Mustafa was one of the first young writers I mentored through We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led program based in Gaza that tells the stories behind the numbers in the news, giving voice to Palestinians and advocating for their human rights. Mustafa is a graduate of Al Aqsa University, and he managed a small convenience store to supplement his family’s income.

Two years ago, I worked with him—virtually, from my home in Los Angeles—as he drafted and refined an essay about 13-year-old Muhammad, a familiar figure in his Khan Yunis neighborhood, who was bullied at school and compelled by extreme poverty to scavenge for castoff bread in the streets. In offering Muhammad odd jobs at the convenience store and extending his friendship, Mustafa awakened a sense of self-esteem in the boy. Through a series of Zoom meetings and Google Doc exchanges, we generated multiple drafts of the essay. And though Mustafa struggled with English, his piece displayed the rich detail and authentic dialogue of a born storyteller. One day, he logged on to Zoom on his phone from the store so that Muhammad and I could “meet.”

Mustafa married this year. In the aftermath of October 7, his wife’s family home in Gaza City was bombed, and the couple has been on the run since. “We are in our fifth place,” he texted me on WhatsApp, “but there is no safe place in Gaza. My wife is pregnant in her seventh month, and she is sick. She cannot get medical care.” My most recent messages to Mustafa have gone unanswered.

Since October 7, I’ve hovered over WhatsApp for messages not only from Mustafa but also from other young writers in Gaza I’ve mentored over the past several years. I leave my ringer on overnight, something I never did before, to seize the rare moments of internet connection and respond right away, even in the wee hours. I stare at the phone, hoping those single check marks will go double, offering me at least the assurance that my message has been seen, even if the writer is unable to respond.

Right now, all the stories published at WANN are about Israel’s current “aggression,” as our writers call it. They have lived through at least five aggressions in their 20-odd years. When the bombs aren’t falling, WANN writers have written essays about the World Cup, the “Hummus Theory,” a foodie blog of modernized Palestinian recipes, the soothing power of the sea, and aspirations to forge meaningful lives in a place where opportunity is scarce and danger abounds, even in the best of times.

Walaa, once a teaching assistant in English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), wrote a cogent essay for WANN that drew parallels between the tragedy of Othello and the occupation of Palestine. Last year, she was one of only two students from Gaza to receive the British Council’s Higher Education Scholarships for Palestine, enabling her to enter a master’s degree program at the University of Birmingham. She started her studies in September 2022 and planned to return to a faculty position at IUG in early 2024. The university was destroyed in an October 11 bombing, and she is now stranded far away. “This is putting more uncertainty on me now, because I’ve lost a job,” she texted me. “But it’s 25,000 students who’ve lost their education, meaning even more unemployment.”

My current mentee, Roaa, is a college student from Khan Yunis with a passion for physics. In a fiction story she completed just before October 7, a young woman enjoying life in a free Palestine and another witnessing the rubble of her Gaza home after an Israeli airstrike experience glimpses of the other’s reality by means of quantum entanglement. “It’s mind-blowing!” Roaa enthused on Zoom as we worked on her story. “It literally states that when two particles become entangled, changes in one particle’s state instantaneously affect the other, no matter the distance separating them.”

Roaa spent her first sleepless night during recent bombings writing about what was happening. She said it helped her get through the night. In more recent messages, she has reported that she and her family “had to evacuate our house twice in the past few days,” and that she’s been writing about that, too.

Other messages from writers tell of homes destroyed, and friends and relatives missing or dead. Four WANN writers have been killed in bombings since the “aggression” began, losses that have left this creative community reeling.

Yet amid the devastation, WANNers, as they call themselves, continue to create. When I asked Roaa what she would want readers to know about WANN, she texted, “The main aim is that each soul in Gaza is a whole life, dreams, and memories, not only a number. As long as we are alive, we will never stop sharing our stories with the world.”

These are voices we need to hear, to deepen our understanding of the lived experience of Palestinians in Gaza and gain insight into their yearning for freedom. Only a full and permanent ceasefire will ensure that they are not silenced altogether.

