Philly Student Stories: Fareed Hamraqul

by Rosie Dillon

Fareed Hamraqul is a 17-year-old junior at Northeast High School. As a baby, he fled with his family from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan with the rise of the Taliban in 1992. When he came to the U.S. last winter, he didn’t know a word of English. This summer he studied English in the Refugee Summer Program at Northeast, hoping, as he put it, to make a big problem – not being able to communicate in English – into a small problem. English will be his fifth language, in addition to Dari, Tajik, Russian, and Uzbek. During the school year at Northeast, he takes three hours of English a day and sometimes receives help from tutors. Though his ESOL teacher doesn’t speak Russian, there is a Russian-speaking bilingual counselor assistant at Northeast, Yana Ratmansky, who works with him every day. Northeast sends documents home with Hamraqul in Russian, and the family can also come to Ratmansky for help translating and explaining things. But there is one problem: his parents don’t speak Russian, he explained, because in Uzbekistan, no one helped them learn. There, they were ostracized rather than helped. “Thank God we are here,” Hamraqul said through Ratmansky. Here, if he doesn’t understand something, he asks and finds that people are happy to help, he said. He expressed his thanks to the people, teachers and otherwise, who are helping him to learn English. His plans for the future are to continue studying English, go to community college, and then university. He explained his commitment to education “When I’m married and have a son, if I’m not an educated person, if he comes to me and asks a question, I cannot say, ‘Wait, I have to go get educated.’”