because i was such a program just  come thank you for coming again and this will have two minutes and the question is going to come from me and it's going to be open for the youths after you guys explain yourselves and the first question is going to go to i tell you and i say who and raised in the united arab emirates i migrated out here when i was seventeen and i couldn't go to school for forty five years i worked three jobs i moved from state to state and then i decided to go to nursing school and got my license and then i went to community college transfer to u c l a and now i'm pursuing medicine so i'm studying for my m cat i think that for you know immigrants like me  they don't expect much and that's what i have encountered when i went to school going to counsellors asking for advice they would always direct me in another direction and i thought that was very frustrating  i had nobody to look up to i was on my own i came out here on my own i had no family so i mean there's so much i want to tell you but i have to move it so and so yeah i'm open to questions at the end but also there is something i'm very passionate about my dad was a diplomat in the u a e and i was exposed to the violence that ethiopian domestic workers face there in the united arab emirates and there's so much i want to say about that but i've done research on it and i think i have a unique perspective on that and i think i should bring light to that issue and so you say only help you that gave me grounds for that but yeah if you have any questions you know you know at the end  my experience is a bit different from probably all depends so i went to law school in ethiopia i did my first master's degree at the united nations mandated university in costa rica i also did my second used to teach at a couple of university stare and then i did an internship at the united nations high commissioner for refugees i would love to tell you more about that and after and i also did i worked as a researcher in a project coordinator persons that has given me i believe that has been the highlight of my my professional life and personal life and yeah i'll talk more about it later on but thank you hi everyone my name is fiona and i originally from kenya am born and raised united will be i also lived in texas so as a teenager my family moved to texas so i went to high school in texas then i moved from college to university of tennessee did my accounting degree of timoci during my third year i decided that i wanted to do more social justice work or more employment work so i decided to switch my major indeed management and then i moved back to texas and walked with refugees and i mostly walked with middle eastern and cuban refugees but then i decided to switch over and walk with young people upon and so i realized in college i was always trying to stand up for myself or trying to explain to people why i am who i am and trying to explain to people that i do not choose to be who i am and i just realized as a black woman i'm kind of on the lowest place of the scale and i felt like it was my call to stand up for people who look like me so that's why i chose to pursue my career as a social justice or youth advocate because there's a lot of girls who look like me who need someone to look up to so i i was an attorney in ethiopia animals for an attorney here so i can just tell you why i decided to get involved in the legal profession you know having been born and raised in east africa where there's a lot of human rights violation i think starting from the time that i was in high school i was really interested to get into you know to that i wanted to become an attorney specializing in the area of human rights so you know  i graduated from college and then i got a chance to get into law school in ethiopia law school is an undergraduate degree so i you know i graduated in the top three of my classes then i got a full scholarship to study at the united nations bundy's university for peace so there i had a chance to specialize in international law and that was the time where i actually had a chance to take a course that was offered by united nations  relation to immigrants in general so i tried my very best but let me just go back and did it i guess you know growing up i was very much interested too to learn about current affairs i was always on the news so that was something that really sparked my interest and i'll tell you maybe later on that my parents what me to be a medical doctor you know us have a shop here and they wanted you to be someone that they could not be because you know they didn't have access to those things but you know i stood firm this is what i want to do for the reasons that i just explained earlier so that is something that i suggest that you also follow in a sense that just do something that you're really passionate about  trying to make a change in someone's face than if he's just one person so i got an internship u n h c r and it was like i said it was the highlight of my life professionally personally i i had a chance to work with over  you know i get to learn a lot from them these are people who had to start all over again these are people who had you know everything families lost to war you know everything that was material that was completely lost but then they had you know they had the will they had the you know they they had to endure and they were they did it with a happy face and so they were they were building their lives and i was when i i started you know to say that anything is possible if they can change their life anything is possible these are people with you know medical doctors ph d holders but they have to start all over again because you know the refugee law is not to see him as it is in the u s because here you can work in countries o you cannot or kenya so anyway that was that was something that really sparked my interest to work in the area for fiji law and after i moved to the u s i was i myself was the immigrant so i had to adopt to the system i had to go to law school again pass the bar again and then you know i did all those things because i knew that i couldn't be something that i wanted to do for myself and right after i pass the bar and i did a couple of internship with northwestern grants rights project and then i decided i want to start my own practice because i want to start something that i i envisioned that i would do at the end of the day help immigrants help m so part of the research i did was on the health and related issues of ethiopian domestic workers in the middle east the rule of the land is that if you have hiv or tuberculosis or hepatitis c you get deported and the funny thing is that when these ethiopian domestic workers come into the u a e they don't have any of those diseases but in two years time they get deported because of it and so part of my research is trying to figure out how are they contract in these diseases is it through their employers are they getting raped or are they you know so all these things i need to i wanted to know what was the cause and it's sad when you see these people leaving their families behind and coming to a country and basically trying to you know support their family back home and you know the things that they face once they get there and there's no one to help them there's no human rights in the u a e as you all know for foreigners really  and so it's really sad to see that and so i saw that firsthand and they're just deported i mean their own even treat them for their illness and so that was where i got my passion to go into medicine  also my father has colon cancer as well so that's another reason why you know the medicine in the u a e is not as what you call it you know at like the u s it's not perfect  if you can sue people or anything if there is malpractise so you know that's another issue and so i decided to go in medicine because i have the passion for it number one and number two i can see all the things that go wrong you know around the world i've traveled around the world i've seen what it's like and yeah that's pretty much that's why i went to that career path things i think my motivation came when i was  years old six seven had an ankle who's an engineer brilliant guy had a scholarship went overseas came to visit in the middle of his study because my dad passed away so we're just having this conversation when i was little i said thing that i would be an artist because my dad is was professional artist he was a painter he was really great at it so my uncle came in were having this conversation i didn't even know why the engineers do and i was asking  america when i was going to school but that had been my my vision all along of course back then i didn't know what exactly the specific domain with engineering that i would consider studying but  also for all of you to probably take one thing from here is having a role model in our life is the most critical thing that we should we should do in my not common or surrounding in our family but whatever it is takes someone someone that you really admire respect in our door and in the study the person studying what it is that they do how they impact their society and i think i think for me that had been my inspiration  crucial part of who you are so when i was in school obviously you know at the university of colorado you don't have a lot of minorities the friends that i made in college were always thinking about the social economic status after they graduate you know graduate get this amount of money you know live this life none of them ever thought about what can i do how can i go back to my community and fix it so that's why after i graduated worked in communications just for that year and then decided to move to seattle because i see my family my immediate family lives here as well and when i came here i was like you know what i don't have to go back to the same path what i wanted to let me just try to work in the east african population it helped me a lot to actually find myself because i got to learn a lot about my own culture and  prayer right as i said so basically you know once again looking at also where i came from and like almost all my friends and i did broad shoulders with the justice system and stuff like that so i was like you know what i think i should do something as my past so working with you you know the youth development really was something great for me and i was a hold up i'm getting paid for something that i love doing and seeing that seattle is a very diverse area and me working with you know used for incarcerated and stuff like that you know makes me wake up every single morning knowing that i'm doing something that i love doing so that you know i want to save that child who should not walk in the same shoes that maybe one of my friends walked in and gets locked