On the same day that President Donald Trump signed an executive order halting refugee admissions from seven countries to the United States, Sudanese refugee Eklaus Ahmed spoke to a small crowd at Freeport Community Library about the struggle of relocating from a war-torn country and assimilating into America.

Ahmed, whose homeland of Sudan was included in the ban, has lived in Portland for 12 years.

“Living in the U.S. has made me the person standing before you today,” Ahmed said on Friday during the last of six speaker events held in conjunction with the 30th annual Camden Conference, which will be held in Camden in February. This year’s conference will focus on refugees and global migration.

“Living in the U.S. has given me a voice,” said Ahmed, who has become a teacher, poet and public speaker since settling in Maine. “It’s been one of the best parts of my life.”

Ahmed was 14 when she came to America from Darfur, Sudan in 2005 with her parents and two brothers, escaping the civil war that began two years prior and still rages today. Her family was one of the first to seek asylum, and though the United Nations eventually allowed them entry into America, they waited in Egypt for two years for their case to be processed. Ahmed said it can take up to six years for a case to even be examined.

After granting them asylum, U.N. officials sent Ahmed and her family to Portland.

“Adjusting has been hard — we’re still adjusting — but it’s been a dream come true,” said Ahmed, who graduated from Casco Bay High School in 2009 and is now an English Language Learners teacher at the school, helping refugee students from Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and other countries learn English. She is also a first-year graduate student at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, working toward a degree in education with a concentration in law.

“When I was a freshman in high school, I didn’t speak any English,” said Ahmed, who got lost in Portland on her first day of school because she couldn’t communicate with anyone. “I decided I needed to learn English to get around, so I read children’s books and started to write down the words I’d learned. I kept doing that, and didn’t realize what I was writing was poetry until a teacher asked me to present to the class. They all clapped at the end and it felt so good. I’ve been writing ever since.”

Ahmed began presenting her poetry to larger crowds after graduating from high school, and her position on the board of Darfur Youth of Tomorrow — an organization that raises awareness of the genocide in Sudan — has given her numerous opportunities to speak, including an appearance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Ahmed said she speaks for the “thousands of boys and girls in Sudan who are speaking but are not heard,” she said. An equally important task is providing comfort to her students at Casco Bay High during times of uncertainty in America.

Comments in the media have had a particular impact on her students, Ahmed said.

White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, speaking to NBC News on Saturday about Trump’s executive order, said that “we don’t want people that are traveling back and forth to one of these seven countries that harbor terrorists to be traveling freely back and forth between the United States and those countries.”

Maine Gov. Paul LePage said last week that Portland has broken the law by providing financial assistance to immigrants who have not yet attained residency.

“If they are undocumented and have not applied, they should be reported,” LePage said Thursday in an interview on WGAN-AM radio. “I’m sorry, that’s how it works.”

“What the kids hear in the media effects everything they do,” said Ahmed. “It effects their learning, how they communicate to the world, and how they communicate with each other.”

While Ahmed said she tells the kids she can fix some things right away, like providing them with a safe space to talk, other issues are more complex.

“When they come to me and say ‘we don’t want Trump to be our president,’ that’s not something I can fix,” said Ahmed. “You need more than just one person to do that. But when they ask me what I do to keep going every day, I tell them I have no fear. I don’t fear Trump, I don’t fear anybody except God.”

Ahmed said that the best way to get involved in positive change is to gather communities together and “rally for what is right.”

“Peaceful protesting, getting community members involved, talking to Paul LePage and the mayor of Portland, asking them how they want us to show that we are benefiting the community,” said Ahmed. “We can tell you, we can show you statistics, give you the facts to prove that. People are talking about it and that’s exactly what should be happening. We don’t want people to sit at home and close up their shutters, but to actually get out and speak to more people, unite and protest, just like we’re doing all around the U.S. right now.”