My Journey In My Life

I grew up in a remote rural village in Rift valley-Kenya, my family and friends expected me to join the Kenyan police like most of my relatives, but my life would follow rather a different course. Unfortunately, in 2012 my father died of meningitis. It was hard watching him in a hospital transition from a strong man to a mere shadow of what he once was. The most prominent memory I have is when one night, the hospital machine began beeping louder and louder as my father laid comatose in his bed. I knew something was wrong and rushed to the nurse station, but no one was there. I looked around in the hallway, but my search was in vain. When I went back to my father’s bed, it was already too late. He was gone. I was deeply affected by his passing and felt like I was now the surviving father of my family and had to soldier on to comfort my siblings. Desperate, I turned to God for answers. I needed to know of God’s love and my spirituality became a guiding force that brought peace and happiness in my life. I became a youth pastor and a Sunday school teacher for a local church in Kenya, a role in which I acquired leadership skills and a gained a better understanding of the western medicine. Due to those tough times and other instances of medical neglect in my village, I generated a deep desire to help my fellow villagers thence began my life-long pursuit to become a physician.

Where a person lives, can influence their life’s trajectory. Accesses to quality education and opportunities are determined by zip code. As I think about the access and opportunity gap, my thoughts often return to my high school graduation in June 1991. Experiencing childhood in Wellston, Missouri, a segregated, poverty-stricken community in Saint Louis, the importance of education was instilled at an early age. Watching television was not permitted while my mother was at work. Instead, books from libraries and secondhand shops were our source of entertainment. I cannot tell you how many times I read Roots and Gone with the Wind. In the 1960s, my mother was the only one out of our immediate family to graduate high school. Eventually, she gained a secretarial certificate to work on an army base. Having a secretarial certificate allowed her to uproot her family from Wellston before the school district lost its accreditation. After moving from school to school, we finally settled in my junior year in a middle class community that looked like us. The architecture of this school resembled a shopping mall with vast resources for students. Mathematics and science became my obsession, and I immersed myself in this new community, taking part in various clubs, learning, inventing and experimenting. Crossing the graduation stage, I recall visiting my guidance counselor’s office the day, Dr. Keener Tippin introduced himself. This towering man explained he was there to

The journey of life has thought me to be honest and loyal. As I arrive in the United States of America in the 2013, it was a dream come through. I made a promise to my parents that I will be a good child and stay out of trouble. It was tears of joy when it was time to say good bye to my parents. On my arrival at the Dallas airport, my uncle was there to welcome me and took me home. On our way home I couldn’t believe my eyes that, the things I see on television am now having physical visual of them. After a month in United State of America I applied for a community college because I didn’t want to over stay at home since I was in my third year in University in my country. But after my placement test I was accepted into the school.

My life started in a town called Troy in northern Ohio, on January the 30th in the year 1999 I was born in Miami Valley hospital. Having lived in Ohio for four years my parents decided that they are going to take a leap of faith and move down south to Oxford North Carolina. This decision changed a lot of things around in my life, no longer could we pile into the car and go to grandma’s house, or drive to a Walmart that was less than 5 miles away. We now lived in the “country” where everybody knows everyone and secrets spread faster than a wild fire. Growing up school was never a real challenge for me, I began elementary school at Stovall Shaw Elementary in Stovall North Carolina. Thankfully classes for me were never too challenging I was always able to do more than just get by. During my second grade year I met the teacher that not only taught me the course content, but also gave me life and moral lessons that every young child should be told. Mrs. Lyons or as I like to call her “MeMa”, played a significant role in the person I am today. I’ll never forget the day we were in class working on some math equations, and the way our class was set up there were two different sections of class. One for more advanced students and another for students who maybe needed a little more help. So, with that being said she put two different math equations on the board one more difficult than the other to account for the more advanced children in the class. I subconsciously begin to work on

The past three years of my life feel like the only part of my life where I have truly lived. The massive majority of my most cherished memories and greatest challenges have taken place within the last few years. On December 26th 2015 my mom surprised me with a intro flight at my local flight school as a Christmas present; it was a simple flight up and down the Miami coastline at five hundred feet right as the sun was setting, and I was hooked the instant my instructor Rudy gave me the yoke. Seeing the city lights ignite the coast as we calmly trekked over downtown Miami was an image that incited a sense of wonder and longing in me that I had never experienced before. That short one hour flight went by in an instant, and before I knew it I was back one week later to begin my journey to where I am today. Over the course of two and one half months I balanced sophomore year of highschool with my private pilot training, finishing two weeks after my seventeenth birthday on March 31st. The next week I started my instrument and breezed through it in two months, and I quickly moved onto my commercial. The biggest obstacle of my commercial training was Time. By the time I was done with my instrument and ready to knock out my next stage of training, I learned that one needed to be eighteen in order to take the checkride. This happened to work out nicely, as it allowed me to focus more on school and enjoying my accomplishments with some relaxing cross-countries to build time.

Who am I? What do I tell people when I am asked this question? Do I even know the answer? It has taken many years for me to be able to answer this question. All of my life experiences have led me to the road I am on today, and I would never give them back.

