What common values, high achievements, and other experiences (such as obstacles and hardships) appear in the writings of Waheeda Samady and Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa? Why are these similarit

Read “A Cabdriver’s Daughter” by Waheeda Samady and “Terra FirmaA Journey from Migrant Farm Labor to Neurosurgery” by Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa. Explain how Samady and Quinones-Hinojosa exemplify the values and high achievements of many immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States. In addition, discuss the similar obstacles and hardships that these authors and/or their families have experienced.
Prompt: What common values, high achievements, and other experiences (such as obstacles and hardships) appear in the writings of Waheeda Samady and Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa? Why are these similarities significant, or important?
In the ntroduction, provide a hook as well as context. Why is it relevant, in the current year, to explore the values and contributions that immigrants and children of immigrants make to American society? Can also address the “between worlds” theme and/or common obstacles and conflicts faced by immigrants. Include a clear thesis that answers the above prompt.
In the body paragraphs, include clear topic sentences. Then, provide well-organized, highly detailed paragraphs about your subjects (we will do pre-writing activities to assist you in the development of your body paragraphs). Include specific evidence from each reading assignment to support your points. Be sure to analyze all evidence thoroughly.
In the conclusion, address what the average reader might glean from the stories of these individuals, and explain the far-reaching impact that their contributions have on America, and on the perceptions of immigrants in America. Also, consider answering the questions, “So what?” “Who cares?” and “What now?”
Full Text:
“Terra FirmaA Journey from Migrant Farm Labor to Neurosurgery”
by Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa
An undocumented immigrant when he crossed into the United States in the mid-1980s, AIfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa (b. 1966) is an assistant professor of neurosurgery and oncology’ director of the brain-tumor stem-cell laboratory at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’ and director of the brain-tumor program at the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus.
In an interview which you can hear at www.nejm.org, Quiñones-Hinojosa discusses his concerns about how immigrants today face discrimination and often feel unwelcome in emergency rooms, where they may come too late for appropriate medical treatment. Quiñones-Hinojosa’s inspiring personal narrative below appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine on August 9, 2007.
“You will spend the rest of your life working in the fields,” my cousin told me when I arrived in the United States in the mid-1980s. This fate indeed appeared likely: a 19-year-old illegal migrant farm worker, I had no English language skills and no dependable means of support. I had grown up in a small Mexican farming community, where I began working at my father’s gas station at the age of 5. Our family was poor, and we were subject to the diseases of poverty: my earliest memory is of my infant sister’s death from diarrhea when I was 3 years old. But my parents worked long hours and had always made enough money to feed us, until an economic crisis hit our country in the 1970s. Then they could no longer support the family, and although I trained to be a teacher, I could not put enough food on the table either.
Desperate for a livable income, I packed my few belongings and, with $65 in my pocket, crossed the U.S. border illegally. The first time I hopped the fence into California, I was caught and sent back to Mexico, but I tried again and succeeded. I am not condoning illegal immigration; honestly, at the time, the law was far from the front of my mind. I was merely responding to the dream of a better life, the hope of escaping poverty so that one day I could return home triumphant. Reality, however, posed a stark contrast to the dream. I spent long days in the fields picking fruits and vegetables, sleeping under leaky camper shells, eating anything I could get, with hands bloodied from pulling weedsthe very same hands that today perform brain surgery.
My days as a farm worker taught me a great deal about economics, politics, and society. I learned that being illegal and poor in a foreign country could be more painful than any poverty I had previously experienced. I learned that our society sometimes treats us differently depending on the places we have been and the education we have obtained. When my cousin told me I would never escape that life of poverty, I became determined to prove him wrong. I took night jobs as a janitor and subsequently as a welder that allowed me to attend a community college where I could learn English.
