The Dilemma of immigrant Youth, by Aisha

2009

I am a 15 year-old Ethiopian female teen-ager. I was born in the country of Sudan, in Northeast Africa. I came to America when I was one year old with both my mom and my dad and arrived in Boston, MA. As a kid I was told to grow up, get good grades in school, go to college and succeed in life and be able to help my family out. So I guess you can say that I matured (mentally) at a very young age due to my environment. I saw my mother as both parents instead of one. She played the roles of both. Everyone says that raising one kid is hard but my mom raised three. Never have I seen anyone like my mother. She’s so independent she never asked anyone for favors. She always did everything on her own. She sacrificed for her kids on a daily basis. She would drop the things that would please her and think about what would please her kids instead.

But the problem was that as I got to middle school and on to high school things just became hard. I was no longer passing classes but instead failing them, and my mom didn’t approve of this behavior. People initially thought that I was hanging out with the wrong group of friends. Maybe in some ways that was the issue, but I also have to take the blame (I mean I knew what I was doing). I know how hard it was for mom. SOO… what was I doing? And how was I going to change? It seemed that once you fell it was so hard to get back up.

But coming from a first generation where my parents were immigrants to this country, people need to understand that we are not back home and that things are different here. I go to school with people that I favor, people that I can’t stand, and then people that I’m just confused about and just don’t know whether to trust or not. But then there are teachers telling you that without school you’re not going to end up anywhere in life. That might be true but also not many teachers or adults actually take the time to talk to or get to know the adolescent on a level that’s not teacher-to-teen but person-to-person. It’s like they don’t understand that not everyone comes from a fairytale family where everything is GREAT. Life’s not like that so adults should guide us by letting us know that they are there for us and take the time to get to know our issues and then….Push Us to Challenge Ourselves.