Editor’s note: Young Writers Project, a Vermont nonprofit dedicated to helping students write well, will be sharing several exceptional pieces of best student work each week at VTDigger.org for special display over the weekend. We hope you appreciate the young writers’ viewpoints, imagination and experiences. Please let us know what you think.
By Hamara Mubarak,
an eighth-grader at Edmunds Middle School in Burlington
My family is not from here. I came from Kenya, Africa. My parents walked for months just to get my family somewhere safe from war. My parents were originally from Somalia, but with all the war they had to leave. They walked from Somalia all the way to Kenya. It wasn’t an easy journey. There was a bunch of people, over 300. Some people had kids and even newborns. They didn’t even have enough food to feed everyone everyday. There were no bathrooms. My bathroom was my backyard. On our way to the refugee camp me and my older brother were born in Kakuma, Kenya. When we finally arrived at the refugee camp, it was challenging. There wasn’t enough food. We had to wait till it rained to find water. We had to hunt, or grow our own crops for food. My two brothers were born in the refugee camp. We left Africa when I was four years old.
I get off something big that flew me across the world. I was just four and I didn’t know what an airplane was. I didn’t even know how to speak English yet. I didn’t come in a good season because it was snowing and I was not used to the snow. I didn’t even know what that was. I went outside from the airport and all I saw was this white, soft dots touching my face. I leaned my head back and I stuck out my tongue. That was the first time I ever saw snow.
The years went by and I got older. I went from desks to tables, cubbies to locker, four classrooms to eight classrooms, and paper to Chromebooks. Middle school has been a real challenge for me. There are some great things and some not-so-great things about it. In middle school everyone one changes. You have to find the right friends: the ones that won’t get you in trouble, the ones that have your back. Everyone has their different opinion in the friend idea. I have some friends that my other friends don’t like, which is hard. I have my strengths and I have my weaknesses. My strengths are writing and reading and sometimes math. My weaknesses are science and social studies.
I usually say I hate middle school, which sometimes I do, but I wouldn’t be in middle school right now if it wasn’t for my parents. Without all of the hard work my parents put in to get me here I would never have gotten where I am now. I am ready to leave middle school, enjoy high school, and try not to have bumps in the road.
About YWP
YWP publishes about 1,000 students’ work each year here, in 19 newspapers across Vermont and in parts of New Hampshire and on Vermont Public Radio. It runs an online teen writing community, youngwritersproject.org, which has only one rule: be respectful. It works with teachers in 63 schools who use YWP’s unique, free digital classroom platform and provides many with ongoing professional development mentoring and other teacher training. And it is developing NxN, a writing center at its Burlington headquarters. For more, go to youngwritersproject.org or ywpschools.net.
If you are a youth or you know a youth who is passionate about something and works hard at it, be it building models or flying or playing the drums or climbing cliffs, please contact Geoffrey Gevalt at ggevalt@youngwritersproject.org and tell him something about the youth and how to get in touch with her or him.