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Edited on Mon Nov-08-10 03:26 AM by DFW
At age 16, she wanted to take her year of high school abroad (encouraged here in Germany), as did
her sister before her. But her sister had opted for an easy situation back at the local public school
in Dallas, living with my roomies in the neighborhood. The younger one said, OK, she went to a day
school in Dallas, so I want to go to a boarding school elsewhere. I said New England had lots of them,
if she still wanted to go to the USA. She said that was too cold. I threw up my hands, and said, so what
do you want, Hawai'i? She said that sounded good. Sure enough, we looked up the Hawai'i Dept. of Education,
and found a boarding school that accepted non-Hawaiians. She said we should go look at it. Right--12 time
zones away just to go look at some school. But we did, she applied, and got in, and liked it so much she
decided she wanted to stay on for another year and graduate.
I said OK, but she had to realize that when she came back, Germany Universities would not recognize
her U.S. high school diploma. She said then to hell with the German universities, she would apply
to an American University. I warned her that with only 2 years of school in English, it would not be
easy. She tried anyway. She got into George Washington U in DC, did an internship with EMILY's list,
hanging with Barack Obama and Howard Dean, worked translating for a German lawyer in DC for pocket
money. She did a semester "abroad" in Paris, for which I had to sign a paper attesting to my opinion
that she had the necessary maturity to spend a semester in Europe. I wrote back that if she had the
necessary maturity to be born there and grow up there, that she probably had the necessary maturity to
come back for a semester. They apologized for not looking closer at her background before sending out
that form letter! LOL. She graduated Magna cum Laude in Political Science/Public policy.
When she took the LSATs, she scored low, as she didn't recognize a lot of the complicated English words
on it. With (I suspect) a little help from Bobby Kennedy, Jr. (grade school classmate of mine in DC),
who teaches at Pace Law, she got in there. Most law school students do clerking in their summers, or
look for work as associates with law firms. Not my girl. She applied to a program that sent her to
Sierra Leone in West Africa to work with the UN War Crimes Tribunal. She had rationed electricity,
little running water, and nearly died from some unknown infection she picked up in Senegal, when
a corrupt African doctor gave her fake antibiotics (the UN saved her with some real ones). She took
it all in stride. Before graduation from Pace, she went with her boyfriend for a week back to her
old stomping grounds in Hawai'i for a week, planning to get back a day before graduation. Then her
plane broke down, and she was told she would have to wait two days to get back to NY. She gave the
air line (Agony Airlines) hell, and wouldn't let them go until they booked some other air line's
redeye route to get her back before that. She SMSed me with her flight, and I arranged transportation
back to White Plains from Newark. She made her graduation ceremony with 40 minutes to spare. No sweat, right?
We're obviously very proud and pleased for her, but I'm still sad that America has lost such a gifted
(says the objective parent) legal mind, who could have gone on to be the next Hillary (or better),
had she stayed (from me, she has had American citizenship from birth, and is as "natural born" as
John McCain). But even though she won the Association of American Women Lawyers award and graduated
near the top of her class at Pace Law, got kudos for her work on the Law Review, etc. etc. etc., the
situation was so bad that jobs she was interested in the USA in were "don't bother applying if you
weren't #1 or #2 at Harvard Law or Yale Law, and to hell with what kind of person you are." Her current
employer lasered in on her as soon as they met her, and couldn't care less about the name of the school
on her diploma. She went through 1 interview with the partner in Frankfurt and 9 interviews with the head
office in London. The job offer was not long in coming. She started in September, but the contract stipulated
that her continued employment was contingent on her passing the NY bar.
We sweated for a while, but we shouldn't have. She has met every other goal she set for herself. This
was just one other hurdle to jump over.
To celebrate, we all went out to a Lebanese restaurant last Saturday in Frankfurt. Her 83 year old
German grandmother was along, and saw her first belly dancer, and ate her first Lebanese food. I
wrote on her Facebook page that we went to see the belly dancer so that our daughter could see the
kind of work she would have been doing had she not passed the bar. In reality, there is about as much
chance of that as there is of George W. Bush winning the Nobel prize for literature.
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