Personal Narrative: My Move To The United States

Falah M. Hassan Prof. Nicole Zaza
English 1301
Sept 20, 2013
MY FIRST MOVE TO THE UNITED STATES My name is Falah Hassan. I was born in 1976, in Baghdad. I would like to talk about my interesting experience during my first move to the United States. My tale begins when I worked as Interpreter and Translator for the U.S. Army in 2004. In 2004, after the United States war with Iraq, there was an opportunity to work with American companies, as a civilian, to help the U.S. Military with public relations in Iraq. I was helping people from dangerous areas during the times when the U.S. military were doing their missions. I had worked hard and carefully to make the missions successful. I had no accidents, even though…show more content…
Army. At that time, to get a visa to the United States as an immigrant was difficult. I submitted my documents to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and after two months, I was approved. I was like “Wow!” I made it. However, it was a tough decision because I didn’t have any family members who were living in the United States. I only had friends. I made the hardest decision I would ever have to make. Before I decided to buy a plane ticket, I made contact with my friends. I called one of my friends who was living in Sacramento, California and I gave him the details of what had happened to me. He was concerned and willing to help me. I asked him for a favor; I needed to stay with him for few weeks upon arrival, and he…show more content…
I missed all my family members, especially my parents, brothers, and sisters. I can’t say when exactly I first became aware of that feeling, that I was never going back home again, but surely I must have felt it during those first years in Houston. I had only a few friends and we sat on the edge of whatever culture we now were supposed to be a part of. We sometimes met at the all-Arabic Cafe, which had a similar at most here as Iraq. This cafe sat on a Houston corner, with a culture and history different from the one I had been born into, but which was familiar to me nonetheless. Men in that corner cafe looked just like the people I had known throughout my life. They were immigrants in the most complete sense of the word because their loyalties were still firmly attached to the countries they had left one, five, or twenty years earlier. Mengestu’s words again ring true to me: “If there was one thing I admired most of them, it was that they had succeeded, at least partly, in re-creating in Houston some of what they had lost when they left their countries of origin”(172). Like mengestu and his friends, “each of us buried deep in thoughts that had nowhere to go, this nightly gathering of Baghdad men was a makeshift reenactment of home”(172). Down the road from the cafe were the few remaining remnants of the neighborhood’s older Muslim community. One mosque was proof that Houston