Overcoming language barriers, a Salinas graduate is headed to college and helping others along the way.

In 2007, Fatima Abed’s family moved to the U.S. from Iraq. Her father took a job at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey and the family settled in Salinas Valley. Even though she was born in Iraq, she doesn't remember much, but her mother is making sure that her children will never forget Iraqi cuisine.  

Abed began working with the Boys and Girls Club in Salinas, helping kids there, just as she had helped to raise her siblings. After facing challenges to learn English, she overcame her language barrier.

She achieved a 4.0 grade point average in high school and was placed in an AP (Advanced Placement) language course. She is now looking forward to attending UC Berkeley in the fall with plans to major in public health.

This year Abed, now a high school graduate, was awarded the 2024 Dream of Flight $1,000 scholarship from MPI Jet Foundation. 

“I tried every trick in the book to prove I could speak English,” Abed wrote in her essay for the scholarship. “I dreaded the hour when my teacher would take me out of class. It reminded me of the stories my parents told when they first came here to America from Iraq in 2007; we were foreign outcasts. My friends reclassified and moved on; I was stuck.”

She learned about the MPI Jet scholarship opportunity as a senior at the Boys and Girls Club. 

In sophomore year, she got interested in comic books—Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes. The comics helped; “they still have a special place in my heart,” she says.

Encouraged by her sophomore English teacher, she enrolled in AP Language and Composition. “It taught me the value of reading, rhetorical writing and how to appeal to targeted audiences,” she wrote. “It inspired me to start blogging about my journey with writing, body dysphoria, leadership and xenophobia.”

Talking about differences between Arabic and English, Abed says Arabic is more poetic and romantic, but it was the different grammar, such as the conjugation system, that gave her the most trouble. 

Abed graduated from a relatively new Rancho San Juan High School that in her opinion lacks stability and has too much of a teachers' rotation. “In a valley of potential young leaders, we are constantly shadowed by drugs and violence,” she wrote. “We deserve better.”

To change that, Abed and her friends established the Young Scholars of Salinas club and met each month during her senior year.

“The focus was recruiting students at school who have dreams of going to college but have no clue where to start,” she says, adding that many of them would like to obtain their degrees and come back to Salinas to create change.

Abed plans to study public health at UC Berkeley. In the meantime, she enjoys summer, comic books and biking.