By Anne Barnard
Published: April 12, 2009
The New York Times 

Standing in a circle, in a windowless classroom near an on-ramp to the Queensboro Bridge, two dozen high school students chanted in unison. Their accents revealed their origins: Honduras, Ghana, Albania, Vietnam.

What are we, why are we, where are we going?

Why are we leaving, what are we doing?

Then, rapid-fire, they spoke the lines they had first uttered in a classroom discussion about displacement and emigration but now were molding into art.

"We had to leave; the rebels took over!" declared Stephanie Saint-Val, from Haiti.

"We left the city for the desert," Hadeel al-Hindawi, from Iraq, said more shyly.

"You don't know my struggle, you haven't a clue," proclaimed Sandup Sherpa, from Nepal, who had just dazzled the class with his break dancing.

Stephanie's family fled machete-wielding attackers during a 2004 coup. Hadeel's father was shot in the face in Baghdad because he worked as a translator for the United States military. Sandup's father, a legislator, was targeted for assassination by Maoist rebels and now lives in Elmhurst, Queens, selling cellphones.

Leading the recent rehearsal at the International High School at LaGuardia Community College was Judith Sloan, a performance artist and oral historian with a fountain of red hair. She has spent a decade documenting immigrants' stories and teaching teenagers to transform their experiences into theater - mainly in Queens, which, with 167 nationalities and 116 languages, was deemed the nation's most diverse county in the 2000 census.

Read the full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/nyregion/13websloan.html?_r=1&th&emc=th