I was filled with so much excitement, and as we kept getting closer to it the faster my little legs moved the faster my heart started to beat. My mom sat at the bench and I walked over to this group of kids, they all stopped what they were doing and stood quiet. But when one of the kids mouths started to move I couldn’t decipher what they were saying. I couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell me. I tried telling them that I couldn’t understand them, then they finally did something I could understand they started to laugh. They were laughing at me, I didn’t understand why they were laughing , what was so funny? All of them laughing at me like that made me feel uncomfortable. I felt a drop of water fall on my arm suddenly and then another, I was crying. All the kids stopped laughing and immediately ran away to the other end of the playground. I walked back to my mom, with tears streaming down my cheeks and told her to take me back home.
    

I was born in Bulgaria like most of my family. Five years after I was born my parents decided that it would be better if we move to America. So my mom and dad applied for Green cards in a lottery, just like the powerball in the U.S. My mom won a green card and we were able to come to the U.S. It was so different the language, food, people, and lifestyle. In the beginning I just thought of this as a vacation. That day I realized that it would be a while until we would go back to Bulgaria. Later that day me and my mom were in the kitchen, she was cooking dinner and I was coloring. My dad walked into the kitchen and asked me if I had fun at the park. I looked down at my paper and stood quiet. Then I asked him when we were going to go home. He looked at me and told me,” The place we are at right now is home”. I looked up at him in disbelief,”Dad what are you talking about this isn’t home”. I ran off to my room and stayed there for the rest of the night. English was really hard to learn, there were so many rules that I just couldn’t understand and still can’t. My english was gradually getting better but making friends was really hard for me to do. A lot of the kids In class didn’t really talk to me unless they had to. More time passed and my accent wasn’t that bad and kids would actually talk to me.
     

All good things must come to an end. I was just starting to fit in when my parents decided that we should move. On the first day at my new school no one tried to talk to me. Great I thought, It’s going to be the exact same way it was at my old school. It's gonna take me ages to make friends again, why would my parents do this to me? I had been living in the U.S. for a couple of years now and I knew english, but I still wasn’t used to it. I missed my whole family, I felt lonely without them. During Christmas or someone's birthday the kids would always talk about how their grandparents, uncles, or aunts coming over and celebrating with them. The only people I got to celebrate holidays with was my parents. During the holidays was when I really wanted to go back and see my family again. Being away from the rest of my family like that made me feel like they didn’t even exist sometimes.
      

My little brother was the first in our entire family to be born in the U.S. A year after her was born we went back to Bulgaria to see my family. I was so happy there that I didn’t want to come back to America. My parents left my little brother in Bulgaria with my grandma for four year so that they could work and get more money. After that my mom had my second little brother and a year after that I went to Bulgaria to see my family again. That is when we took my first little brother back to America with us. Friends weren’t really an issue for me anymore, but I still felt out of place in America. I’m seventeen now and I’ve been in the U.S. for about twelve years now. I have a lot of friend and they accept me and make me feel like I am apart of something. I pretty used to it in the U.S. now, there isn’t a language barrier anymore either. My accent is mostly gone too so you can’t even tell that I was born in a different country.