Growing up going to a Christian school it taught me a lot about the person I wanted to be a have now become. Experiencing life and incorporating the morales from the past is the biggest challenge of all. I felt like I always had faith as I have always believed in a higher power than myself. Living life through the lens of watching everyone you ever knew such as your parents, grandparents, exes and so forth all pass away; left me with confusion, frustration and more importantly I felt abandoned. I was able to close the last chapter in my life two years ago and something started to change in me. During all the chaos, I could not see all that was going on around me and I lost myself. I did not recognize the person I had become, the wife the mother, I could barely recognize her. I started to change the way I thought positively in October 2016. I knew I wanted more for my next generation, being that they have no family like I did growing up, I knew my husband and I needed to change our style of thinking and incorporate a strong foundation for our children and more importantly pave the road to a religious legacy that will last generation after generation.

When I was a child my father always came to me and told me a quote, but over the years I have changed it into my own and now I live by it everyday . “Tomorrow is a brand new day, and a gift from yesterday, if you’ve failed rise from your ashes and create your own path and leave a trail behind because you can not take others pathes to live your life, life is your adventure and what you make of it.” I have always loved life and the people that are in it, since i was a child i have had the biggest dreams of going and doing anything I wanted to be and that nothing was going to stop me. My success to that has been keeping to not only my quote but to my heart, and to succeed I have stuck to these things: being determined, encouraging others, and hardworking.

On March 9, 1996, I was born to a teen mother and father in Savanna-la-mar Westmoreland, Jamaica. Two years later my sister was born. A couple years after my sister was born our parents split after they had a huge fight. From that day forward my relationship with my father has degenerated as he wasn’t around as much as he used to. He would promise to take me and my sister to the beach or out to eat, but never showed up. On December 2006, my mother, my sister and I moved from Jamaica to the United States. My mother used all of her life saves to get us to America where she hoped we would have better life. We stayed with my aunt in San Antonio for a year until my mom get back on feet. Schools in America were much different from those in Jamaica, but I was a great learner so class work was easy for me. In Jamaica, we spoke “Patios” a broken form of English, so while I could understand everybody else they couldn’t understand me. I would constantly have to repeat what I said previously, which discouraged me from talking much. After a year in San Antonio we moved to Houston where we got an apartment close my other aunt. I wasn’t really a fan of the move as I would have to make new friends again as I had done the year before, but I grew to like it. The coming school year I decided to join band because I loved music and wanted to make some myself, I chose the trumpet as my instrument. The next year I entered middle school and was finally able to play sports, and I was so excited.

I was always told that I could walk at a very early age. Back when I think about it I was always running as a child. I could never keep still. I was placed into every sport imaginable played soccer, baseball, basketball, volleyball, and even tennis. After I tried them I ended up getting tired of them. The only sport I really stuck with was soccer but in time it faded too. After that, I started to notice slight pains in my hips and I would usually walk with a limp. I went to the doctor on multiple occasions to fix this problem however their answer was always the same, growing pains. Then I was 14 years old and I started my high school career. I went to West Springfield high school. I had realized that I had just moved into a new situation in my life that I had completely no control over. So, in an effort to find people to talk to and find some friends in my new environment, I decided to join a club or a sport. However, after I thought about it I had nothing I felt I could properly assist in. After much debate, I came to the conclusion of joining the crew or rowing team.

As a very small child I don’t remember too much, but the things that I do remember were seen through a child’s eyes that has made me the person that I am today and I will always have those memory’s with me until my last breath on this earth. In this essay I intend to show how my childhood and adult life to this point has influenced my life, my journey. By utilizing the adult development theories from this class I also intend on showing how they relate to my Life experiences and where I am today as an Adult student.

Who I am has taken me quite a long time to figure out. My journey has been filled with happy times and sad times. Difficult times and triumphant ones. My journey of life began prematurely on February 17, 1983 in Memphis, TN. I was born to two of the most wonderful people on this earth, and that’s a completely unbiased opinion. I weighed a whopping 4lbs and 13ounces and I had to stay in the hospital for quite a while before I was able to be released to go home with my parents. About a year before I was born, my mother’s father passed away and my parents moved into my grandmother’s house to help out. It helped them quite a bit as well because my father was working a lot of overtime and my mother was in nursing school.

In my birth story, I was born in a house. I was supposed to be due later, but I came out early. My mom always tells me that I was ready to come out into the new world. I think one of the coolest parts of my birth story is that I was born in a house.

Just as they say life is a journey, the same could be said for English Composition 1.

When I was a child, my father always came to me and told me a quote, but over the years I have changed it into my own and now I live by it everyday: “Tomorrow is a brand new day, and a gift from yesterday. If you’ve failed, rise from your ashes and create your own path and leave a trail behind because you cannot take others paths to live your life. Life is your adventure and what you make of it.” I have always loved life and the people that are in it. Since I was a child I have had the biggest dreams of going and doing anything I wanted to be and that nothing was going to stop me. To pursue and make that “any dream” come true I focused on these three things: being determined, encouraging others, and hardworking.