Feature

YES Alumni Conference,
Washington DC, 2009

Shariqa Habib

ON 8th February, 2007 my life changed when my English Professor announced that I was finally selected for the Youth Exchange and Study (YES) Program. YES Program is a high school student exchange program funded by U.S. Department of State. It is a full academic year program, which started after 9/11. U.S. Department of State started this high school exchange program in order to build a better understanding with the Muslim world. I was one of the lucky ones among the 30 students in the academic year of 2007-2008 to go to USA for a year.

I was placed in Cincinnati, Ohio and my host school was Walnut Hills High School, which is one of the top 100 high schools in USA. Living with an American family and studying in an American school for a year was a life changing experience for me. And after the completion of the program, when we all returned home, we were YES Alumni. We all joined the YES Alumni Association, Bangladesh and became the State Alumni. I also got the chance to work in various volunteer projects, which even took me to the northern part of Bangladesh. Working with the YES alumni taught me team work and it also helped me to develop my leadership skills. YES Program started in 2003. Since then a total of 3,480 students have participated in the program.

During the coming academic year 2009-10, approximately 882 students will join the program from: Afghanistan, Albania, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bosnia Herzegovina, Brunei, Bulgaria, Egypt, Gaza, Ghana, Kosovo, India, Indonesia, Israel (Arab Community), Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Suriname, Tanzania, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen. To celebrate successful 5 years of YES Alumni, The U.S. Department of State and AMIDEAST organized the first YES Alumni Conference, Washington DC, 2009 at American University. Around 150 active YES Alumni from all over the world were selected to participate in the conference. While 7 alumni were selected from Bangladesh and I was one of the lucky students to be selected. It was a great pleasure to get to know that I was selected despite of my young age. The 7 of us, who made this journey back to USA were Fahad Bin Kamal (the President of YES Alumni Association, Bangladesh), Imran Kayesh Asif, Masaba Adneen, Sharid Khan, Rukhsar Jahan Arzoo, Sakib Noor Billah and lastly me, Shariqa Habib. We arrived at Washington DC on 27th July, 2009, and were accommodated in American University dorm.

Besides celebrating success of YES, we also made new contacts, and gained skills to advance our goals in community service and volunteering. All the countries participating in this conference made presentations on their successful community service and projects. Thus it was a great chance to learn about what other countries were doing and get ideas from them. There were sessions held by officials from the U.S. Department of State to help us in our alumni activity back home. We had three very useful breakout sessions on the second day of the conference. And those were, Workshop-1: "Building Alumni Network", Workshop- 2: "Building Leadership Skills" and Workshop-3: "Studying Abroad in USA". All these workshops were very useful and were conducted by experts in these fields. We also had question-answer session in these workshops, where our questions were answered by the specialists themselves.

On the 2nd day of the conference, we were taken to the U.S. Department of State. Since we were supposed to wear cultural clothes, we Bangladeshi girls decided to wear saree. While we were waiting in the line to get through the security check at the U.S. Department of State, it started raining, and the three of us had to run inside. It was a funny scene to witness. And something funnier happened to me afterwards. When I was walking through the security door, the metal detector went off. The person who was in charge of security at the gate came to me and asked me what metal I was carrying with me. I lifted both my hands and showed himdozens of bangles I was wearing. He scanned them again and gave me a smile and said that I could go in. In the U.S. Department of State, we got the chance to meet some of the officials of Obama administration. There were alumni from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and other Arabian countries present on the occasion, who asked questions about very sensitive issues regarding the recent attack on Gaza.

Iraqi and Afghan alumni asked questions about the issues in their countries. It was a great learning experience as well. After the visit to the U.S. Department of State, we were taken to our excursion on a cruise, the Spirit of D.C. Cruise. The award ceremony for the YES Spot Light Award took place at the cruise.

The third and the last day of the conference started with the country break-out session, where each country had to discuss the future action plans for their alumni association and make a presentation on that. The team of 7 of us discussed the future action plans for the YES Alumni Association, Bangladesh and to my utmost surprise, our president asked me and Sharid Khan to make a presentation on the Country Based Action Plan presentation. We did a winning presentation. At the end of the third day, we had one more discussion on "Benefits of Private and Public Partnership". After that, we had an official photo session to end the conference. Those 3 days of the first YES Alumni Conference was a great learning experience for all of us. We met young activists from all over the world. We learned from them and they learned from us as well. We all inspired each other.

I would like to pay special thanks to International Education and Resource Network, Bangladesh (Iearn-BD) and American Center, Bangladesh for all their kind support s regarding this conference.