Q Life Magazine Q Magazine (US) December 2015 | Page 32
| Issue 1
Learning
Arabic
in Alaska
W
illiam Scannell was six years old when he told his
dad that he wanted to learn Arabic. The family
had just got back from a holiday in the Middle East,
so the request made sense. Except that the Scannells
live in Anchorage.
“He’s a kid from Alaska whose family is Boston Irish,
so learning Arabic struck me as useful as an Egyptian
taking up the language of the Yupik Eskimos,” recalls
William’s dad, Bill Scannell. So Bill enrolled his son
in an online Arabic course, confident he’d soon drop out.
Except he didn’t. In fact, William, now ten, has
completed seven semesters of Arabic through Johns
Hopkins, four Arabic summer camps at Concordia
Language Villages, an immersion program with the
Middlebury Monterrey Language Academy, and
a month at a Palestinian elementary school in Jerusalem.
“William can now read, write, and speak Arabic: it is
part of who he is,” says his dad. “He’s become a life-long
learner of the native language of close to half a billion
people across the Middle East and North Africa; and
the religious language of Earth’s billion-plus Muslims.”
“Empathy is what
makes us better
human beings. My
son’s love of Arabic
helped him connect
with the very real
problems currently
playing out in the
Levant.”
William’s dad
No wonder William Scannell recently became
the youngest ever recipient of a grant from Qatar
Foundation International (QFI). Two years ago, he
participated in QFI’s winter clothing drive, which led
to Alaskans sending more than half a ton of clothing
to Syrian refugees. And, last year, he launched Any
Refugee, a program that encourages children across
the world to send postcards to refugees.
William says that sending clothing or a postcard
to a person you’ve never met is a gesture to show
them that someone cares: “[The cards] fill them with
happiness, because they didn’t even know the person
and yet they still got a postcard,” he adds.
This year at the 27th Annual Alaska Philanthropy Day
Awards Luncheon, William was recognized as Alaska’s
Outstanding Youth for his humanitarian work. “William
has been charting his own course toward adulthood.
For him, studying Arabic has been not just an end unto
itself, but a tool he uses to express his greatest quality,
which is his empathy for others,” says William’s dad.
As William said to his sixth-grade classmates while
they were painting postcards, “Refugees can be anyone.
Albert Einstein was a refugee.”
To send a postcard, visit anyrefugee.org
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