The post In Gaza, Storytelling and Silence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Prendergast, renowned for his advocacy on behalf of Darfur as the founder of the Enough Project, which seeks to end genocide and crimes against humanity, has inspired people to try to put a stop to mass killings around the world. But closer to home, he admitted to worries that he’d fail to meet the evening’s promise if he couldn’t list five kids who were saved through mentoring.

“But then I thought to myself,” Prendergast added, “What does ‘save’ mean anyway?” And, for that matter, when assessing mentoring, “Who is saving whom?”

That is one of the themes Prendergast explores in Unlikely Brothers: Our Story of Adventure, Loss and Redemption, the book he co-authored with Michael Mattocks, a young man Prendergast mentored whose family got caught up in the “underworld of the D.C. homeless shelter system” but who is now a happily married bus driver in the nation’s capital.

However, if he could write the book all over again, Prendergast said he would divide it into four chapters: fathers, brothers, war and wives. The first chapter would highlight the relationship that Prendergast and Mattocks had with their respective fathers. In the second chapter, Prendergast would recall Mattocks’ “moonbeam smile” the first time they met at a homeless shelter in Washington D.C. When social services threatened to split Mattocks’ family apart, Prendergast, then 21, took him and two of his brothers to his Philadelphia home for the summer. “I can remember some terrible nights of attempted cooking episodes and frantic calls to friends saying ‘Can you rescue us from my latest catastrophe?’” But it was at that point that he started considering the Mattocks brothers as family.

Chapter three, a grimmer chapter, would be entitled “War.” Prendergast recalled the time period in which he fell out of touch with Mattocks. “I was learning more about what happened in Africa. My first visual picture was the Ethiopian famine. It hit me like a tornado. I decided I have to go. I have to understand what’s happening there.” And while Prendergast was in Africa pursuing his new career, Mattocks was experiencing a war of his own back home. Prendergast described Mattocks’ road to becoming a drug dealer as “chilling” and expressed his remorse for letting his little brother down in his moment of need.

Redemption

Chapter four, the chapter Prendergast likes best, would be called “Wives.” “This chapter, neither of us saw coming a couple of decades ago. We are not only unlikely brothers, but we were definitely unlikely husbands,” he said as he fondly recalled the crucial meeting between Mattocks and his wife Nikki.

Returning to the question of whether mentors can save lives, Prendergast said, “So I don’t know at the end of the day whether we saved each other or not, but I do know that we both played absolutely critical roles in each other’s paths to redemption. ”

That sounds at least as good as a B in math, no?

Advice For Mentors

During the question and answer session, several members of the Zócalo audience shared their personal experiences as mentors, including the fear of not having enough time or the struggles of getting their mentees to open up. Prendergast offered helpful advice, urging those interested in becoming mentors to not worry about the limits and guidelines of a particular program. He noted that the key is to plant seeds of unconditional love early on, and to be a consistent figure in a child’s life. “It’s mostly all about self-esteem,” he says, “If you believe in a kid and the kid feels that, it makes all the difference.”

Prendergast then urged people to step up now more than ever. “In this moment we’re in, you would literally have your head in the sand to believe that we’re not going to see hemorrhaging in social programs over the next decade at the federal and state municipal levels… I hope people will have that kind of leadership here because it’s not going to come from the state at this point.”

We’re going to have to take care of each other, was Prendergast’s takeaway, as much at home as in the global village.

For full video, please click here.
For event photos, please click here.
To read about the effects mentors have had on the lives of four successful Angelenos, please click here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

The post Minding the Home Front appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Carlos Moreno

My most recurrent mentors have been my schoolteachers, beginning as early as the fifth grade at Solano Elementary School (Mr. Leathers), on to Lincoln High School (Mr. Talley), and then Yale (Professor Alvarez). All of these mentors encouraged me to do my best and challenged me to do a little bit extra beyond the normal school assignments. They had confidence in my ability to not only complete my assignments, but to go the extra mile. There was a term for this–“extra credit.” Somehow, the positive reinforcement worked. I was never discouraged when I expressed an interest in a future profession, whether it was to become a physicist, physician, or a writer. I am literally astounded when I hear reports that people I know, successful in their professions, were told they could not aspire to become what they subsequently have achieved with great success. That is why when I serve as a mentor for a new attorney or law student, I emphasize the many options they have to achieve success and never discourage them from taking a particular course of action when their talents and interests take them there.

