When I had my first child. I was only thirteen years old at that time, and I want to be a really good role model for him. I want to be a really good example for him, and I want my kids to look, you know, because you have to model it in order. Like it's the same thing saying that I'm going to do this smoking, but I will not allow my kids to smoke. That is kind of a hypocrite, right? So I want to model for them. So my motivation came from my kids. High school was fun for me. And the reason high school was fun because I was a leader of the cultural educator part of it, and I was a part of the Islamic Association student, which is I was the leader for that program. I really I did not enjoy middle school, to be honest with you, which is middle school. It's a middle school everybody knows. But I enjoyed it in high school because I took a lot of leadership roles. I was a cultural navigator. I was a coordinator for the culture. My job was to navigate between all the cultures and different languages, and we come together, and we educate each other between the cultures. And so every other month, we will celebrate one culture, like Latino culture, like Japanese culture or Vietnamese culture or any other culture. Every other month we'll come up with an idea and they will dress up and they will bring that things that are important for their culture. Like in our Somali culture, food is important. You guys know that. So like we will present with that Somali traditional clothes. We will dress up and we'll do Somali traditional dance. And I think we did that here in East Grand Forks. So basically every other month we'll celebrate a different cultures, which is kind of empower and brings people together and understand each other.
--Deka Ali / mother & cultural navigator from East Grand Forks, Minnesota
