26-02-2025
Lodi Unified essay winners share their inspiring stories with county supervisors
Feb. 26—Two Lodi Unified School District students showed county leaders what it means to never lose hope this week.
Vince Sinigaglia and Kanaan Taha read their Art Raab Memorial Essay Competition entries to the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors Tuesday as a way to close out Black History Month.
Sinigaglia and Taha, who are fifth and sixth-grade students, respectively, were asked to read their essays by Supervisor Steve Ding, who represents Lodi on the board.
Ding attended the Breakthrough Project For Social Justice in Lodi's annual Celebration of Unity last month, where the two youngsters read their compositions about the event's theme, "Infinite Hope."
The theme was taken from Martin Luther King Jr's quote that "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope."
"Words can be joyful. They can be hurtful," Ding said. "They can be poetic. But they can be interpreted differently by all individuals. When I heard these two read their essays and what Martin Luther King Jr's words meant to them, it was really inspiring."
Sinigaglia took King's quote about hope and used it to recount the experience he and his family felt when his stepfather died from stage 3 cancer in 2023 after a five-month battle.
He said he learned a lot of lessons throughout the ordeal, but never gave up hope in the end that his stepfather would pull through, just like King had done with faced with numerous challenges during the Civil Rights Movement.
"It was very difficult to watch my dad suffer for five months and see how cancer destroyed him," Sinigaglia said. "It is still difficult because I have to live every day without him. I learned life is truly short and we never know when it's our time to go."
Sinigaglia said his father taught him to never give up hope, and he has since lived his life doing his best to make good choices and treat everyone with respect. It was something his father did during his life as well.
"During difficult times, life can turn very dark," he said. "Having hope gives you the will to look forward to good things to come in your life."
Taha used King's quote to show the spirit of the Palestinians who have experienced starvation, torture, and even death on the Gaza Strip for decades.
He said he had read and viewed news reports about the goings-on in Gaza every day, and wanted to be a representative of Palestine wherever he set foot.
"I began to realize that no matter how hard I thought, I was at least safe to go to school every day," Taha said. "Palestinian children living in the woods on the Gaza Strip probably never felt this way."
He added that he wanted to represent Gaza because many people were most likely unfamiliar with what was happening in the war-torn region.
"It's clear to me that the works of Martin Luther King, Jr. can also be used to describe what Palestinians continue to go through," he said. "We shall strengthen hope as we continue to fight for our fundamental rights to human rights."
Sinigaglia and Taha both placed first in their respective grades for the Art Raab contest, which is held annually each year.
The contest is named after a former Lodi High School teacher and local activist who marched alongside Cesar Chavez and helped form the Breakthrough Project in 1998 after a cross burning at Tokay High School in 1998.
"If that doesn't warm your heart, I don't know. I guess you have a bad heart," board chair Paul Canepa said after the students read their essays.
"One of my goals this year was to celebrate youth," he added. "And if this isn't a celebration of youth, I don't know what is."
