From the New York Times, a feature on a school in suburban Atlanta in which more than half the students are refugees, many from countries torn by war. The school has evolved into a laboratory for the art of getting along. Among the students featured are 9-year-old Dante Ramirez and his friend Soung Oo Hlaing, an 11-year-old Burmese refugee with dwarfism.

The two boys met on the first day of school this year. Despite the language barrier, Dante managed to invite the newcomer to sit with him at lunch.

“I didn’t think he’d make friends at the beginning because he didn’t speak that much English,” Dante said. “So I thought I should be his friend.”

… [Soung's] English has improved markedly, enough so that he regularly torments Dante with a reliable schoolyard prank: he tapes a piece of paper bearing the words “kick me” on Dante’s back.

“They’re two peas in a pod,” Ms. Ramirez said.

Video on the two boys is titled “An unusual friendship.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 25th, 2007 at 5:25 pm and is filed under dwarfism/little people, international. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post