For the Mountain Mail
ALAMO -- Speaker Johan Khalilian visited several Socorro County schools last week to encourage young people to pursue their dreams and to make great choices in life. Khalilian’s
message is inspired by his own
life story, and the Mountain Mail heard him tell it with a humorous twist to middle and high school students at the Alamo Navajo School.
Khalilian, of Puerto Rican and Iranian descent, grew up in one of the gang- and drug-nfested neighborhoods in Chicago.
“You will never make it out of your environment” was the general attitude held by the teachers at his school. When Khalilian obtained a scholarship to the University of Chicago, all his student advisor said was: “You are never going to make it.”
Even so, when he was still in seventh grade, Khalilian had an epiphany. Early one morning, he came in to find one of his uncles sitting there, stinking, drunkenness seeping through his pores.
The uncle was a gang member, a drug dealer and drug user and a womanizer.
“Is this going to be my life?” Khalilian asked himself. And right there, he made a lot of decisions, and took on several commitments. He was not going to use drugs. He wasn’t going to go from one woman to another and use them, but wait to find his true love.
Khalilian has been known as an abstinence advocate, and at the Alamo school he told the story about how supermodel Tyra Banks tried to set him up for a date on her Cupid show. Khalilian played along and picked a girl and the production team sent the couple off on a first “date”.
First, though, the girl was instructed to put on a bikini underneath. Khalilian got nervous and informed the producer that he couldn’t swim. However, they were not headed for a swimming pool, but driven in a limo to the Hustler store.
True to his commitments from seventh grade, Khalilian refused to go in. End of show.
To illustrate the importance of direction in life, Khalilian asked two Alamo students, Kristen and Anthony, to each run one circle around the gym while he clocked them.
Kristen went first, cheered by her classmates, and got a good time. When it was Anthony’s turn, however, Khalilian put the blindfold on him and because of it, Anthony had a hard time to complete his round at all.
Khalilian had the Alamo students’ full attention by the time he rounded up his speech by reading a poem called “The Crazy One” dedicated to dreamers and rebels. His message of critical thinking, good choices and to take control of one’s life had hit home.
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