The Ann Arbor Independent’s Skyline High School intern Stavi Tennenbaum kicks off an original High School Heroes interview series with a conversation about homelessness among AAPS students.
by Stavi Tennenbaum
ALI SHAHIN IS a peer educator, a Muslim, a poet, a guitarist and a proponent of social change. Last year, like nearly 3,000 other children and their parents in our community, he was homeless.
According to data collected by local homeless advocacy groups, there are approximately 325 homeless students in Ann Arbor, around two percent of the AAPS total enrollment.
The Education Project for Homeless Youth (EPHY), a project of the Washtenaw Intermediate School District, works to help homeless students regularly attend school.
During the 2013-2014 school year, EPHY served over 1250 students in Washtenaw County, from the nine school districts and ten public school academies. In the 2006-2007 school year, The Education Project began helping homeless students. During that year, EPHY served 370 students.
According to EPHY, “every school district in Washtenaw County works with students in temporary living situations.”
EPHY is funded through the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, reauthorized by Congress in January of 2002. That Act guarantees homeless students equal access to the same free and public education provided to others. EPHY also relies on private donations and grants to directly meet student needs.
In 2004, Washtenaw County human services organizations kicked off Blueprint to End Homelessness/Ten Year Plan. That initiative failed: homelessness in the county among families, children and the chronically homeless rose sharply between 2004 and 2014. On Jan. 28, 2015, county officials kicked off an initiative called Zero: 2016. The program aims to end homelessness among veterans and the chronically homelessness by Dec. 2016. County officials applied to be part of Community Solutions’ Zero: 2016 campaign.
The number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased to an all-time high: there are 1.3 million homeless public school students. One child in every 30 is homeless, according to a state-by-state report that blames the nation’s high poverty rate, the lack of affordable housing and the impacts of pervasive domestic violence.
Titled “America’s Youngest Outcasts,” the report was released in Nov. 2014 by the National Center on Family Homelessness. The group calculates that nearly 2.5 million American children were homeless at some point in 2013.
Ann Arbor high school senior Ali Shahin was one of those 1.3 million homeless public school students. Stavi Tennenbaum sat down with Ali to talk about his time as a homeless high school student and how homelessness impacted him, his family and his education.—Editor
As he sits down to tell his story, his voice is unwavering. Ali speaks slowly as he leans back, contemplating where to begin. His hands are callused and worn, like those of someone who spends a lot of time handling wood and other raw materials.
A senior at Skyline High School, Ali is a part of the Student Homebuilding Industry Program, an alternative to in-the-classroom education which gives Ann Arbor’s high school students the opportunity to design plans for and to construct a house from start to finish. He seems older than his eighteen years, with twinkle in his eyes, as he describes his passions: live music, writing poetry, architecture and urban design. Next year, he’ll be attending Wayne State University on a full scholarship, where he hopes to follow these interests and callings. This is his story.
What is your ethnic background? How do you identify racially?
Ali Shahin: Both of my parents were born in Egypt, and my father is ethnically Albanian. Throughout my life, I have identified as both Egyptian and Albanian, a complex mix of two North African cultures. Growing up in America as a first generation immigrant, speaking Arabic, I often has lapses in cultural understanding between myself, who grew up around American lifestyle and customs, and my parents, who were foreigners. It was hard for me to reconcile these cultural differences and I experienced racism often and very early on. Because of this, I feel that I’ve never been able to relate to the “typical white American” or feel a sense of patriotism in this country.
What is your religion? How does your faith impact your everyday life? What kinds of social barriers has it created for you?
I identify as a Sunni Muslim. Above all, I’m a proponent of religion being between you and yourself, with faith as an avenue to treat others with love and respect. I see the religious guidelines of Islam as a handbook for how to be a good human being, and try to live in accordance to this. In my daily life, however, dealing with Islamaphobia has been an ongoing challenge. Many people in this country are blinded by mass media stereotypes of Islam, which, more often than not, are major perversions or generalizations. Despite this, prayer and religion itself have been forms of comfort, happiness and self-expression for me when I needed them most.
Growing up, what were things like for you at home? What was your family dynamic?
Ali: My parents divorced when I was 7. They always lived separately, but got along well and would cooperate financially to take care of my siblings and I. I remember it being hard for me when they first got divorced, especially in trying to find a steady housing situation with my dad, who is 77. Still, I was closer to him and he was always more convenient to live with than my mom, who although I knew I could reach out to if I needed to, is a cosmetologist and is usually busy working. Right now I live mostly with my dad and my uncle, but we’re still between houses.
Can you describe the events that led up to you becoming homeless last year? What was that time like for you? How has it affected your outlook on your peers and society? Have things changed since then? What is your home life like now?
Ali: After my parents got divorced, my half-siblings, who live in Egypt, bought a house for my dad and I, since ours was foreclosed. My dad and I lived there until 2013, when my siblings asked us to leave so they could sell it for extra money. For a while we had nowhere to stay, until we moved into my uncle’s basement, which is where we live now.
