Islington students' trip to meet First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House

Published: 19 February 2010
by RÓISÍN GADELRAB

NOT many teenagers from Islington, let alone across the globe, can claim to have put their arms around Barack Obama’s wife.

And after embracing 18-year-old St Mary Magdalene Academy pupil Curtly Mejias at the White House yesterday (Wednesday) the First Lady did not stop there. Then came Malcolm Atobrah, Shenece Liburd and the other seven students, each representing an Islington Secondary school, and each the winner of an essay competition about post-Windrush immigrants to the UK.

From the terrace of the lush four-star Madison hotel, where the students are staying, the Washington Monument can be seen clearly.

Yesterday, the group of 10 braved the snow to make the five-minute walk from their hotel to the White House for an audience with Mrs Obama. Each read an extract of their winning essay before asking Mrs Obama about her own life.

She extended the invitation to the pupils after visiting Elizabeth Garrett Anderson last year. Airfare, hotels, meals and travel in Washington totalling £13,700 were all paid for by the White House.

Highbury Fields pupil Shenece Liburd, 15, migrated to the UK from Montserrat following a volcanic eruption when she was five.

Her Windrush research brought back memories of how different she found life in the UK when she was younger.
Shenece said: “They experienced similar problems with food and the weather to me. I felt like they were my ancestors and I really wanted to tell people about them.”

She added: “It’s a dream to go there. To be in a place with such history is overwhelming. I read a book about Mrs Obama and it said when she left her job in the law sector she didn’t want to take a job on the automatic path, she wanted to help people and promote social justice.”

During their trip the students spent a day shadowing pupils at Bell Multicultural School, where more than 60 per cent of students are hispanic.

Malcolm Atobrah, 14, from Central Foundation School, said: “I’m really enjoying myself. Never did I think I’d win an essay competition and come to Washington and talk to lady Obama. I didn’t really get much high grades at school. This was really a surprise. I was really happy, I was jumping about. My mum was so happy, she went shopping, she knew it was cold.”

The pupils went to the 19th Street Baptist Church on Sunday, where they received a warm welcome.

Malcolm said the hotel was really fun, and he was enjoying pancakes and waffles for breakfast. He said the trip had inspired him to make something of himself.

Karen Weir, a consultant for Cambridge Education, who put together Islington’s Black History month programme, accompanied the students. She said: “They are all here on merit, they all did a smashing job. I could never in my wildest dreams imagine that we could have got Michelle.”

Ms Weir said she had initially hoped to bring just a couple of students to the US and was astonished when the Embassy suggested bringing one from every primary school in Islington.

She added: “I wanted at least two or four to travel to one of the historically black universities. They were established because black people and white people couldn’t be educated together. There’s Moorhouse, Spellman and Howard, which we went to on Tuesday. I wanted it to be a real slice of black history.”