Muslim girl fights poverty

from North Jersey

By DIANE HAINES
HERALD NEWS

Aseel Najib promotes religious understanding. That's one of the qualities that resulted in her being picked as one of 25 future world leaders.

It means she sends e-cards for Hanukkah to her Jewish friends and gets remembrances from them during Ramadan.

Unusual? No, that's what Youth for Charity is all about. It teaches mutual understanding among young women of different ethnic backgrounds while at the same time working to end poverty and homelessness.

Youth for Charity, based in North Bergen, is just one of the charitable pursuits that figure into Najib's crowded schedule.

"It's so important for people of different religions to reach out and build bridges, not burn them. When you work together good comes out of it," says Najib, 17, of Clifton about her community outreach involvement.

A junior at Al Ghazaly, a private Muslim school in Teaneck, Najib gets top grades. She volunteers in a North Bergen physician's office and is active in an organization called Stamp Out Hate. Najib, who was born in Saudi Arabia, takes advanced placement courses and participates in Mock Trial and Model U.N. programs. She speaks Arabic and English and is working on her Spanish because that is the language of some of the patients at the doctor's office.

She discusses her goals and beliefs seated on a white damask couch in the living room of her parents' ranch-style home. Barefoot and wearing jeans, she has her head wrapped in a blue, white and black abstract-patterned hijab.

Over the winter one of her teachers nominated her for an international leadership award called 2007 Tomorrow25. She was one of a few hundred accomplished students nominated by business and community leaders, teachers, school administrators and guidance counselors. A panel of judges at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., narrowed it down to 25 outstanding high school juniors, and Najib made the cut.

The program, now in its third year, is co-sponsored by Time magazine, which supplied speakers for an April leadership forum. The theme was "The Business of Healing Our World." More than half of the winners were from the United States, and others hailed from Colombia, Mexico, Nicaragua and Turkey. In addition to New Jersey, they came from California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts and Minnesota.

The day-long conference at Bentley College featured Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Najib says he addressed a sleepy audience of scholars; the night before, the college hosted an ice cream party for the students that stretched into the early morning hours. That was where they all got to know each other. They were reluctant to leave their new friends, who are all likely to become tomorrow's leaders.

Najib has returned to being the spokeswoman for Youth for Charity and attending Al Ghazaly High School. It is one of the oldest full-time Islamic schools in the nation and serves students in seventh through 12th grades. Courses include the study of Arabic, Islamic heritage and the Quran.

Youth for Charity comprises 10 Muslim and 10 Jewish students. The group organizes events that raise money for charity.

She says the first meeting in Fair Lawn was awkward. The 10 Muslim teenagers were on one side of the room and their Jewish counterparts huddled across the room. The organizers – a Jew and a Muslim – persuaded the participants to start mingling and talking to one another.

"We started talking about books and SAT's and we hit it off from there on in. The more we kept up the communication we found we had common concerns," Najib says. Some of the original group has graduated from high school but they still keep in touch sending e-cards to commemorate holidays.

The first event the teenagers organized was called "Project Provide a Home," a dinner at a Fair Lawn banquet hall on Dec. 17, 2005, that raised $15,000. The funds were donated to create the first homeless shelter in Union City.

Arabic and Hebrew sweets were served, and dancers performed the Dabke, a Middle Eastern folk dance with complex steps. The young women sold tickets to the dinner and conducted a raffle and a silent auction.

The second fundraiser, in June 2006, was a carnival for children at the Rutgers University campus in Newark. "Project United for Children" raised $5,000 for homeless children needing school supplies.

Over the summer, Najib will work as a counselor at a camp in River Edge for the children of the working poor. She has also been invited to attend a conference in New York in July designed to empower youths to fight poverty.

There are so many things Najib wants to accomplish. She will specialize in Middle Eastern studies with journalism and literature minors at either Columbia University, NYU, Cornell University or Georgetown University.

Reach Diane Haines at 973-569-7046 or haines@northjersey.com.