Culture Part 2

This week we continued talking about different cultures. We watched a movie called God Grew Tired of Us. In the movie, we were able to follow a group of boys who not only escaped from their homeland alone, without their family and many of their friends, but many years later were taken to the United States to create a better life for themselves. To see what they went through back at home every day and then coming to America not knowing anything about how anything works really puts things in perspective. I have lived in America my whole life and the stresses for me of deciding between two amazing colleges and dealing with parents who are divorced and live 30 miles away to me are the types of things I spend a lot of time worrying about but in the scheme of things they are nothing. The young men who came to America couldn't preform basic functions like turning on lights without being taught how and they, after a few short months, were expected to make it out in the world just as I am. I feel so lucky though now for the advantages I have been given.

Another thing that has really personally affected me about watching this movie was seeing firsthand the hardships these people are going through. I have heard a lot about it because the nanny me and my sister had for a lot of the time we were growing up was from Ghana. Although the conditions she was in were much much much better than anything that the people in Sudan and the boys in the movie had to go through,  it showed me how different her life was before she moved here and how much help her family needs. She moved to the US over 10 years ago but all of her children still live in Ghana with the rest of her family because she cannot afford to fly them here. They also cannot afford a lot of things where they are and me and my sister have, for many years, sent them the clothes that no longer fit us. When she would call her relatives she would speak a very different language than what she spoke to me and my sister and she would constantly talk about how much she missed her family. Although I again will admit, she and the boys in the movie are in very different situations, there are a lot of parallels that I can notice. For example, they both decided on coming to the US to make their families proud and be able to make money to send back home to support them, also while they are doing the best they can, a lot of them was left back in their home country therefore they miss their family and home very much.