By Lubna Zeidan, iACT Employee Engagement Director

Zizi Ellison is teacher of the year at Walnut Creek Elementary School!  

Who? And why the exclamation mark, you may ask. We are excited at iACT because Zizi is a member of the iACT family and has been since she came to the US in 2015. 

Zizi Ellison (nee Zaineb Elyasri) came to the US on a visitor’s visa in 2015. She was lonely and knew almost no one in Austin and she couldn’t work while her asylum application was under consideration. She realized she could volunteer to fill her time, so she came to an iACT volunteer orientation that I was leading.  

We were trying to recruit mentors for refugee kids at the time and I was so grateful for her! Zizi was a refugee most of her life – her Iraqi family were refugees in Iran for the first 21 years of her life. When Saddam Hussein was toppled in Iraq, politics changed and her family were no longer welcome in Iran. They went back to then wartime Iraq.  

So Zizi was familiar with the issues that refugees faced. Having been a refugee as a child, she knew the isolation of being an outsider. She saw herself in the young refugees, wide-eyed and wary, unsure of how to say things in a new language or how to make friends and be accepted. “I was born and raised wearing a refugee badge,” she says. “But it is not always a badge of pity and despair.  My mother and father are retired educators, they are also refugee parents who lived through this fear that many forces of this world work tirelessly to take education away from their children.”

Volunteering as a mentor then an interpreter for iACT – Zizi was a rare breed since she spoke native level Arabic AND Farsi. She could read and write in both and could move smoothly between those two languages and luckily (for us) had college level fluency in speaking, reading and writing English. Once she had her work permit, we were fast to employ her as a paid interpreter, but she was soon snatched up by the Austin School District to be a Refugee Parent Support Specialist.  During her time there, Zizi continued to work on her days off as an interpreter for our adult English program and devoted her summers to interpreting for our iLearn Refugee Youth Summer Program.. 

For the first two years at the school district, Zizi couldn’t drive and had to take public transportation to all her meetings – her job entailed interpreting for parents of refugee kids at the various schools in the district. A trip to a meeting that would usually take 15 minutes took two hours by bus. But she persevered – and that skill in particular came in handy for iACT clients. On numerous occasions Zizi would meet a new adult refugee student at her apartment complex and take the bus with her to show her how it’s done. She did this with numerous refugee women- who are usually reluctant to come to our classes on their own. 

In 2018 we hired Zizi full time to be iACT’s Refugee Program Specialist. Her close ties to the refugee community, whatever their country of origin, was invaluable. She established close ties with many of the Afghan women who were arriving in large numbers at that time. Since Farsi and Dari have common roots Zizi learned many of the common terms and expressions in Dari. 

During her time with us Zizi worked on her teacher certification. She left iACT in 2019 to be a full time teacher. However, her summers remain devoted to our clients and she switched roles, from interpreter to one of our two certified teachers in the iLearn Youth Summer Program. 

For the past three years, Zizi has taught ESL to second graders at Walnut Creek Elementary School where she was voted teacher of the year for her school. Many of her students are refugees and in her typical fashion, she knows the families of all her students, visits them and supports them.  

“For me, teaching is a journey and what gives me joy is to celebrate every little step of progress that my students are making. My ultimate goal is to take a step back and see all of this progress in the larger frame of society as our youth make more and more choices in the community,” she said. “Today’s children are tomorrow’s leaders.”  

This January iACT’s refugee program was trying to set up tutoring for a volunteer student group from St. Stephens Episcopal School. The Austin school district was slow in finding a suitable site for the tutoring. We consulted Zizi. That is always a good call. She responded by helping us secure refugee students to be tutored from Walnut Creek  and is supporting the volunteers who are tutoring on Saturday mornings at an apartment complex nearby. 

Asked about her thoughts regarding iACT, Zizi said.“There is a quote that I love posted in my school. It reminds me of iACT’s impact on thousands of refugee families and on me.  iACT takes a hand, opens a mind, and touches a heart. It is a garden for the seeds of future leaders.”