GIVING BACK: Shaheena Haque teaches the AARP Driver Saftey course at the Vicksburg Senior Center.

For two years, Shaheena Haque has been volunteering at the Vicksburg Senior Center. Since 2013, she has been teaching the AARP Driver Safety course, which offers seniors updated driving skills, current rules of the road and information about normal age-related physical changes, all of which will help them to qualify for insurance discounts.

“I first got involved after I took a class,” Haque said.

Now she teaches the course, at the Senior Center four to five times a year and also teaches classes in Clinton and Jackson.

Along with teaching the driver safety course, Haque is also an AARP car-fit technologist, someone who can help older adults check to see how well their vehicle fits them, she said.

As a former executive director of the Vicksburg Child and Parent Center, Haque has also served on the board for The Salvation Army of Vicksburg and she volunteers with Camellia Healthcare in their hospice program.

Haque says she also spends her days writing letters to heads of states, where she advocates for women’s rights and human rights.

“I quit my job in 2007, and I am very passionate about causes, and there were many opportunities to get involved, and I felt like I could help out,” she said.

Currently, she is working on starting an Amnesty International chapter in Vicksburg, she said.

Haque grew up in India and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

“We were financially well off before we moved here from Iran,” she said, but she and her husband, Amin, who is a physicist and professor at Alcorn State University, decided they wanted to move to a country where their children could have freedoms and rights.

“We are so lucky to be here,” she said, and likened becoming a U.S. citizen to a marriage.

“This was not an arranged marriage, this was a love marriage,” she said.

Haque said she also dedicates time to an Indian senior network in Jackson, which includes providing transportation for some of the elderly, and once a month she organizes a music program for the group.

Haque has four children and two grandchildren, and when she is not volunteering her time, she said she likes to paint and read.