 Dear Mr. President, in those seven countries, children can't even go to school. And here, we have the audacity to sit in class and drool. So many children wish for an education with no limitation, but they live in a nation where little boys learn about war way before they learn their ABCs, while their families are thirsty and dying of disease. And when those bombs hit, there's nowhere left to flee. Are you too blind to even see clearly? Little girls are forced to learn how to cook and clean, but they don't even know how to read. Bounded to child marriages, well, they will never be free. Our countries are starving, and our blood is oozing down the street. Mothers lose their children to conflict and violence. Mainstream media turns their head away in silence. We see their cries for help as a sign of defiance. Their bones are breaking from all this burden. Their skin is glassed from all this hurtin'. For us, one plus one equals two, but for them, one bomb plus one bomb equals destruction. One missile plus one missile equals massive reconstruction. One drone plus one drone equals more obstruction. They are stranded alone. No one who will avenge. They hear loud explosions again and again. But all these children are wishing for is a paper and a pen. My name is Syeda Dahir. I'm an 18-year-old student, living and going to school here at UC Berkeley. I started writing poetry when I was seven years old. I'm from Somalia, and Somalia is called the Land of Poets. Every single person in my family has some sort of story with writing and poetry. And prose. When I was seven years old, I really got introduced to it by my siblings and the rest is history. After the Civil War, my family fled to a refugee camp, and that's where I was born. I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, when I was around three years old, and it's been my home ever since. I don't really know anything besides Salt Lake City, and it's a very homogenous place. Everyone looks the same. Everyone acts the same. Everyone is the same. I remember being very badly bullied as a kid because of things that I couldn't change, because of my skin, because of my hair, because of the way that my family was different. But I guess that really made me wake up. Everything about me as a minority is perfectly fine. Being a Muslim, being a woman, being a refugee, being black, even though none of those things are the norm. In 2016, Donald Trump released that he was proposing a Muslim ban on seven countries. One of those seven countries is Somalia, and I'm from Somalia, which means if that travel ban had been put into place 15 years ago, I wouldn't be standing in front of you today. I wrote paper and a pen talking about why people choose to leave their countries in the first place. Because no one voluntarily leaves their home, their culture, their people, their language, their lives, they're pushed out. And a lot of these people that are affected by this directly are children. So I talk about why people choose to leave for education, for life, for liberty, for the pursuit of happiness. Being a first-generation college student has really been an amazing opportunity. Although Muslim, my poems are about things that I want to see change, you can also criticize and be very grateful. And I'm very grateful for the opportunities I have, but I also am very aware that there's things that have to change, that need to change. I'm really looking forward to things that I can make happen here in this institution and in the world in general. There's so much power that's behind your voice, so it's really important to speak out and speak up.