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SADIYA MOHAMMED: : Allahu Akbar. I live on the eighth floor of a public housing building next to the Hiawatha Line.

[ARABIC]

I pray five times a day. Allahu Akbar. It is one of the important pillars in Islam and one of the few things in my life that hasn't changed since I came to America. I left Somalia when I was four and grew up in a refugee camp in Kenya. When I was 17, my family and I came to the US. Sometimes, my friends and I compare our stories about coming here.

SHUKRI JAMA: [ARABIC]

SADIYA MOHAMMED: : My friend, Shukri Jama, lives in my building. She came here from Kenya two years ago. Do you miss where you from, like Kenya or Somalia?

SHUKRI JAMA: Not quite. Yeah, sometimes I miss the weather. I haven't seen snow or bad weather in Kenya, but sometimes, life in US-- I prefer in life in the US.

SADIYA MOHAMMED: : The weather was a part of the challenge that I had when I came here, but--

SPEAKER: Everybody had.

SHUKRI JAMA: Yeah, and the food, too.

SADIYA MOHAMMED: : That is really wonderful, but I think the food is OK with me. And the weather-- I know it was so hot, of course, it was hard for me. But I think more difficult is the language. I remember my first day of school, when I walked into my ninth grade class at Augsburg High School, there was a group of students introducing themselves.

When it was my turn, they looked at me and waited for me to talk. I felt like I was in a cage and couldn't breathe. The teacher said, what is your name? But honestly, I had no idea what he was saying. I asked a Somali girl sitting next to me what the teacher was asking. She told me to say my name, Sadiya, and that's when I started learning.

A few months after starting the school here, I transferred to Lincoln International High School. Lincoln played a big part in improving my language.

This is Miss Kelly, my favorite teacher, English. She is a really good teacher.

Miss Kelly convinced me to compete in a national poetry competition. We picked poems by famous poets and get up on a stage to recite them. I picked Steven Dunn's poem, Sweetness. The poem is about what it means to be alive. There is sadness, not just sweetness in life.

Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear one more friend

Waking with a tumor, one more maniac

With a perfect reason, often his sweetness has come

And changed nothing in the world

Except the way I stumble through it--

I just want to ask you, Miss Kelly, how did I do, overall?

MISS KELLY: Well, Sadiya, you did the best out of all of the students that competed. So you did a lot of things very well. Your presence on the stage and your being really confident about understanding your poem, and that's what made it really, really, powerful and really memorable, I think, because you understood every word you said, and you said it with such feeling, and that's why you won.

SADIYA MOHAMMED: Do you think I can do, like, the regional, state fun, and the final-- the nation? Do you think I can do that?

MISS KELLY: I absolutely think you can do that.

SADIYA MOHAMMED: Oh, and I will try my best. Thank you.

The day of the competition, I go to the downtown Minneapolis Library to compete against the students from other schools in the west metro.

SPEAKER 2: Sadiya Mohammed.

[CHEERS]

SADIYA MOHAMMED: Miss Kelly and my friends are in the audience cheering for me.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I feel my faith in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go. Thank you.

I didn't win the competition, but I am proud I tried my best. At my graduation ceremony this spring, one of the school leaders, Chris Navin, talked about what he had learned from me, inshallah. It means, if God is willing.

CHRIS NAVIN: No, I am a christian man. And my Muslim friends and colleagues use this phrase often, so often that I am beginning to use this phrase myself. For example--

[APPLAUSE]

For example, after a long, hard school day, I might see Sadiya Mohammed in the hallways. And I might say, see you tomorrow, Sadiya. Have a good day. And she usually replies, yes, Mr. Chris, see you tomorrow, inshallah.

SADIYA MOHAMMED: It was a dream that I always had since I was a child, to go to school and get education and be someone one day. I am planning to go to college in January. I want to be a journalist and work with the United Nations. I will continue to work until I achieve my dreams, inshallah.

She's two years and five months.

When I walk through my neighborhood, people are friendly. I take my niece to the playground by our apartment building and sit on a bench while she swings. When I first came here, I wondered if life will get easier.

It's so hard when you come a place that you don't understand nothing. It's like-- you feel like you die for something. It's really hard, and it hurts because you need a translator with anything. Sometimes, you need to go with someone, come here and help me.

And now I feel like I'm not missing anything. I feel like I'm home now because now, I feel that I don't need a translator. I can go anywhere I want. I can travel around this country with nobody.

[ARABIC]

Hey.