When People Don’t Think about Others:

When I moved from Baghdad to Egypt, my life changed because there were a lot of different people to see and many different things that I hadn’t learned. It was like something happened to me. It was a hard thing for me to change my life based on what my parents taught me. Before, it didn’t change. It didn’t change because the little child that I called the mind was fresh. When someone taught me something, I could not forget it for all of my life.

In Baghdad, I couldn’t say any bad things to my friends, but, to be honest, when I moved to Egypt, I started to learn how to say bad words. I learned to insult people in many ways using bad words. When I moved to the U.S., I saw the same thing and I sat and thought about how some of the students who just came to the U.S. do the same thing. They started to say the same bad words that I heard in Egypt. Sometimes we say that those people are not from a good family, but they are good. I really started to say the bad words; I tried to be like my friends who kept saying them and they kept trying to make me say them to be like them. They were bad friends for me in the U.S. because they taught me something bad.

I tried to learn how to just not listen, but I never can make it and my life has to change. I’m trying to stop what is happening, I mean to stop changing myself to another person, but I have to take care of what I want to be. I have to change how I look and how I talk because I can see the boys and the life in the U.S. is different from the life that I was living in Egypt. I really want to be more honest with everybody. What I mean is that sometimes I say untrue things, but I’m trying to be what I want to be and now I thank god for making me to be honest and say always the truth. In this world, no one likes to lie, but sometimes they have to for their personal life.

I want to talk about the things that people try to say or to do to hurt me or hurt others. Sometimes jokes or lies are very hard to listen to, especially if it is something “funny” about me. I think if I can just see what my heart wants me to do, then I can be better with everybody. If I can make myself feel that nobody is sad because of me I will feel fine. For example, when I say anything that makes people feel bad maybe I can fix that and there will be no problem. Then people will like the way that I talk. In our grandfather’s house, we don’t like someone to say any negative words to us because it starts to make each person in the house fight and not talk to each other. I want to live without negative words everywhere.

My body, my heart, my eyes didn’t change, but there is one thing that did change in the U.S. It is my mind because I didn’t listen to my heart when it told me don’t do any of those things. I mean that people here do different things than what I have seen in my country or in the place that I used to live. But it’s my problem that I didn’t listen. I didn’t listen because I don’t want to be without friends. But I must make a choice in my life, if some of my friends leave me, there are a lot of others friends I can talk and play with. I don’t have to trust anyone. I will just not listen to anything that they say; it will be better for me to listen to my heart. I want to influence how people speak before they know the person who they are talking about. It is really not nice to say negative things about someone that we don’t know. I want to be the same boy who was playing with his toy car and not saying any bad words to others. In America, I really can’t be that boy because there are some friends that are not going to talk to me if I don’t do bad or nasty things. I want these friends because at this time I don’t have any friends to hang out with, but I will try to find more friends that are going to help me when I need their help.