At a recent breakfast meeting of the Optimist Club of St. Paul, Police Chief Axel Henry talked about how hard one has to work to be an optimist.

Henry “saw the other path as one easier to take,” said John Tillotson, a longtime club member and senior vice president at Stifel investment services.

The 15 winners of the 2024 Optimist Club of St. Paul Youth Appreciation college scholarship awards “realize there is no easy way,” Tillotson said. “But, as one of the students commented, ‘Optimists find a way to liberate themselves from their problems and move on.’”

Each winner received $3,000. Most come from low-income or working-class families. Some are first-generation immigrants. Several faced harrowing journeys to study in St. Paul.

“All of these students have incredible self-motivation in pushing themselves to adapt and face things head on to grow in many ways,” Tillotson said. “We are so impressed by their grit and resilience. They are just great examples of what can be possible.”

Murtaza Ahmadi, Maybelin Munguia Henriquez, William Rubio and Maxine Yeboah are four of this year’s winners.

Murtaza Ahmadi

Murtaza Ahmadi and his family fled Afghanistan in August 2021 when the Taliban returned to power.

They settled in Mashhad, Iran, where Ahmadi, then 17, lived for a year. He and his brother, Ali, then were granted visas and moved to Brazil while their parents, sister and younger brother stayed in Iran.

Now 21 and a senior at LEAP High School, Ahmadi lasted about six months in Brazil. “My plan was to stay in Brazil, but the situation there was so hard,” he said. “There were a lot of poor people, and their own people didn’t have jobs, so it’s too hard to find a job. I don’t speak Portuguese …. It was too hard to live there.”

Ahmadi then started a two-month trip north to the United States, traveling by foot, bus, train and plane. It cost him $7,000, he said.

Murtaza Ahmadi (Mary Divine / Pioneer Press)

When he got to the U.S.-Mexican border, Mexican police sent him away, he said. He returned to the border a few days later and paid to have someone take him over the border to California, he said.

From there, he flew to Georgia, where he lived for a month before joining Ali, 26, in St. Paul. He arrived during the summer of 2023, and enrolled in St. Paul Public Schools that fall.

At LEAP, Ahmadi serves as a new-student ambassador and is part of the school’s student leadership team. He took on a leadership role to represent Afghanistan at LEAP’s annual cultural celebration and was a member of LEAP’s medical club and site council.

Ahmadi has a 3.18 grade-point average and works at the front counter at Leeann Chin at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. He plans to attend Minneapolis Community and Technical College and major in aircraft maintenance. He eventually wants to work for Delta Air Lines, he said.

“I like mechanics, and also I work at the airport,” he said. “I like to fly. I want to be successful in my career in aircraft maintenance. My dream is to work for Delta and to bring all my family here.”

Ahmadi loves living in Minnesota because of its natural beauty and lakes, he said. “I really love spring and fall. I like to go fishing, but I never catch any. My favorite sport is soccer.”

Ahmadi hopes to inspire others by telling his story.

“I’m like the person who has seen every kind of hardship,” he said. “It would be easy to be sad or sick, but I never lose my hope. I will always be optimistic because I know I can. I got here. I have a lot of opportunities here. It’s the American dream. We came here to achieve our dreams, to reach our goals.”

Maybelin Munguia Henriquez

Maybelin Munguia Henriquez (Courtesy of Maybelin Henriquez)

Maybelin Munguia Henriquez was just 4 when her parents left her with relatives in Chalatenango, El Salvador, and immigrated to the United States.

Henriquez was sent to live with her father’s sister while her three siblings went to a different aunt. It was a difficult childhood, Henriquez said.

Just before her 18th birthday, Henriquez moved to Minnesota, where her mother and two brothers lived. The journey took more than two months and involved days of walking and driving, she said.

“I came for better opportunities,” she said. “But I miss my country and miss my friends there.”

Henriquez, now 20 and a senior at LEAP High School, lived with her mother when she arrived in St. Paul, in September 2021, but it was a challenging re-unification, she said. She and her two older brothers moved into their own place shortly after she arrived in St. Paul and together they cover all of their living expenses.

Henriquez began working within a week of arriving in St. Paul. She now works about 40 hours a week at La Palma Supermercado y Cafe on the East Side.

During her junior year, Henriquez took four college classes through the SPPS Districtwide Career Pathway Program — three in criminal justice from Minnesota State University, Mankato and a medical-terminology course from St. Paul College. She earned a 4.5 GPA her first semester, and a 3.75 her second semester. She now is enrolled in a five-credit college writing course at Metropolitan State University as a part-time Postsecondary Enrollment Options college student.

Henriquez hopes to study forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“I’m interested in the way people think in a criminal way,” she said. “I just want to know their reasons for why they did what they did. I want to prevent the next generation from going the same way. Something happened to (criminals) to make them do or act the way that they do. Maybe we could help them, so they won’t commit these crimes.”

