The World in LA; Los Angeles in the World

Last week, the Poly community had the distinct privilege of hosting Alephonsion Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan and the author of two books, They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky (2005) and Disturbed in Their Nests (2018), and Joseph Jok, his International Rescue Committee (IRC) case manager. Deng and Jok joined the Upper School for an assembly to begin the day and later had lunch with the Global Scholars cohort and other Poly students who had read and were interested in his most recent book. In the evening, the two also presented at a Global Scholars event. During the morning assembly, Jok opened with a brief history of the region of Sudan and the more recent geopolitical trends that led to the fleeing of thousands of refugees, of which Deng was a part. Like other Lost Boys, as they were known, Deng made his way out of his village and to a refugee camp in neighboring Kenya entirely on foot. Jok also touched on the role of religion and resource scarcity that led to the cultural...

For his fifteenth birthday, my younger brother received tickets to an NBA game between our two home teams, the Lakers and the Clippers. With superstar duos and solid supporting players, both teams are championship contenders this year. Lebron James and Anthony Davis helm the Lakers, and Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, who is currently injured, lead the Clippers. A couple weeks ago, my little brother, our dad and I made the trek across Los Angeles to the Staples Center, where the highly anticipated matchup would take place. After a typical half-hour looking for parking, we began the walk over to the stadium. Outside of the enormous arena, we saw the usual array of characters: young men scalping tickets, locals hawking street food, and entrepreneurial vendors selling merchandise. One group, however, stood out from the rest. Their wares, handed out to any willing passerby, were free: bright yellow shirts with the words “Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong” emblazoned across the chest....

Last week, Poly middle and upper school students experienced an amazing hour of performance and presentation by the Malawi-American singer and songwriter Masauko Chipembere, who graduated from Poly in 1988. At an assembly that brought the two aforementioned sections of the larger Poly student body together, Chipembere wove insightful thoughts on activism, citizenship, and sustainability between lively renditions of various songs of his. His story in the United States started at nearly the same time as his parents; he was born only months after they arrived as political refugees. His father played a significant role in Malawi’s independence movement, but after disagreements with former compatriot and newly established prime minister of Malawi Hastings Kamuzu Banda, he took up residence in California, where he studied and taught for most of the rest of his life. During the assembly, Chipembere offered various anecdotes about his experience at Poly and as a teenager growing up in th...

Brave Girl Rising , screened this past Monday for members of the community including Global Scholars from both Poly and schools in the Pasadena Unified School District, follows the story of Nasro, a Somalian refugee in the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya. The twenty-minute short film, which blends the artistry characteristic of film festivals with subject matter typical of a documentary, furthers the mission of the original Girl Rising piece, released five years ago to promote girls’ education worldwide. Brave Girl Rising focuses on one girl and her struggle to receive an education in the environment that is perhaps least conducive to such aims. The film has five main segments, each of which depicts a distinct part of her journey to attain an education. The film, per Martha Adams, the producer who spoke at the event, was not wholly reflective of what actually happened during Nasro’s years in the camp. However, the piece did attempt to capture the realities of the refugee experie...

I recently travelled to New England for a few days to see family and friends and to pick my little brother up from sleep-away camp. While I was there, I decided to visit a few small liberal arts colleges as well since I will be applying to colleges this year. During each information session, the admissions counselor, without fail, would make a point of discussing their school’s robust financial aid program, and for good reason; higher education has historically excluded students from disadvantaged backgrounds. But, particularly after two summer programs where I had numerous peers from all over the world, one group of applicants was flagrantly glossed over in these discussions of financial aid: international students. Perhaps their omission was an unfortunate byproduct of a program tailored to domestic applicants, an intentional decision to save time, or a mere oversight. However, I suspected there were other reasons these sessions did not readily offer up such information. W...

This summer, I have met hundreds of students my age from around the world. I now consider as friends citizens of Pakistan and Zimbabwe, Tunisia and the Philippines, Czechoslovakia and Brazil, Sudan and Costa Rica, and countless other countries. The reality of these relationships, in decades past, would have been months or even years of separation, punctuated by perhaps a chance encounter or the occasional reunion. Today, however, I can get in contact with my new friends in seconds. On platforms like Instagram, GroupMe, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, the great distance that has historically characterized intercontinental friendships shrinks to the distance from your hand to your pocket. Thus, we natives of the Internet are separated not by miles and convenience but by our circumstances, our cultures, our surroundings. The shift in the nature of these relationships has resulted in the creation and continuation of long-term friendships, at least for me. But, it has also demanded the use of medi...

During the last decade, immigration has taken center stage in many political movements in the West. Frustrations with the apparent shortcomings of immigration fueled the rise of both far-right populism in Western Europe and the current American presidency. The underlying causes of this resentment or suspicion of immigration range from economic stagnation to increasing globalization to purportedly threatened cultural norms, yet the demonization of newcomers, particularly those from Latin American or Middle Eastern countries, is a common thread. However, the economic impact of immigration has long been understood by economists as generally positive, particularly in cases of movement from poorer to wealthier countries. In a novel way of going about opinion writing, Philippe Legrain outlines his support for and dispels negative misperceptions of immigration as a social phenomenon. In what is known as an Open Essay in The Economist , Legrain explains his reasoning for preferring immigratio...