Immigrant seeking permanent reprieve
Popular teacher fights deportation
If it weren't for the student and faculty protests, the media attention, and the state's intervention, Obain Attouoman's American dream would have ended with a plane ticket back to the country he fled.
But the popular Fenway High School teacher, who was at risk of being deported to the Ivory Coast last March, won a reprieve until 2007.
Even though a fight over his future in the United States still looms, the 43-year-old special education teacher is returning his life to normalcy. He teaches in his trademark dark pinstripe suit, a fashion statement that has created a new word at Fenway: ''Obaining" means dressing sharply.
To students in his special education classes and outside of them at Fenway High, he's the cool teacher. To Attouoman, the students are the angels who saved his life.
''They reinforced my willingness to contribute," Attouoman said.
In the Ivory Coast, ties to the politically active teacher's union and the Ivorian People's Front, an insurgent opposition political party, almost cost him his life. In America, immigration officials almost sent him back to the Ivory Coast, where he could be immediately arrested and perhaps killed.
All he wants to do is teach in peace. Two bills filed to grant him permanent residency in the United States are pending in Congress. He hopes that will be enough to put a long struggle behind him.
At Fenway, he teaches math to about 25 freshmen and sophomores in classes of only six to 11 students. The students have a variety of learning disabilities. Many are doing math at a sixth-grade level.
During a recent class, the voices of six 10th-graders echoed against the room's yellow walls. The students scribbled on paper and blurted out answers to the area of a square. Attouoman, about 5 feet 8 inches tall, stood at the board, with a broad smile.
Attouoman gives his students the attention he missed out on when he was one of about 90 students in school in the Ivory Coast.
Attouoman arrives at 7 a.m. to grade papers. After class, he opens his office for anyone with questions. He brings snacks to share at school. They are little perks he uses to build a bond, to show support, which eluded him in his home country.
Growing up, Attouoman's father worked in the country's ministry of agriculture, and his mother was a seamstress. He was his mother's only child, but he had five stepsiblings. They were poor, he said, and like many poor families, believed education was the way out of poverty.
The country assigns students to high schools, and his was 120 miles away from home. He had to leave his family, and with little money, he had to sleep on the floor in an apartment. His struggle to afford food and shelter affected his schoolwork; he went from being among the top five students in his math class to failing.
''Nobody came up to me and asked, 'What's going on?' " he said.
His father later helped him improve his situation, and he graduated and went on to college. He became a teacher when he was in his early 20s.
In the early 1990s, Attouoman, as a teachers union district leader, joined protests calling for more political parties. Two of his colleagues were killed, and he was jailed twice for participating in the protests. In 1992, he was forced to flee, leaving behind his family, but never forfeiting his dream of teaching.
But Attouoman, who came to America on an exchange visa, says he misread a notice in which he was given a court hearing date to argue his case for asylum, leading to a judge's order for his deportation.
When his March 2005 deportation date neared, the students and Fenway High mobilized to help him fight it. Peggy Kemp, the school's headmaster, shifted school schedules so students and teachers could plan marches. Attouoman, Kemp said, connects with all types of students.
Attouoman, who is divorced and has no children, has not been home in 12 years. He said he sees himself in his students, who say they look up to him. Many of his students also come from poor families, and many also fight to be heard.
''If you knew what they were coming from, where they started," Attouoman said, ''you would be so proud of them."
Since he won a reprieve to stay longer, the attention surrounding his case has faded somewhat. Many students who marched in protest have graduated. His fight lives on through a student organization trying to get the bills that will keep him here passed. The students say they will not give up hope.
Attouoman can only wait.
After each class, he walks down the hall, greeting students by name, and enters his office, where a sign from last school year's protest leans in the left corner. It says: ''THIS JUST IN: Obain Didn't Do Anything!!! Deport Bush! Not Obain!"