In 1989, while I was working for a railroad company as a welder and high-pressure valve specialist, I had an accident that caused me to reevaluate my life once again. I fell into a tank car that was used to carry
liquefied petroleum gas. My father was working at the same company. Hearing a coworker’s cry for help, he tried to get into the tank; fortunately, someone stopped him. It was my brother-in-law, Ramon, who climbed in and saved my life. He was taken out of the tank unconscious but regained consciousness quickly. By the time I was rescued, my heart rate had slowed almost to zero, but I was resuscitated in time. When I awoke, I saw a person dressed all in white and was flooded with a sense of security, confidence, and protection, knowing that a doctor was taking care of me. Although it was clear to me that our poverty and inability to speak English usually translated into suboptimal health care for my community, the moment 1 saw this physician at my bedside, I felt I had reached terra firma, that I had a guardian.
After community college, I was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley, where a combination of excellent mentorship, scholarships, and my own passion for math and science led me to research in the neurosciences. One of my mentors there convinced me, despite my skepticism, that I could go anywhere I wanted for medical school. Thanks to such support and encouragement, I eventually went to Harvard Medical School. As I pursued my own education, I became increasingly aware of the need and responsibilit-y we have to educate our country’s poor.
It is no secret that minority communities have the highest dropout rates and the lowest educational achievement levels in the country. The pathway to higher education and professional training programs is not “primed” for minority students. In 1994, when I started medical school, members of minority groups made up about 18% of the U.S. population but accounted for only 3.7% of the faculty in U.S. medical schools. I was very fortunate to find outstanding minority role models, but though their quality was high, their numbers were low.
Given my background, perhaps it is not surprising that I did not discover the field of neurosurgery until I was a medical student. I vividly remember when, in my third year of medical school, I first witnessed neurosurgeons peeling back the dura and exposing a real, live, throbbing human brain. I recall feeling absolute awe and humilityand an immediate and deep recognition of the intimacy between a patient and a doctor.
That year, one of my professors strongly encouraged me to go into primary care, arguing that it was the best way for me to serve my Hispanic immigrant community. Although I had initially intended to return to Mexico triumphant, I had since fallen in love with this country, and I soon found myself immersed in and committed to the betterment of U.S. society. With my sights set on neurosurgery after medical school, I followed my heart and instincts and have tried to contribute to my community and the larger society in my own way. I see a career in academic medicine as an opportunity not only to improve our understanding and treatment of human diseases but also to provide leadership within medicine and support to future scientists, medical students, and physician scientists from minority and nonminority groups alike.
My grandmother was the medicine woman in the small town in rural Mexico where I grew up. As I have gotten older, I have come to recognize the crucial role she played not only in instilling in me the value of healing but also in determining the fate and future of others. She was my first role model, and throughout my life I have depended on the help of my mentors in pursuing my dreams. Like many other illegal immigrants, I arrived in the United States able only to contemplate those dreamsI was not at that point on solid ground. From the fields of the San Joaquin Valley in California to the field of neurosurgery, it has been quite a journey. Today, as a neurosurgeon and researcher, I am taking part in the larger journey of medicine, both caring for patients and conducting clinical and translational research on brain cancer that I hope will lead to innovative ways of fighting devastating disease. And as a citizen of the United States, I am also participating in the great journey of this country. For immigrants like me, this voyage still means the pursuit of a better lifeand the opportunity to give back to society.

Full-text article:
“A Cabdriver’s Daughter”
By Waheeda Samady
Oct. 3, 2010
In the morning, before my father and I go our separate ways to work, we chat amiably. “Good luck on your day.” “Hope business is good.” And our one response to everything: “Inshallah.” God willing.
I get into my mini-SUV and head off to the hospital, groaning about the lack of sleep, the lack of time, but also knowing that I am driving off to what has always been my dream.
My father gets into his blue taxi, picks up his radio and tells the dispatcher he’s ready. Then he waits. He waits for someone wanting to go somewhere. He waits to go home to my mother, the woman he calls “the boss.” Maybe today will be a good day. He will call her up and tell her he is taking her out tonight. He can do that now that we’re all grown up; now that he doesn’t have to save every dime for the “what-ifs” and the “just-in-cases.”
There is very little complaining in his car. His day starts off with a silent prayer, then a pledge: Hudaya ba omaide hudit. God, as you wish. Then he hums or sings. Some songs are about love and some about loss. They are all about life. He sings. He smiles the whole time.