Carlos Moreno is former Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court. He is the outgoing Chair of the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Children in Foster Care and also served as Co-chair of the Child Welfare Council.

—————————————————————————————————————

Wendy Greuel

Of the thousands of people I have met throughout my career, a few stand out as mentors who have inspired me and shaped the course of my life. During my decades of public service, two of my most influential mentors were Tom Bradley and Henry Cisneros, the two former mayors that I worked for at the very beginning of my involvement in politics.

Working for these leaders profoundly influenced my early career, because I not only got the chance to be involved in the political process, but I also got to observe tried-and-true executives and learn about what it takes to be successful in public office and as a leader.

These mayors taught me that leadership means tackling the big issues, but never losing sight of the little things that really make a difference in people’s lives. Good governance means finding solutions, regardless of the size of the problem. Budgets and expansive projects are extremely important, but most people care just as much about the state of our roads and the simple, practical things that make up our daily lives. I have carried this belief with me throughout my career, and even earned myself the nickname “pothole queen” around City Hall during my tenure on the City Council. I like to think that Bradley and Cisneros would be proud that I earned that nickname.

Bradley and Cisneros taught me what it takes to get things done and to change the world, and I will continue to do whatever I can–whether it’s fixing a pothole or balancing the budget–to recreate a Los Angeles that works.

Wendy Greuel is Los Angeles City Controller and former President Pro Tempore of the Los Angeles City Council.

—————————————————————————————————————

Sonia Marie De Léon de Vega

I was fortunate to meet the person who would be my lifetime mentor in college. His name is Dr. David Buck, and he was the conductor of the University Symphony. He saw a talent in me that I had not even seen in myself. He believed in me from the very beginning. I was a pianist at the time I enrolled in his beginning conducting class, but this experience made me change my career goal and this is when I began to pursue conducting.

At the time, there were not any women conductors. Even though there were two females conducting opera, it was unheard of for a woman to conduct a symphony orchestra. The fact that I was a female and that the chances of succeeding in this career were slim were not an issue for him, or for me. What he stressed was excellence–excellence in musicianship and technique; nothing other than excellence would be accepted. In return, I expected that of myself, too.

Now many years later, I have conducted numerous symphonies. Through Santa Cecilia Orchestra, the orchestra that I founded and conduct, I have started a mentorship program. The program is in a middle school that is located in a gang-infested area. I send professional musicians from the orchestra to mentor youth that are playing an instrument in the school orchestra. The involvement of mentors is essential. Everyone needs someone to look up to and someone to believe in him or her.

Sonia Marie De Léon de Vega is the founder, music director and conductor of the Los Angeles-based Santa Cecilia Orchestra. She created Discovering Music, a two-year program that provides music education to schools throughout Los Angeles.

—————————————————————————————————————

Kai Ma

On the surface, my greatest mentor and I are nothing alike. He’s a Depression era-born WWII veteran and businessman. I’m a much younger journalist and creative type. Truth be told, we didn’t always agree or get along. But over several years, Bob Wagner, a family friend, managed to open my world up in fascinating ways. He taught me how to gargle fine wines and eat oysters; he shared stories about the war, his travels and 1940s New Jersey. While professors and supervisors provided more hands-on advice about my writing career, Bob’s mentorship focused on my character. He pushed me to think critically and to act ambitiously. His guidance inspired me to aim for bigger things.

It is also because of Bob that I learned failure was acceptable. He even encouraged it. One day, I was crushed after receiving particularly harsh feedback from an editor. Bob showed no sympathy. “So you failed,” he said. “I want you to fail. It means you tried. And it means now, you’re one step closer to succeeding.” This philosophy–that it’s OK to fail, even necessary–felt liberating. These types of lessons allowed me to grow and embrace challenges. And though I haven’t spoken to Bob in years, I still turn to his words during moments of loss or confusion about where to go or what to do next. Even as I write these words, I can hear our last conversation in my mind, especially when he told me: “Use brainpower. Be imaginative. And always, be brave.”

Kai Ma is an award-winning journalist living in Hong Kong. She is the former editor-in-chief of KoreAm, the longest-running English-language magazine serving the Korean American community.

*Photo courtesy of BES Photos.

The post Who Was Your Greatest Mentor? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.