#promoting understanding

Recently I was invited by an Islamic middle school in my area to give a presentation on Muslims in America. Let’s be honest, powerpoint’s make me sleepy, that program needs a facelift. My audience? Imagine being those poor kids who by late afternoon still hadn’t eaten lunch and were sweating up enough liquids to compensate for the recent drought. They later serenaded me with Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’. 

To make the presentation more interactive, I (a) used a long ruler to point to things and make loud sounds so no one dozed off and (b) made the entire thing a fun facts quiz. You can see me combining both (a) and (b) and doin’ it like a boss. 

Other things I love in this photo: President SBY’s portrait smiling over the American flag. Symbolic unity! & also the marble plaque on the table with my photo. 

FYI, Dearborn, Michigan has the largest concentration of Muslim-Americans in the United States (~32,000 = 1/3 of Dearborn’s total population).