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EVER since 2003, when a leggy Muslim girl from Senegal named Hawa Kebe immigrated to Brooklyn, in the eighth grade, she has dreamed of going to her senior prom. So in the late fall, when she learned that her high school wasn’t planning a prom, she volunteered to organize one.
Never mind that many of Hawa’s classmates at the International High School at Prospect Heights, a public school that serves newcomers to the United States, had no clue what a prom was. Never mind that there was no translation for the word “prom” among the 28 languages spoken by the school’s 411 students. Hawa and an informal prom committee of half a dozen of her girlfriends were determined to spread the word.
“We were just telling the seniors, ‘Oh, it’s like a party; everybody has to go,’ ” she recalled. “They said, ‘Why don’t we just have a party?’ I said, ‘No, let’s have a prom because it’s better.’ ”
It was the first introduction to what was supposed to be a lavish last hurrah, a gala event at Giando on the Water, a popular prom location in Williamsburg. But for the students, who officially graduate on Wednesday, preparing for this quintessentially American rite of passage felt more like a daunting test.
This was evident one afternoon last month, when members of the prom committee, which had spent weeks doing research, met at their usual time, during sixth period, to compare notes.
“We’ve been watching prom on TV,” said Lyse Pamphile, a Haitian girl who had already snagged as her date the captain of the soccer team, a tall, sandy-haired boy from Poland. “The typical prom has a prom queen and king.”
“And the mean girl and the prissiest girl and the girl who wants to go with every boy,” a Venezuelan girl chimed in.
“And then there’s the virginity-losing thingy,” Lyse added.
“Getting pregnant?” Hawa said with a slight gasp.
“That’s an American tradition,” replied a girl from Gabon, rolling her eyes.
To the average American teenager, for better or worse, prom feels like an unalienable right.
But until recently, it was a foreign concept for many of the 73 seniors at the international school, on Classon Avenue near Union Street, which was founded four years ago and teaches English and other subjects to immigrants and refugees from more than 45 countries. And getting ready for prom was at times a stinging reminder of the fact that in many critical respects, these students were still outsiders.
Martha Pyne, a teenage mother from Liberia, couldn’t afford the $75 ticket, much less a gown, because she was already struggling to pay for diapers and day care for her baby, born on March 11.
Chime Dolma and Adon Adon, twin sisters from Tibet, survived a perilous two-month pilgrimage to India seven years ago, but they were mortified by the idea of putting on makeup for the first time — or, even scarier, being asked out on a date.
And many nerve-racking decisions had to be made along the way, like selecting a prom menu. Most of the seniors had never heard of exotic fare like linguine or oven potatoes, and an entire afternoon was spent Googling images of all the unrecognizable dishes. “It looks good,” Hawa said when pictures of fried calamari popped up. “But we don’t know what it tastes like.”
In the weeks leading up to the big night, seniors flooded their teachers with questions: How do you spell prom? Was it a graduation requirement? Would it be held on a school night? Just when the teachers thought they had cleared up all the confusion, one Chinese girl admitted that she would bypass the event, preferring to wait for her college prom.
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