Students

Dilafruz Khonikboyeva and her family won the Green Card Lottery while living through Tajikistan’s civil war, but they didn’t know about it until the years-long blockade was lifted in 1995. They crossed multiple battle lines to reach the U.S. consulate in Moscow. Luckily, even though their green cards had expired by the time they arrived, the U.S. government honored them, Khonikboyeva said.

There are multiple sides to every story. But when it comes to Eritrea, a country that’s been isolated due to 20 years of war and nine years of sanctions, much of their story hasn’t been told, said Carol Pineau, a former CNN journalist who reported live on the Eritrean-Ethiopian war and is a visiting scholar at George Mason University.

School suspensions can triple the probability that a student will drop out of school or have later involvement with the criminal justice system, according to studies linked to the school-to-prison pipeline. These statistics are concerning, but Sarah Parshall has hope.

For about 25 years, Khairi Shammo said it felt like he and his family from Sinjar, Iraq, were “running from a conflict to a conflict.”
They moved back and forth from Iraq to Syria multiple times trying to avoid the Iraq-Iranian war, terrorism and religious discrimination for being Yazidis, members of a religious minority.

During the war in the South Caucasus, and particularly the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, closed borders and a shortage of resources became the norm for Armenians like Margarita Tadevosyan.

George Mason University has a large student body—more than 37,000 people—but that doesn’t mean it’s hard to find community. And that’s especially true for the S-CAR Ambassadors.

Amadu Koroma was only three at the start of the Sierra Leone War, when his uncle carried him on his shoulders as their family fled to Guinea for safety. Though the war ended in 2002, the consequences still affect Koroma, and they motivated him to make the most of his education.