Experience Summary
I had a rendezvous with death between birth and the age of four because I lived in Khartoum, Sudan. It’s possible that I could have been one of many helpless Sudanese boys who were abducted and trained to fight in the twenty-one year long civil war that claimed over two million lives. Several years later, I recognized the seriousness of this fate and how fortunate my family was to safely escape from a tragic reality that plagued so many. We immigrated to the America seeking the American dream in a precarious combination of circumstances—we were poor, however; my brother and sister and I received unconditional love from our parents, an abundance of it. It was this love that helped me through some of my hardest childhood years and it was all I had when my family lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the Southside of Chicago. This was the beginning of several adverse circumstances that I endured and overcame. The annals of living in poverty, assimilating to another culture and learning a new language explain a big part of the journey that I have been on. Once my siblings and I began grade school we were only allowed to speak Arabic at home because my parents planned for us to remain bilingual—their plan succeeded.