My father is the type of person who is content to listen, but I love it when he speaks. There is wisdom there, although he does not intend there to be.
“What’s new?” he’ll ask over a Saturday morning breakfast.
“Not much,” I reply. “My life revolves around these books, Dad; there is little to say unless you want to hear about the urinary tract.”
“You know when Gandhi’s minister of foreign affairs died, his only true possessions were books. It is the sign of a life worth living,” he replies and begins to butter his toast.
Sometimes, the years of education and learning shine through the injuries and lost dreams. I get a glimpse of the man who once existed, and the one who never will. Who would he have been, I wonder, if the bombs hadn’t come down in 1978? What if I could take away the time he spent in a coma, the years of treatment and surgery, the broken bones and disabilities. What if there were no refugee ghettos, no poverty, no fear, no depression written in his life history. Who could he have been? The thought saddens me, but intrigues me as well. Is it possible that he is who he is because the life he has lived has been filled with such tragedy? Perhaps these stories were the making of my hero.
Sometimes he’ll tell me about his college days, about an Afghanistan I have never known and very few people would believe ever existed.
“In the College of Engineering, there was this lecture hall, with seats for 1,000 students,” his says as eyes begin to get bigger. “At the end of the lecture, the seats would move. The whole auditorium would shift as you spun along the diameter. The engineering of the building itself was very interesting.” He continues to describe the construction details, then sighs. “I wonder if it’s still around?”
There is a pause. For 25 years I have tried to fill that silence, but I have never quite figured out what to say. I guess silence goes best there. He is the next one to speak. “You see, even your old-aged father was once part of something important.”
When he says things like that I want to scream. I don’t want to believe that the years can beat away at you like that. I don’t want to know that if enough time passes, you begin to question what was real or who you are. I am unconcerned with what the world thinks of him, but it is devastating to know that he at times thinks less of himself.
We are the same, but we are separated. People don’t see him in me. I wish they would. I walk in with a doctor’s white coat or a suit or my Berkeley sweatshirt and jeans. High heels or sneakers, it doesn’t matter, people always seem impressed with me. “Pediatrician, eh?” they say. “Well, good for you.”
I wonder what people see when they look at him. They don’t see what I see in his smile. Perhaps they see a brown man with a thick accent; perhaps they think, another immigrant cabdriver. Or perhaps it is much worse: Maybe he is a profile-matched terrorist, aligned with some axis of evil. “Another Abd-ool f—–g foreigner,” I once heard someone say.
Sometimes the worst things are not what people say to your face or what they say at all, it is the things that are assumed. I am in line at the grocery store, studying at a cafe, on a plane flying somewhere.
“Her English is excellent; she must have grown up here,” I hear a lady whisper. “But why on earth does she wear that thing on her head?”
“Oh, that’s not her fault,” someone replies. “Her father probably forces her to wear that.”
I am still searching for a quick, biting response to comments like that. The trouble is that things I’d like to say aren’t quick. So I say nothing. I want to take their hands and pull them home with me. Come, meet my father. Don’t look at the wrinkles; don’t look at the scars; don’t mind the hearing aid, or the thick accent. Don’t look at the world’s effect on him; look at his effect on the world. Come into my childhood and hear the lullabies, the warm hand on your shoulder on the worst of days, the silly jokes on mundane afternoons. Come meet the woman he has loved and respected his whole life; witness the confidence he has nurtured in his three daughters. Stay the night; hear his footsteps come in at midnight after a long day’s work. That sound in the middle of the night is his head bowing in prayer although he is exhausted. Granted, the wealth is gone and the legacy unknown, but look at what the bombs did not destroy. Now tell me, am I really oppressed? The question makes me want to laugh. Now tell me, is he really the oppressor? The question makes me want to cry.
At times, I want to throw it all away: the education, the opportunities, the potential. I want to slip into the passenger seat of his cab and say: This is who I am. If he is going to be labeled, then give me those labels too. If you are going to look down on him, than you might as well peer down on me as well. Close this gap. Erase this line. There is no differentiation here. Of all the things I am, of all the things I could ever be, I will never be prouder than to say that I am of him.
I am this cabdriver’s daughter.

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