My dad is in his 70s and has some heart conditions, so the stress of homelessness was really heavy on him, physically and emotionally. Instead of drawing us apart, though, I think the whole experience actually brought us closer. Unlike most kids, I was thrust into a sort of caretaker role, and I learned to be thankful for what I had and to never to ask him for anything.
When I first became homeless, I was very angry. I was upset at my relatives in Egypt who had done this and at the people around me for misunderstanding what homelessness means and can look like. It took me the better part of a year, but gradually I started to heal through volunteering and community service work around Ann Arbor. This kind of involvement and seeing people in the same and worse situations than myself made me able to look at things through a more compassionate and empathetic lens.
My current situation at home hasn’t changed all that much, but way I feel about it now is different. I was angry and hurt, but over time I filled the sense of emptiness homelessness gave me with purpose, giving me a good reason to get out of the basement and fill the holes in my life with meaning.
What led you to become a social activist? What issues do you find yourself most passionate about?
Ali: Foremost, I’m involved in Teen Voice at Safe House Center, which educates our peers in schools around the community on healthy and unhealthy relationships. I felt compelled to be volunteer with Safe House due to my older brother’s experiences with unhealthy relationships and my always bearing witness to this when I was younger. I’m also a part of the B-Side at the Neutral Zone, where I help organize music concerts and events like Speak Out Against Rape (SOAR) and Live on Washington. I joined the concert venue because I play 5 different instruments, mainly guitar, and I have a deep love for live music. I later became a part of the Board of Directors at the Neutral Zone because I enjoyed the leadership positions I had at B-Side and wanted to do a service to the organization that had given me so many unique opportunities to do great things and had been a second home of support and acceptance to me.
One of the issues I’m passionate about is gender equality, which for me has been an long-standing journey, as I grew up very much buying into ideals of patriarchy, male dominance and gender roles. Joining Teen Voice was what really opened my eyes to feminism and its necessity, and about the danger behind rape culture and the need for ending it. Another issue I’m really passionate about is Islamaphobia, as I was subjected to a lot of it growing up, especially in school. As a kid, I was bombarded with images of the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan, which to me was just a lot of people who looked a whole lot like me getting killed by white Americans in the military. I often felt antagonized by all people in this country who support drone strikes and the killing of citizens in the Middle East, but attribute this to the fact many of them ignorantly buy into the manipulative, one-sided aspect of media. I have never had a point in my life where I’ve felt proud to be an American, probably because while I acknowledge the rights that I’m given in this country, I’m not blind to the lack of security I feel when I go to school and get called things like “sand nigger” and “terrorist.” While there aren’t a lot of official groups out there dedicated to ending Islamaphobia, an issue that I know touches countless other Muslim Americans like me, I make a point to be as vocal about it as I can on social media (Twitter: @alishahin21) and amongst my own friends, especially in light of recent events around the world.
How have these methods of self-expression been forms of therapy for you?
Ali: I’ve had/have depression for 11 years, and poetry was always my primary avenue of expressing my emotions, not only negatively, but positively. Whether I don’t like something or I’m feeling thankful for it, I feel like I can always express myself through writing. My poetry, (Tumblr: shahinpoetry.tumblr.com), has been published in two online literary journals and one in-print anthology.
Musically, I picked up guitar and other instruments due to my love of rock music growing up, and as I got older shifted into other styles, exploring and embracing my emotions through music. Putting together live shows in our community is also one of my favorite forms of musical outreach and gives me a huge sense of fulfillment. That became really important to me in coping with things in my life. Last year I had the pleasure of performing at the acoustic stage at Live on Washington and will be reading poetry on it this year.
How did traumatic experiences in your personal life affect your academic performance?
Ali: My GPA dropped significantly from sophomore to junior year, at the time when I was between houses, and I never really recovered from that academic blow, so in this way I guess you could say my experiences affected me negatively. But that period in my life taught me that grades aren’t everything, that they aren’t directly tied to my self worth and aren’t a measure of how smart I am.
Understanding that it was okay for me to take time away from school to grieve for my traumas and make my mental health my first priority helped me to be okay with bad things happening in my life and showed me how to gain strength from them.
As for homebuilding, since I’m interested in studying architecture and urban design in college, I wanted to go through the process of building a house to have some first-hand experience in the field and keep my architectural dreams realistic. I think the homebuilding program has the potential to be extremely valuable to our district, but in reality a lot of the trades like carpentry are marred by racism and backward thought, and there are a lot of behavioral issue in class. It’s an unwelcoming environment for people of color.
Do you have any thoughts towards youth who may be in similar home life situations? Advice to high school students?
Ali: The best advice I have is that when life gets tough and you feel boxed in, don’t ever give up. Life will give you good breaks out of the blue, and the best parts of life are worth every minute of the bad ones. When bad things happen to you, don’t beat yourself up; allow yourself time to hurt and time to heal. Because there are no bad experiences, only learning ones.