Ma Mint is so soft-spoken and polite that I could barely hear her. We sat together in tiny desks in Kathy Sosa’s classroom in the middle of a vast middle school in the heart of Albany.

She and another of her classmates (Dah Blue, the artist Blue’s younger sister) both want to go to Bishop Maginn High School in the fall. They are graduating from the Hackett Middle School in Albany on Wednesday.

I went to meet both of them (I’ll write about Dah Blue separately tomorrow) in Kathy Sosa’s home room at the Hackett  school this afternoon.

The story is somewhat familiar, yet still wrenching and powerful.

These gifted children need special schools to help them acclimate and learn English,  and prepare for college, but their families do not have the money for tuition.

The very  hallmark of the refugee experience is to have nothing, everything was lost. These families sacrificed everything for their children, they didn’t come her to rape us or steal from us, they came here to give their children better lives.

My idea is that we help raise the money for their tuition.

So far, we’ve done it four times.

Ma is 14 years old and spend six and a half-years in a refugee camp in Thailand after her family was driven from their homes. Her strongest memory of life in the camp was her father setting out most nights into a nearby jungle to find something for his family to eat.

Ma works in a community garden  Albany because they were so poor in the refugee camp.

Sometimes,,”  she says, “when my father couldn’t go to the jungle we had to eat white rice, salt and the spicy chilis. “We grew up eating that, so we are used to the spicy taste. Sometimes we almost had to eat it every day.”

Ma has an older sister who just graduated from Bishop Maginn and was awarded a full scholarship at Sage University.

Ma wants to plant chilis in the garden, she said, because they remind her of her country and her culture. “Even in America,” she told me, “we never forgot about our spicy chilis.”

Ma startled me there was some urgency about getting to America. She had open heart surgery a few years ago in Albany, in the same hospital where I had my own open heart surgery nearly five years ago.

Needless to say, we connected.

Kathy Sosa says Ma Myint is a wonderful student. She is also a devout Christian. I can testify that she is courteous and especially bright. I think she has been through enough in life for one child. She needs a smaller classroom and more attention from her teachers.

She loves to play volleyball.

She is bright and ambitious, she is grateful to be in America.  Her mother wants her to get the best possible education.

Ma spent a day at Bishop Maginn last week, she loved it and they loved her I spoke with Mike Tolan, the principal at Bishop Maginn, and he says the school will accept her but she needs to be able to offer some tuition payment.

I’m not sure yet what we need. If people want to help, there will be  a tuition fund donation  page on the Bishop Maginn High School web page, details to come.

For people who prefer to send their contributions to me, there will be a way to do that.

Catholic schools are also poor these days, and it is a very reasonable  expectation for Ma to pay something. Principal Tolan is also very flexible, we are talking about how much is necessary and whether or not the payments could be spread out.

The school is a lot less expensive than some of the schools we have been dealing with, and also much more flexible. They seem to put the student first, and the money second.

So over the next few days or weeks I’ll figure out what we might need, and yes, I will be asking for some help and support to get Ma Myint where she belongs. I think Bishop Maginn is just the right place for her.

I also meet with Dah Blue, she is also a student in Kathy’s 8th grade class, she has also applied to Bishop Maginn and will be accepted this week. She will also need some tuition support. I’ll write more about her tomorrow. She spent eight years of her life in refugee camps, she is the sister of Blue, a member of the Silverstein Art Gang.

I enjoyed meeting her very much, she is neither shy nor without some strong opinions. I liked her very much. I met with her last week at Bishop Maginn, she was spending a day  at the school, she sat with Red on the floor for a long time. She loves K-pop, a rap genre.

More later: