I lay in bed waiting to be called downstairs by my parents. I was ready for the long walk to the boat to America. My siblings, without a clue, think we are going to an amusement park. I look out my window to see the vast African desert staring back at me. Oh the wonders that America must hold. In a few long weeks I will be standing at the top of a skyscraper looking over New York. Our trip has now begun. It's been four days on this boat that is hotter than Hades. It's even hotter than my home in Africa. There's about three thousand people to share this boat with. The food is so gross that my dad and I often sneak upstairs to the first class trash can and get some of their food. The sleeping arrangement is very odd because I prefer not to …show more content…
“We started up long winding steps to a room that my entire house could fit in twenty times”(Bruyne 233). At the top of the stairs some officers were stopping some of the older or larger people who had a hard time going up the steps. Were they being sent back home or were they getting special treatment? I really wanted to know what was happening to them.
We stayed in the Great Hall for about four hours. The noise was so loud that my ears started ringing and they wouldn't stop. “Many unlucky people in this room with trachoma were often sent back to their home countries”(Sanchez 43). My mother was diagnosed with trachoma and she was sent back to Africa. My entire family is heartbroken but my mother tells the rest of us to keep going to become an American. None of us wanted to keep going without her but she forced us to keep going.
As we moved on, we had a “six second physical.” A man in front of us got marked with a piece of white chalk. He had an “X” wrote on him which I'm pretty sure means insanity. Nobody left in my family was marked with chalk so we got to keep moving through Eliis Island. Almost everybody was marked with something like a “P” or