My story begins in Managua, Nicaragua where I was born; a place that to me was, and always will be, filled with magic. Ever since I was really young, my parents wanted me to have a wider view of the world. I remember a time when I was around five years old, my mom came up to me and said, “Kenia, we are moving, and you and your little sister..."- who was four at the time -"...are going to school in a place where nobody speaks Spanish. I want you to have the opportunity of experiencing different cultures." She went on about the benefits of picking up our lives and settling in the United States, stressing a little phrase that I didn't give much thought to at the time: "You never know what the future holds." Meanwhile, in my five-year-old mind, I wasn’t sure how moving worked. I thought it meant an extended vacation, and that it was going to be even better because we were going to go a little further north, and that I might even get to see snow or get visit where Mickey Mouse lived. I got very excited. My mom, however, had a slightly different plan. From Managua, Nicaragua, we moved to Sunrise, Florida. Mickey Mouse was not there, and snow rarely ever fell in the ‘Sunshine State.’ After arriving we quickly enrolled in school. On our first day, I immediately noticed that people did not look like us. Almost all the other kids' had hair that ranged in shades of blonde and eyes to match in shades of blue. The teacher gathered everyone around the whiteboard and said, "Kids, we have a very international class this year; the Brenes’ girls have just moved here from Nicaragua." The other kids looked at us as if we were from another planet. They would ask us things like, "Do you know what a hamburger is?, or "did you go to school on a donkey?" I would try to respond in my broken English, and they would laugh. I know they weren’t trying to be mean; they were just trying to understand who we were, and find a correlation with the world they knew. After all, we looked nothing alike or spoke the same language, we were different. As a kid, that hurt. But I knew I had to take care of my little sister, who cried almost every day after school. So I decided to flip the fear and put on a brave face. I embraced everything about the American way of life. Eventually we went through schooling and learned to speak the language and years later, I got to high school. Now at this point, I remember daydreaming about "the American high school experience" - with a locker. It would be perfect. When I got there, I was told that I had an assigned homeroom partner who was eagerly waiting. …show more content…
I opened the door, and there she was, sitting at the desk, with a headscarf. Her name was Safa, and she was Muslim from Pakistan, and not at all what I expected. I looked at her and I knew that she could sense my disappointment, because I didn't try to hard to hide it. See, as a teenager, I wanted fit in, I wanted to be popular, maybe even have a boyfriend for homecoming, and I felt that Safa stood in the way of that. She was shy and had a strict dress code that was far from the American ‘average.’ I didn't realize that in that moment I made her feel the way the other kids had made me feel. This was the high school equivalent of asking her, "Do you know what a hamburger is?" I was consumed by my own selfishness and unable to put myself in her shoes. And if I’m being honest, we only partnered for a couple of months because she transferred to a private high school. But I thought to myself "Oh, she'll be alright. She's just different." But what I didn’t understand was that when we label someone as different, it dehumanizes them in a way. In a sense they are "the other." It becomes a situation where they’re not worthy of our time, not our problem, and in