2006, that was when the journey started. Every year since 2006 it has been a paved road for me until I decided to move to a different country far from my home. I don’t remember much when I was young but I can remember some things when I was 4,5 years old. There was no difference between me and my home country, people looked similar to me, we shared the same language.

I went to Kenya which was unfamiliar to me and it was a whole new world for me. It was in 2013 when I first moved to Kenya, the weird part of this journey is that I moved by myself. Obviously, there was my aunt who cared for me through the flight, but my closest family, which was my parents, stayed in Korea.

Throughout the story above, you might think that my parents didn’t care about me but that’s not true. They said it doesn’t seem to be a good idea and they tried to persuade me to stay in Korea but I was a person who was solid and stubborn. If I had an interest in something then I would've done it, even though that was moving to another country.

I said, I don’t remember much when I was young but I clearly remember when I first arrived in Kenya. The people’s skin color was different from mine, and I understood nothing about what they were talking about. It was a fantasy world for me, it was really interesting but I was also nervous.

First day of my school life started at the school called “West Nairobi”, which was a school located in the capital of Kenya, Nairobi. In the short amount of time, I studied some common words in English and some phrases that I can introduce myself. In the school, I think I was the only one who did not speak English well, it’s obvious because it’s their first language and they had lived in Kenya way longer than me. Surprisingly, there were some Koreans in Kenya and even in my school. We became friends because we had a consensus and in the beginning of my school life I did not have any foreign friends. Unlike me, my friends had other foreign friends and they spoke English very well like others, so I thought that they are amazing and I should get help from them and get better.

I wanted to make new friends, I wanted to speak fluently in their language and to have a conversation with them. It was not easy for me to study a new language and use it in a real situation, but over time I made it and I made new friends from other countries rather than Korea.

Until this part it was an okay journey right? I will talk a bit about the downside of my journey. When I was adjusting to life with Kenya, my stomach ache started. I don’t know exactly why I had the stomach ache but I assume it is because of stress and water. I think I had got stressed because I was out of my comfort zone and because it was difficult to adjust in a new world. Water is what my family said about it, they said that it is because I consume different amounts of water compared to when I was in Korea and I also naturally had a bad stomach. This followed me for a long time, I would say total 5 years. This made my whole condition down and made my school life harder.

I was in 3rd grade when I came back to Korea, I think I have got lots of stress than I might think from now. My parents said that when I was calling them, I said I want to go back to Korea, so they decided to bring me back. I started my second school life in Korea and I was in 4th grade with other friends that I don’t know much about. I’ve got close with friends in Korea much easier compared to when I first went to Kenya. I don’t remember why I decided to move back to Kenya when I finished my first year in Korea.

I started my third school life in Kenya again but in a different school which was called “Rosslyn Academy”, which I would say is better than West Nairobi. It was not was hard when I was in first grade because I was in fifth grade and had experienced fairly many things. From this I learned how to adjust myself to a new environment around me. If you think about how people are different from each other even though they share the same country. For example, in the United States, their culture is different in most states and even one next to another. So the difference between Kenya and Korea is really huge. Our choice for food, music, house, language, tradition, etc. I would say almost everything is different from each other.

I’ve experienced people from both Korea and Kenya, so I know how I can adjust to a new environment based on this experience.