When I Got Here Literacy Achieves

Arang Cistulli came to the US from South Korea as a very young child with her family.  She grew up in a small Ohio town where her father was a medical doctor.  Her story is bookended by prejudice she experienced as a child and by recent hate directed at Asian-Americans.  Don’t miss her lessons about dealing with hate and prejudice.
The story of Arang's parents, "Physician and Family," is in Immigrant Stories from the When I Got Here Podcast and Literacy Achieves.
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In 1979 Mylinh Luong left communist Vietnam with her father, mother, and four siblings in a crowded fishing boat.  She was six years old.  She vividly recalls the deprivation, squalor, and brutality of the journey and life in a Malaysian refugee camp.  She knows what it is to be without resources, education, family, and friends.  In the US, she experienced acts of kindness that helped her overcome the lack of these things.  Now a successful businesswoman, she puts her knowledge into practice by helping and supporting other immigrants in a big way. 
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Ana Arellanos was born in Mexico and came to Texas, undocumented, when she was five.  She grew up in Gail, a small town in West Texas.  Now, at age 34, she is a U.S. citizen and an immigration attorney.  She knows the system from both sides.  She wishes the whole country could be more like the tiny town that prepared her for U.S. success.
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Ow-z (Aws) Al-Darkazali, known as “Big Al,” is an Iraqi dentist.  At first euphoric over the ouster of Saddam Hussein, he grew so discouraged with the outcome that he gave up everything and left home to rebuild his life.  After false starts in Cyprus and England he settled in the US.  Hear Big Al’s perspectives on the Iraq war and life in America. 
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Alexandra Bacalao is an immigrant from Venezuela by way of Canada who came to the US as a schoolgirl.  Now a physician and scientist, the podcast is the story of how she sees America through a complex matrix formed from the other countries where she’s lived, her experience in the US health care system, and her observations of US politics.  It’s a story of belonging everywhere, yet nowhere—and why she loves America.
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Jabeen, a Pakistan-born woman watched her mother, who did not know English, struggle to the point of suicide in England.  Jabeen’s own knowledge of English was essential to overcoming loneliness when she found herself without friends or family after immigrating to the U.S.  English was the difference between failing and flourishing for these two women.
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