Personal Narrative: Coming To The US

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” true words that was once said by Laozi, an ancient Chinese philosopher and writer. The decision of leaving my home country, Egypt, at the age of 11, and coming to the U.S. definitely marks the start of that one single step- education. I knew that coming to the U.S. was a great opportunity for me to get a better education and thus a better future in my career. Even though I was very happy and excited, it was also a very challenging step in my life. Coming only with my father and my brother while leaving my mother and my two sisters back in Egypt was very difficult. The reason that they did not come with us was because my mother had to stay with my sisters who were studying pharmacology there. The first year for me in the U.S. was probably the
was that I found myself missing the rest of my family and of course, my friends. However, I realized that I have to make new friends, and in order to make new friends, I had to learn how to speak the language. In order to learn English as fast as possible, I decided to read children’s books and pick out the words that I do not know. Then, I translated the words and tried to memorize and put them in different sentences. One year after another, I started to have more and more friends who gave a meaning to my life. One last challenge that I went through during my first year in the country was that I had more responsibility. Being totally on my own was not easy. I had to learn how to cook different kinds of food and how to behave and act without supervision. Even though it was very difficult in the beginning to rely on myself, it still made me confident about how much could I actually achieve. The only challenge for me after the first year was to academically do well and begin my journey of a thousand miles. Despite all the challenges, I decided that failure should never be a word in my