MOTT HAVEN — A group of South Bronx students talked with Syrian and African refugees over the summer, an eye-opening experience that will also give them a chance to see Kendrick Lamar and Rihanna in concert for free.
High school students Emily Robles, Yaritza Montiel and Taleek Neal, who attend the Laboratory School of Finance and Technology in the South Bronx, spent their summers working with Global Citizen.
The advocacy organization aims to end extreme poverty by 2030 and puts on an annual music festival in Central Park.
The students focused mainly on Global Citizen's work to help refugee children get a quality education, part of which involved talking via Skype with Syrian refugee students at a camp in Jordan and with South Sudanese refugees at a camp in Kenya, an experience they described as very eye-opening.
"If we weren’t seeing them and we were just hearing them, you would think that they’d be in a place like we are right now, in a school," Montiel said.
Syria has been gripped by war and violence for years and more than 4 million people have fled the country since 2011, with more than 600,000 going to Jordan, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
The number of South Sudanese refugees in neighboring countries just passed 1 million earlier in September, with almost 200,000 fleeing their homeland in the wake of a new wave of violence that erupted in July, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
Despite these dire circumstances, Robles characterized their conversations with the refugee students as lighthearted, focusing more on their day-to-day lives and favorite activities than their living conditions.
They are learning about subjects ranging from math to American football, and she was surprised by how friendly and outgoing they all were.
"I knew that refugees were people who were unhappy or scared where they were, so they leave their country," she said, "so going into it, I thought that they were going to be quieter. Like, they were very excited to talk to us and everything."
The living conditions of the refugee students compared to the South Bronx students were still extremely different, Montiel said. She noted that she and her classmates were talking to them from a fancy department filled with computers while seeing them "just sitting on a couch in a dark room."
In Kenya, for instance, the refugees were originally supposed to speak with them from the camp itself, but its Internet access was shut down at 5 p.m., forcing them to drive 40 minutes to someone's house just to make the Skype session happen, according to Madge Thomas, Global Citizen's deputy director of global policy and advocacy.
Robles said this helped her understand that many of the problems she is facing are not nearly as serious as those faced by people in other parts of the world.
"It made me realize that what I'm complaining about is totally nothing compared to what they go through," she said. "They would dream of just actually being in a school building — a nice school building on top of that — with all the opportunities that we get."
The students' work with refugees has earned them a trip to the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on Sept. 24, where artists including Lamar, Rihanna, Demi Lovato, Major Lazer and Metallica will perform.
The students said they were most excited about seeing Rihanna and Lamar.
Refugees has been an extremely controversial issue as of late, with countries across the globe engaged in bitter disputes over whether leaders should let them in and, if so, how many.
Robles argued that a good portion of the resistance to letting in refugees was based on fear and that people needed to take it upon themselves to learn more about the issue and developed an informed opinion.
"Many people, they might not know about them, or they might just think that they come from this country, and they’re just here to hurt us or whatever," she said. "And until people become more informed about it, there’s no value in their thoughts because they don’t know the whole picture."
Neal said that he would want to be let into a country if he had struggled the way refugees had, maintaining that it is important to be compassionate towards people regardless of where they come from.
"We have to care about one another and we have to care about people in foreign lands because in the end we’re all the same person," he said.
"We all deserve the same opportunities."
