Judging People:

I feel that people who judge each other are too bad. In Iraq, I was one of them because I had friends in school and we were judging the new students. I didn’t know how we made them feel when we judged them. We were making fun of them and talking about them, calling them ugly. Also, we made them cry, to then laugh at them and say, “You are a little child.” We thought what we were doing was fun.

One day my father come home and said, “We have to leave our country and go to Egypt because Iraq is a dangerous place.” My father was being threatened with death.

We left Iraq quickly and arrived in Egypt. I went to school there and the same thing I did in Iraq happened to me in Egypt. Egyptian students were judging me. They were saying, “Go back to your country. Don’t stay here.” They said, “We don’t like Iraqi people to be here.” They were saying these things to make me angry. They were hurting my feelings because my grade was an A, and the teachers asked them to be like me. I asked my dad to change my school because of them.

After a few months, I changed my school and the new school’s students were mean too. They didn’t talk to me. I said to myself, “I don’t have to be scared. I have to be strong and go talk to them.” So I went to them and I asked them if we can be friends. They laughed at me, but one of them shouted, “Stop laughing; it’s not funny. I am glad to be your friend,” she said. “Thank you so much,” I said. She said that because she had lived in Lebanon and she had the same problem when she was there. I told her what happened to me when I came to Egypt and what the other girls did in the old school. She replied, “Don’t worry about them; forgot them.” We stayed together in school and also on the weekend. We spent our time going out and having fun.

After 2 years of living in Egypt, I came here to the U.S. I didn’t want to come here because I worried I would have the same problem I had in Egypt. When I came to the U.S., I didn’t speak English. There was one boy from Mexico who lived next to my apartment. When I started going to school, I started to see him every morning. He was teasing me. I understood a little bit, but I didn’t know how to tell him, “Stop. You have to know me first. Don’t say anything.” He was saying, “Crazy, stupid! You don’t have any feelings,” just because I was wearing a hair cover. That made me feel bad and sad all the time. After a few months, my English improved and I saw him again. When he started teasing me, I shouted “Stop!” I was nervous, but he was surprised. He didn’t know my English was better than before. I asked him if he knew me. He said “no,” and I asked him why he was always teasing me when he didn’t know me. He was very shy with me, then, and he said sorry to me. I asked him to be different, to know people before teasing them.

I learned a lot from these problems. My dream is to make a big group and share our stories and let people know about each other.