Star Tribune
These Rochester teens wanted to help families like theirs. Now Congress is recognizing their new app.
ROCHESTER – In a city this big, it can be tough to find the right resources for Muslim refugees.
Where’s the nearest halal restaurant? What direction is east? Where can non-English speakers find legal help or mental health resources?
It drove a group of current and former Rochester students from Century and John Marshall high schools to create an online app to assist newcomers to the area. Their app, Merhaba, was one of this year’s Congressional App Challenge finalists.
“We were working on something that we knew was novel, that could help people,” said Ibraheem Razouki, now a senior at Lamar High School in Houston, Texas.
Razouki moved to Houston after attending middle school in Rochester, where his friends Logan Nguyen Hammel, Fahad Albadri and Scott Anderson still live. The group is a part of AIM to AID, a youth-led nonprofit that Razouki co-founded in 2022 to help immigrant families in Houston and Rochester.
AIM to AID has raised more than $50,000 so far and includes a clothing line called Crescentwear created by Albadri and Nguyen Hammel. The nonprofit is entirely run by high schoolers and has expanded into chapters across the United States, Canada and six other countries.
Merhaba grew out of the group’s efforts to assist newcomers in the U.S. Most members of the group are either children of immigrants or immigrants themselves who knew how their own families struggled in the community.
Razouki said he was born in Iraq but can identify with the same sort of issues Rochester’s predominantly Somali Muslim community faces. Finding good places to eat that accommodate Muslim practices, known as halal, spurred the group’s initial talks.
“We wanted to create an interactive map where you could scroll through various areas,” Nguyen Hammel said. “You could scroll through ratings and go through stores or restaurants.”
The students spent much of 2023 working on the app, which Anderson described as sort of a tailored Google Maps. By the time they entered the app in the Congressional App Challenge last fall, it had grown into a one-stop-shop for resources that even includes a built-in Arabic-to-English translator.
“It was something that we hadn’t really done before,” Nguyen Hammel said. “It’s something that not many high schoolers do. We just dove right into it to research what kind of platforms we could put it on, design a usable interface … researching everything to put all the puzzle pieces together.”
Republican U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad picked Merhaba to represent southern Minnesota’s entry in the challenge, one of almost 400 chosen by members of Congress this year out of about 3,700 entries. The group flew to Washington, D.C., this week as part of a conference honoring the 2023 challenge winners.
Nguyen Hammel said the win was a “really big surprise,” comparing it to winning a state championship. Anderson said he was just happy the group got the project done on time.
“Winning the competition was an extra bonus at that point,” he said.
Merhaba soon will be available to download in Rochester and Houston, but the students want to keep growing the application even as they start college in the fall. They’re hoping other young programmers across Minnesota and beyond will help expand Merhaba, while obtaining feedback from initial users to improve the app’s experience. The students even dream of the app going international one day.
“There’s no application that really aims to improve the global migrant crisis,” Razouki said. “It may seem very ambitious, but I feel like why should we stop at Minnesota, Houston and the U.S. when this is a global issue?”
Star Tribune
Richfield nursing home staff suspected of slow response to resident dying, forging DNR form
Staff members at a Richfield nursing home are accused of forging a do-not-resuscitate directive after responding slowly to a patient dying, according to police.
In a search warrant affidavit filed Tuesday in Hennepin County District Court, police asked for a judge’s permission to seize from The Villas at Richfield all relevant medical records, video surveillance and identities of any medical staff involved in the care of 55-year-old Candace Columbus, who died on Oct. 2.
The affidavit said police began investigating Columbus’ death on Oct. 7, when they received a state Department of Human Services (DHS) report detailing various suspicions of first responders who were called to the nursing home to aid Columbus.
According to the affidavit:
A report from the DHS’s Minnesota Adult Abuse Reporting Center said paramedics were called to The Villas after nursing home staff “suspected [Columbus] was dying but did not check on her or call 911 promptly.”
The Villas staff claimed that Columbus had a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) directive on file, but they did not provide it when asked by police officers, firefighters and paramedics on scene.
First responders then saw staff “filling out a DNR form, and they are suspected of forging documents. No physician was present to sign the form.”
Police reviewed officer body-worn camera video, which showed staff on the phone “with someone who claims to be the facility manager, who appears to be giving the staff instructions on how to fill out the DNR form.”
Footage from Voyageurs National Park recently caught a large cougar on camera.
The male cougar was seen on Oct. 25 in the Marion/Franklin Lake area of the national park, according to a post on the Voyageurs Wolf Project’s social media pages.
“Most cougars traveling through Minnesota and the Great Lakes region are thought to be young dispersing males. This one appears to be a hunk,” the caption read.
There have been just six observations of cougars within the national park in the past 3 years, all seemingly solitary individuals not spotted again, the park said. They have yet to see evidence that there is a breeding population of cougars in the area.
Q: What was your business experience before buying the coffee shop?
A: I wanted to [be a chef]. But I did theater. I trained at the Guthrie. Then I went to L.A. I moved to L.A. on a Thursday, auditioned on a Friday. I got in on a Monday, I did a bunch of indie films. I made a little money. You know when a movie isn’t so great, it goes to video? Yeah [laughs], but I still got paid. Then I realized, after five years, I hated it. Halle Berry’s manager, Vincent [Cirrincione], goes, “I’ll take you on.” But they want me to take these classes. Helen Hunt’s mother, I would wait on her. She said, “Oh, you’re gonna be famous.” I said, “Oh, everyone always says that.” But then I put on my clothes and go home and nothing happens. Everyone had this angle. It was exhausting. And [points to himself] this personality works great in the Midwest. It didn’t really work in Los Angeles.
A: I think you need that in L.A., where you don’t care about anybody. And the sad thing is, I’ve got this golden retriever personality. It did really well at work, and I would meet people. But it didn’t do really well in that acting thing. Then I got hit by a car at a crosswalk, and I couldn’t work for about three, four weeks. So I was gonna go back to school … do the 4+1 program at the U of M in architecture. I took the classes, and I realized the program was too theoretical. So I switched to engineering and construction management. So I have a B.S. in construction management, and then I threw in a B.A. in Spanish language and literature. And then I have a minor in East Asian studies with Chinese lingual emphasis.
Q: None of which is a prerequisite for opening a coffee shop.
A: No. But the whole thing is, I was in construction, and I worked for two companies that had a habit of not paying me. God bless them. And I was always teaching and making desserts and doing wedding cakes. And then eight years ago, I had $37 in the bank, and I was working 80 hours a week. But I had a paid-for house, and a paid-for car. So, I just kind of went full force into catering, and then wedding cakes happened. And then I got a good reputation, did a lot of charity work, events, home shows.
