Cultural Autobiography
By the time I was 12 years old I had been to more than 10 countries. Our family always loved to travel and my parents always thought it was important to show us other cultures and educate us on how other people live.Traveling is a passion of mine now and I have a goal to visit each continent before I graduate college. I love going with my family because I feel like having my sister and brother with me makes the experience so much better. We always have such a good time traveling no matter where we go. One of my favorite trips has to have been when we went to Thailand and Cambodia for three weeks over summer. When we were in Thailand we went to Phuket which is an island that had incredible beaches, while we were there we went on a snorkeling tour. We snorkeled off the shore of multiple small islands and we even went to a monkey island. As soon as the boat pulled up to the island, all of the monkeys ran towards the boat, we all got some small bananas to give the monkeys. It was so interesting because we would give the younger monkeys a banana and they would run to the older monkeys and give it to them and then come back for more. Some of the most memorable things I have done or seen while traveling have been walking up the Great Wall of China, visiting the Eiffel Tower multiple times, seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and seeing the Colosseum. Traveling has been such a big part of my life and has helped me become the person I am today, it has taught me about how other people live and has opened my eyes to so many of the cultures of the world.
When I was in second grade I had a friend named Sarah, who at the time I thought was my best friend. She came from a conservative christian household, at the time as a 7 year old I didn’t know there was more than a couple religions let alone that some people didn’t associate with people who followed a religion that wasn’t their own. One day Sarah and I were on the playground during recess, doing our usual thing like going on the swings or playing handball. I remember so clearly that when the bell rang and all of the kids were heading back to their classrooms, Sarah turned and looked at me like I would absolutely dread the next words that would come out of her mouth. I did. She told me that she had told her mom that I wasn’t christian and that I was muslim, her mom didn’t like that and told Sarah that the only way we were allowed to be friends was if I converted to christianity. When she told me that, I was appalled. How could someone tell a 7 year old girl to convert religions if they wanted to be friends with them. I don’t think that Sarah and her mother realized how from that point on I would be afraid to tell people what religion I was in fear of rejection or how I would even tell people that I didn’t have a religion so that I wouldn’t be shunned by any other friends. How that moment would follow me through life and always be in the back of mind when anyone would ask me what religion I was, even if I knew that they wouldn’t judge me because of it. They don’t realize that my first conversation about religion with someone of a different religion was negative and how it made me avoid any and all conversations about religion for the following years in my life.
In sixth grade I had a language arts teacher named Mrs. Caravelli. In the beginning of the school year I thought she was such a cool, funny teacher but as the school year went on I thought that there was something off about her. At first I thought that the thing that bothered me was that she wasn’t really teaching us language arts most of the time but social studies. I quickly came to realize that wasn’t the reason and the real reason was that she had a bit of underlying racism in her and every once in awhile she would let a very questionable comment would slip out of her. There was one time where we were learning about different cultures and races, while we were learning about Mexico and Mexican people. Mrs. Caravelli showed her true colors more and more everyday, she once told a student that her parents were stupid for telling her to ask questions, she made fun of crying students and she was consistently rude and cruel towards students.
One day in her class, all of us students were doing individual work so the class was extremely quiet. I remember that my seat was faced away from Mrs. Caravelli’s desk so I could hear her but I couldn’t directly look at her without turning my entire body around. I heard her get up from her desk and walk towards the kid that sat behind me. I can’t remember what they were talking about but they somehow got onto the topic of terrorism. By the time they started talking about terrorism I was listening very closely, interested in what they would say about it. The next words that came out of the kid’s mouth still shock me to this day, he so confidently said that all terrorists are Pakistani and that no one would care if everyone in Pakistan died. That seemed to attract attention from the rest of the class as they had all put their pencils down and were staring intently at Mrs. Caravelli to see her reaction. As soon as he said that I went still, my heart started beating so quickly and I was speechless. I thought that there was no way a teacher would let a student get away with saying something like that and that she would quickly shut down the conversation, quite the opposite reaction happened.
Mrs. Caravelli started humming in agreement, she proceeded to say that she agreed and that America should drop a bomb on Pakistan so the world could be a better place. I remember that only one other person said something and that was a girl named Amelia, she had said that they couldn’t generalize like that but Mrs. Caravelli shut her down and told her that you could generalize if you were talking about such a bad country of people. They continued on this conversation for the next five minutes, and those were some of the scariest moments of my life. The amount of hatred in their voices made me slouch so far into my seat hoping that no one in the class would remember or bring up the fact that I was Pakistani because I was so frightened about what they might say or even do to me. I was actually afraid that they might try and turn their words to actions because of the revolting things they were saying. For the rest of that class I just stared at my desk in shock of what had just happened, occasionally looking up at the clock to see when I could leave the class that had suddenly become such a scary place for me to be.
When the class was finally over, I all but ran to the door and out of the school gates looking for my dad’s car. As soon as I got into the car my dad knew something was wrong and asked me what happened. I told him everything and started tearing up towards the end of the story, at the time I didn’t know why I was crying. When we got home my dad immediately emailed the principal of the school telling him had gone on and he set up a meeting the next day between the principal, Mrs. Caravelli, my dad and me. At the meeting the next day we went over what happened and the principal said that Mrs. Caravelli would go through some sort of training process to make sure that she never says anything like that again and that was it. The meeting lasted twenty minutes at max and it blew over for the principal and Mrs. Caravelli that same day, but I still thought about it every time I walked into her class. Mrs. Caravelli didn’t get any punishments for her wrong actions and wasn’t even put through the training she was supposed to, instead I suffered. The school coincidentally stopped sending in my artwork to any art competitions and never said anything about it. It was the first time I had ever experienced anything like that and it affected my learning experience in that school so much, but I also gained from that experience. I used to wish that I had stood up for myself better, but I learned from that experience and grew as a person.
I have been lucky enough to grow up with a loving family and to grow up in a positive environment. My life has honestly been really good so far, I feel like I can’t complain too much because even the bad experiences that I have had have helped me grow as a person.