Henriquez said she tries to look on the bright side and “see the glass as half full.”

“I consider myself an optimist,” she said. “In my past, I had hard times, but I am who I am because of my past. I cannot be bitter, though. I am a person who takes the past and the bad stuff and learns from it. I want to be seen as someone who never gives up. I want to be a person who helps people who need it, especially teenagers. That’s one part of people’s lives that is really hard. I’m one of those people who doesn’t want help, especially now that I’m almost an adult, but I do want to help.”

William Rubio

William Rubio (Courtesy of Dan Kennedy)

William Rubio remembers the day he turned his life around.

It was the summer after his freshman year at Harding High School and he was struggling. An older brother had died from a fentanyl overdose. His mother was diagnosed with end-stage liver failure. His grades were awful. He rarely went to school.

“I had an epiphany that I wanted to do something more in life and have an impact on society,” Rubio said. “I came to the conclusion that if I really wanted to make a difference in my life or in the world, I had to change my mindset. Up until then, I had let my circumstances push me around in life. I was pushed against this wall. But I realized there’s power in decisions, and there’s power in choice. I chose to not let those circumstances define my character, define who I am in life.”

Rubio, 18, now a senior at Harding, joined the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps his sophomore year. He signed up for a full load of advanced classes. He started working out. He made the National Honor Society. He went out for the wrestling team. He ran track.

“I began to make better decisions and do better things in order to help myself feel better about life and empower myself,” he said. “I never truly realized how much power there is inside of all of us because of the experiences that have shaped us. There’s always something inside of you that can lift you up if you’re willing to go there and look for it.”

Rubio is a commander in JROTC, the highest student rank. He credits JROTC with giving him self-confidence, structure and discipline. “It gave me community,” he said.

Rubio, a member of the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, is part of the American Indian Studies program at Harding. He is taking his fourth year of Ojibwe language classes. He also is taking International Baccalaureate physics and chemistry and is on track to earn both an International Baccalaureate Career Program diploma and highest distinction in American Indian Studies upon graduation.

He has joined the Marine Reserves and will be training in San Diego this summer. He hopes to attend either the University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences or Carleton College in Northfield next year.

One of Rubio’s favorite philosophers is Marcus Aurelius.

“One thing I learned from him is that negativity is a perspective,” Rubio said. “I believe in that. If you can just think about a situation in a different way, in a different light, you can find joy and you can find resolve.”

Maxine Yeboah

Maxine Yeboah (Courtesy of Maxine Yeboah)

Bullying, exclusion and online harassment drove Maxine Yeboah out of her old school in Coon Rapids.

“I went through a lot, and I basically had to get out of school because of it,” Yeboah said. “I didn’t go to school for, like, my whole sophomore year.”

The bullying intensified, Yeboah said, after her older brother, Prince, drowned in Ham Lake while he was on leave from the Army. “He was here for a wedding, and I didn’t get to see him before he died,” she said.

Yeboah, 17, of Coon Rapids, transferred to Gateway to College on a friend’s recommendation. She joined the school’s career pathway program and takes an introduction to business course through St. Paul College as a PSEO student.

The business course is key, Yeboah said, because she runs her own hair salon — Hair by Maxine — out of the basement of her father’s house in Coon Rapids. She also works 20 hours a week at Target in Coon Rapids.

When she isn’t working, commuting or going to school, Yeboah is an active member of her parents’ Ghanaian churches. She spends her weekends singing solos and praise dancing at her father’s church and volunteering in Sunday school and serving meals at her mother’s church, where she also sings in the youth choir.

After maintaining a C average during her first few years of high school, Yeboah now has straight A’s and is ranked ninth of 101 seniors. Her plan is to attend Concordia University, St. Paul next year and study business administration. She also wants to get her cosmetology license.

“I like making my clients feel beautiful,” Yeboah said. “I want to get my cosmetology license so that I can continue to do hair professionally and wash hair and do the things that, you know, clients want.”

Yeboah said she is proud she has overcome feelings of loneliness and despair and that she works hard to no longer compare herself to others.

“I used to be a hothead, and I would get really mad,” she said. “I’ve learned to be a calmer person and to not be so dramatic and take things to heart. You’ve got to be comfortable with yourself.”

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Other winners

The other 2024 Optimist Club of St. Paul Youth Appreciation college scholarship award-winners are:

— David Ortiz, Creative Arts Secondary School

— Harper O’Dowd and Jamal Randle, Great River School

— Abdullah Abdulaziz, Oscar Tadeo and Tiffany Tran, Harding High School

— Noah Grisham, Jessica Vue and Eh K Yaw, Johnson Senior High School

— Lorena Herrera Rosas, LEAP High School

— Mariyam Kajela, Washington Technology High School