“Go back to your country.” Those five injurious words were tormenting enough to make me wonder if I was different, if being “foreign” felt different. The answer was yes. Hearing those words made me feel like an outcast. While growing up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I was surrounded by lovely parents, siblings and friends who looked out for me. It wasn’t until the day I heard someone say those words that I realized that everything really had changed.
Not so long ago, my family and I immigrated to the United States in search for a better life and more opportunities than we had in the D.R.C. We had to sneak away from our comfortable home in the small town we lived in, hoping that no one would see us leaving. We spent about five hours on the airplane flying to our capital, Kinshasa, where my family and I spent about two months living in a two bedroom apartment in some pretty uncomfortable conditions. Then we spent about 19 hours flying to the United States. Despite the conditions we encountered and the hours spent on our journey, we finally made it, however, settling in wasn’t easy, but we survived.
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When I was returning home, there were adults waiting in front of the school building for the bus to unload. Among those adults stood my older sister, holding an umbrella that shielded her from the rain. I was glad to see her after spending three days of camping with people who mistreated me because I was different. She opened her bag and gave me her potato chips, holding her umbrella over me as we walked home in the rain. She asked me if I had fun at the camp. The answer was no. But instead of telling her the truth, I lied because my family had enough