Geography, and generally any topic that required memorization, was definitely one of my weaker subjects. The fact that the geography teacher would bring a few students to the board and quiz them on the previous session’s material did not seem to have any effect on me other than trying to hide myself in class in order to not get called upon. As my luck had it this particular day I was the first one called to the board. With the topic being Africa, the teacher asked me a few questions and in response I spewed whatever came to my mind. He finally asked me about the whereabouts of a certain ethnicity in Africa. Dumbfounded I blurted out that they were in northern Africa. “Ok, let’s go,” he said as he began escorting me towards the door to throw me out of class. “But that’s what it said in the book,” I protested. He stopped and grabbed a book and said, “Show me where you read that.” I flipped through the pages, unsure about where I was going with this, until I came to the page with a gian...
He escaped an abusive father, wrote scientific papers by flashlight during power outages, and scored a university scholarship — all before turning 18. But now, Pooya Karami, a once-homeless Iranian teenager with dreams of changing the world, is seeing them shattered by Trump's travel ban. 'We, the Iranian students, are the youth who never had a childhood,' Karami told Daily Mail in an exclusive interview from inside Shiraz, Iran. After Karami's father—battling severe mental illness—cast his wife and children from their home, they scraped together borrowed money from financially strapped relatives to rent a cramped 40-square-meter basement on Shiraz's outskirts. To get by, Karami's mother and six-year-old sister sold their modest collection of jewelry to fund a single university application fee. His mother's sacrifice of her precious gold jewelry became a defining moment for Karami, as he realized the profound devotion of his mother sustained him thr...