More News

Shreedhar Shah, whose parents and 50-plus relatives from India moved to Montgomery County between 1978 and 1997, described his family's struggles to make it in America to a group of high school students.

"You guys don't realize the sacrifice your parents are making because it would have been very comfortable for them to stay in their own countries," the Gaithersburg businessman told the 20-plus teens in Liberty's Promise.

The 10-week program, run by a nonprofit of the same name in Alexandria, Va., is designed to introduce students from immigrant families to their community and to give them a working knowledge of how government works, said Julien Labiche, program coordinator.

Since 2005, Liberty's Promise has served 679 immigrants from 68 countries, most in Montgomery County, said Labiche, who runs after-school programs at GHS, Wheaton High School and John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring.

"It's not only the language, but the whole thing changed," said Lillian Kalizia, 18, of the new country she is navigating.

The high school senior's father, James Kimonyo, is Rwanda's Ambassador to the U.S. While her family may not have faced the citizenship and financial concerns of other immigrants, she has worked hard to adjust since moving to Gaithersburg in 2007, Kalizia said.

"If you don't get used to something new, you don't feel good as you do in your own country,"

she said.

GHS students partaking this fall are from Bangladesh, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Tanzania, Togo and Zimbabwe. Some have been in the U.S. a short time, nearly all are studying English as a Second Language and most live in low-income households, Labiche said.

He and Carlos Perez, a Montgomery County Public Schools English as a Second Language paraeducator, introduce students to scholarship and grant programs, he said.

In recent weeks, students have practiced writing resumes, networking and interviewing skills.

On Thursday, Shah and Asonglefac Nkemleke, a Cameroonian journalist who came to the U.S. with his wife and five children in 1998 and now works for MCPS, spoke about hard work, perfecting language skills and education.

Shah, who holds a master's degree in business administration from Georgetown University and owns an engineering company, told a story of two relatives — one who became a senior vice-president for General Electric, earns about $400,000 per year and flies in a corporate jet, and another who is stuck in a dead-end job with no opportunities.

"The difference here is not intelligence, because I know them, they're my cousins," Shah said. "They're both very similar, but what's the difference? His attitude."

Maxime Djomo, a 15-year-old freshman, didn't know English when he moved to Gaithersburg from Cameroon in 2008, he said.

"We have a lot of opportunities, you can get a job, go to college," said Djomo, who said he immigrated "to be successful, be a bigger man."

He hopes that Liberty's Promise will help him get a summer internship, Djomo said.

"The reason why I joined it is: Even though I know the language, I know everything, I was once in their seat," said Javeria Ahmad, 15, a freshman whose family came to the U.S. from Pakistan when she was 8, of her friends in Liberty's Promise.

"I was once them," she said. "It's a look back."