Fauzia Issaka 0T6 & Azin Samani
“Education provides opportunities and the confidence that you can fit in and succeed along with everyone else.”
“Trinity is a small college full of highly motivated students, and there is a strong sense of collaboration.”
JUNE 2006 - Fauzia Issaka arrived in Canada from Ghana when she was seven. She says her English was “horrible” and that her family came from very “humble circumstances.” But her parents stressed two things: work hard; excel at school. “My parents drove that home, and I saw how that worked out for me,” says Issaka, who graduated in June 2006 with an international relations and political science degree. “Education provides opportunities and the confidence that you can fit in and succeed along with everyone else.”
Eager to share that message, in 2004 Issaka founded a national refugee support group, Learning to Integrate New Cultures Canada (LINCC), along with then Trinity student Nailyn Rasool. It now has a second chapter at the University of British Columbia, with plans to launch one at McGill.
While a fourth-year international relations and economics student, Azin Samani was president of the U of T chapter of LINCC, and most of its student members hailed from Trinity. “Trinity is a small college full of highly motivated students, and there’s a strong sense of collaboration,” she says. “You work on things with your friends. You get a sense that ‘this is our thing.’
“International Relations is often a pessimistic study of what can go wrong, and sometimes you feel that you can’t make a difference,” says Samani, who was born in Iran and came here with her family at age five. “But getting involved at a local level, we see that we can make contributions and achieve results.”
LINCC continues at U of T, with Julia Muravska and Anh Nguyen, both third-year Trinity students, as co-presidents. Each week, about 16 high-school refugee students arrive at Trinity to be tutored by a 14 or so student mentors who help them adjust to their new world.
– Margaret Webb
