FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT www.queenscourier.com october 23, 2014 • THE QUEENS COURIER 33 s moral courage “All of a sudden there is a major change in plans and that is when I decided it was time to go,” El-Sayed said. She called her mother in April 2008, who contacted the appropriate authorities, and within a few months El-Sayed was in touch with the FBI and American embassy to plan a way out of the country. But after her father found out about a visit she made to the embassy, she was put on lockdown and became suicidal. As she recounts in the video, El-Sayed, through luck and bravery, managed to escape while she was at a friend’s house in Cairo. But El-Sayed’s story and her ups and downs didn’t end with her escape. Most of the Moral Courage Project videos are two to three minutes long, but El-Sayed’s is 10 minutes. “I tried cutting it down but it just felt wrong to leave out a lot of it,” said Grannick, who wanted the video to discuss El-Sayed’s life after she returned to America. Back living in Richmond Hill with her mother, El-Sayed went through a major depression the first year as she tried to figure out her purpose and why she went through what she did. Her relationship with her mother, good for the first two years, became fractured when differences began to show between them, and they disagreed over El-Sayed’s publicly sharing her story, including a June 2013 Daily News article. But she considers herself one of the lucky ones. Children around the world are abducted by parents every year, she said, and she is not only one of the few who has survived and is functional, but is one of the few who has also come out with her story and become an activist. After graduating from Queens College in the summer of 2013, El-Sayed now works with the school’s Ibrahim Leadership & Dialogue Program as the assistant manager. The program gives college students from a variety of religious backgrounds the opportunity to travel to the Middle East to interact with government officials, entrepreneurs, students, educators and philanthropists, create a dialogue and experience what the region is really like. El-Sayed also works, through the Epic Theatre Ensemble, with a women’s group regarding issues in the Arab American community, and continues to work with the FBI to bring awareness to the issue of childhood abduction by parents. “It is possible for you to survive,” she says to end the video. “It is possible for you to leave behind the stigmas and actually carry on and make something of yourself.”
QC10232014
To see the actual publication please follow the link above