, a nonprofit organization
that aims to make applied sciences as exciting to children as sports.
"I didn't want other people to know," said Amadou, 18, referring to his illegal
status. "They're all U.S. citizens but me."
Most team members learned of his problem only yesterday at a meeting with
Kristian Breton, 27, the staff member at the East Harlem Tutorial program who
started the team, inspired by his own experience in the competition when he was
a high school student in rural Mountain Home, Ark.
Alan Hodge, 18, echoed the general dismay. "We can't really celebrate all the
way because it's not going to feel whole as a team without Amadou," he said.
Amadou's teammates have struggled with obstacles of their own. When Mr. Breton
called a meeting of parents to collect permission slips last week, only five
showed up. One boy's mother had a terminal illness, Mr. Breton learned. Another
mother lived in the Dominican Republic, leaving an older sibling to manage the
household. One of the six girls on the team said her divorced parents disagreed
about letting her go, and her mother, who was willing to approve the trip,
lacked the $4 subway fare to get to the meeting.
But Amadou's case stands out. As he tells it, with corroboration from
immigration records and other documents, he was 13 and spoke no English when his
mother brought him to New York from Dakar on Sept. 10, 2001. He was 14 when she
went back, leaving him behind in the hope that he could continue his American
education.
By then, he had finished ninth grade at Norman Thomas High School in a program
for students learning English as a second language. But his mother left
instruction for him to take a Greyhound bus to Indianapolis, where a Senegalese
woman friend had agreed to take him in and send him to North Central High School
there.
"It was the same thing when I was in Africa," he said, describing a childhood
spent shuttling between his grandmother and the household of his father, a
retired police officer with 12 children and three wives.
The woman in Indiana, who had four children of her own, changed her mind about
keeping him after his sophomore year, and he returned by bus to New York in the
summer of 2004. "I had to find a way to help myself for food and clothes, and to
buy some of my school supplies," he said, recalling days handing out fliers for
a clothing store on a Manhattan street corner. "I ended up living with another
friend — I'm under age and I can't live alone."

posted by victor @ Wednesday, April 26, 2006