Things That Influenced My Life

One thing that influenced who I am today is my early childhood. I grew up in Asmara, Eritrea which is a country in Africa next to the Red Sea. When I was only a year old and my sister, Yosan, was four, my parents decided to risk everything and leave Eritrea to come to Chicago. I was raised by my grandma due to my parents departure, when I was about one years-old. Life is difficult for young adults in Eritrea. There is a mass amount of unemployment and those with jobs hardly make enough to survive and support their families. In order to find a better life, my parents made a tough decision to leave my sister and I and come to the United States.

Many people are fleeing Eritrea. In Europe, only the

I lived a happy life in Eritrea with my sister, Yosan, and my grandma, Haregu, until I was seven years-old. My grandma was a mother to me. After I turned seven, my grandma told my sister and I that we were going for a long journey that no one can know about. On the surface, we pretended we were going to visit relatives in the villages. This was the story we had to tell if asked to. I was a child that constantly responding with a fake story caused me to believe it was true. Instead, we were embarked for a great and long journey; a journey with full of stories in our

We lived in Khartoum for a year. We could not attend schools for they were in the middle of school year and classes were taught in Arabic. Instead we took the homeschooling route. After 7 years of separation, I got to see my dad in Sudan, and we took a bus to Ethiopia together. When we arrived in Ethiopia, my father went back to Chicago. We spent three months in Ethiopia until my mother came and brought my sister and I to Chicago. My grandmother stayed in Ethiopia because her paperwork wasn’t done. This was a difficult decision to make for ourselves for we would have chosen to stay with our grandmother no matter how long her process would have