If You Can’t Fly, Then Run

Diversity, Equity, and Poverty Division

One of the best things about being an educator is when you bump into one of your students after they have left you, and you learn of their success. What’s even more fantastic is if one of your students ends up working where you once taught them!

That’s exactly what happened with Ms. Juna Mangar! 

Ms. Mangar was born in a refugee camp in Jhapa, Nepal. She is the oldest child of parents who decided to come to the United States in 2008. During the 2008-09 school year, she attended Newcomer Academy (NCA). Today, she is employed by JCPS as a nurse for NCA! Catching up with Juna, she shares with readers her challenges, her experiences as a student, and her journey: 

I, along with a lot of immigrants who come to the United States, face a lot of challenges every day. These were my greatest challenges—the language, the food, and the culture. I only knew limited British English from studying in a refugee camp in Nepal. So I struggled to try to understand teachers and other people sometimes in the office, bank, and hospital setting when they spoke American English super-fast. 

The food here in America was very different. I was so used to eating spicy foods in Nepal, so pizza and sandwiches tasted kind of bland. So I would pack my own lunch for school, but after a few months I started to try American foods and now I like eating pizza, pasta, and sandwiches sometimes. The culture here was very different from Nepal. For example, in Nepal boys can wear anything that has pink without being judged. During that first fall season, my mother made my little brother wear my pink sweater and sent him to school. The other kids laughed at him in his elementary school. Later that day, his teacher told the other kids to be kind; we learned something new that day and we still are learning something new every day.   

It was interesting being a JCPS student because I had never ridden in a bus to go to school in Nepal. Plus having other international students at the Newcomer Academy made me more curious about people from different cultures and backgrounds. Overall, I had an amazing first school year in America through JCPS. I am so grateful for all my teachers and for the international friends that I made while attending Newcomer Academy. I remember being so nervous and even feeling nauseous while riding the bus to school. But when they used to stop in front of the school for the students to get off, a few of my teachers used to greet us by saying “Namaste” (“Hi” in Nepali), “Hola,” and other international greetings or by fist-bumping us. I learned to fist-bump because of Mr. Book while I attended Newcomer Academy. Even though it may seem a small act or a regular act of greeting for Americans, it made a huge impact on me and made me feel so welcomed to the school every day.  

When I was a little girl, I saw a lot of sick people in the refugee camp, so I wanted to be a doctor or a nurse and help people when I grew up. But since I was not a citizen of Nepal, attending college while being a refugee would have been impossible. Tragedy struck in our refugee camp in 2008, after all of our belongings were destroyed in a fire. We lived in the nearby jungle for more than three months and made the decision to come to America. In America, I took the responsibility of helping my parents and my younger brothers. While helping my parents take care of my middle brother Buddha’s asthma problems, I decided to be a nurse. 

With her love of meeting new people and learning about cultures, Ms. Mangar decided to work for JCPS. She sees it as an opportunity to be with students who are new to the United States and new to Louisville. Having been in the same shoes, she knows the challenges with language barriers and cultural unfamiliarity. Her hope is to have a positive impact on the students’ lives she serves.   

“If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward” by Martin Luther King Jr. This quote is one of my life mottos that keeps me motivated, and I will continue to live like that in the future until I become old and bedbound. Anything is possible, so do not be discouraged and lose hope. Because if you don’t lose hope, then you will have the potential to become the person you have wished and dreamed of for all your life.