My Life Experience

For the majority of my life, I had been shy, even though it didn’t seem like it most of the time, I was scared to death when I met new people. I know that it sounds extremely trivial, but I feel that when you first meet someone, you’re ultimately giving them their first impression of yourself and that is a lot of pressure. It seemed almost certain that I would lead a life of being a social wallflower until March 2017, more specifically, March 28th, 2017. This day was and still is important to me because I learned how to be confident, and through my experience, it taught me something that I will hold onto forever. Prior to this day, I was an extremely introverted person and rarely went out of my way to make friends. As a volunteer at day

The idea of flying has terrified me since a youthful age. Being in a metal bird, thousands of feet above the ground, that consumes me from one location to the next safely, doesn’t sound appealing. A pilot, who I could only hope knows exactly what he is doing, has my life in his hands. When I found out that I would be taking a helicopter to prom instead of a nice car, I honestly believed I was having a nightmare. The one entity in the entire world that scares me the most will be my transportation of choice for the ultimate night of my adolescent years.

For many, there is nothing more important than to have the acceptance and unconditional love from your mother, sadly this was not my experience. I remember the day that changed my life forever as if it were yesterday. I was 18 years old and I did not feel well. I smoked a cigarette to calm my frantic nerves before I walked into the clinic. I sat in the old and dreary waiting room and awaited my fate. The nurse called my name and I stood up as if I just won an award. As instructed, I took a urine test and sat with disbelief as I waited for the results that would determine my future. The Dr. entered the cold and sterile room and looked at me with disappointment as he questioned my sexual activity. “Ms. Fuentes, are you sexually active? “ “Yes, I am”. “Do you only have one partner? “Yes, I do. “Have you missed your period “? Yes

My eyes were filled with tears and my hands sweaty. I was nervous about how mommy would look after coming home from the hospital. I was 10, it was daytime outside, but inside and all around me it was nighttime, darkness was coming and it filled me with terror. My mother worked as a nurse in the local hospital, I could smell her uniform even today.

“Remember that unlike you, I did not have an opportunity to finish school”, my mother always told me this to remind me of the importance of education. After her father’s death, she was forced to drop out of primary school because there was no one to pay for her education and to help take care of her mother and brother. With a less than 8th-grade education level, she worked odd jobs including, selling street foods, and currently selling second-hand shoes shipped from affluent countries in the Gikomba open-air market. She is my biggest inspiration because every day she wakes up at 4:00 am and arrives to work before 6:00 am hoping for a great day. Although working in Gikomba market does not guarantee any income, she remains determined and hardworking. Sometimes she comes home with no earned income but always carries with her a grateful heart. In Kariobangi South where I live, many people are like my mother.

I was 6 years old when I got the news that me and my family were moving to Portugal for a few years. It was my first time on an airplane, my dad had recently got a job in Portugal and we all moved there to stay close to him because it would be a few years. I was having the best of times on that airplane and couldn’t wait to land in a different country, for the first time as well. I had an amazing childhood, we ended up staying five and a half years in Portugal. In these five and a half years, we were able to travel a lot inside Europe because it was practical and very cheap. We traveled throughout Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Greece, Austria, and Andorra. We even went to Morocco because it was very close to Portugal, and it was one of the best trips I ever had taken. After all of this, I fell in love with traveling.

Throughout my life I have encountered many circumstances that have shaped me into the person I am today. I started life in a small house outside of Mackinaw, Illinois. I lived in that house for eleven years, and while I was there I became the oldest of four children. That in itself has been an experience, teaching me a lot about being an example and impacting my views on responsibility. I have a brother who, quite frankly, is the worst behaved kid I know. He lies, steals, and misbehaves compulsively. Academically he is not much better. He was held back in first grade due to a refusal to do homework, and has barely scraped by ever since, consistently getting D’s and F’s. Miraculously, he is now in eighth grade, but he still is not doing much better academically or behaviorally. He is actually very smart; he just refuses to do work which is why he fails. At home he fights with my younger brother and sister and pushes my patience to its limits constantly. Through it all there is a silver lining. He has taught me tolerance and patience. I have learned to deal with other people and annoyances through my experiences with Brock, and find that I am generally harder to anger than others. The lessons in patience that I have learned from Brock have helped me a lot in working with others, and have contributed greatly to my successes in academics, but no single person or experience has impacted my outlook on life as much as my Mom.

July 3, 8 AM in the morning Woke up thinking that this camp is going to be amazing and it is going to be one of my most memorial times of my life. I got up and got ready to leave my home sweet home, I reached there and when I pulled up in the schools parking lot it was kind of awkward. When I reached their everybody was just watching me in the car but I shook it off because I thought that everybody probably had those moments, so I hopped off the car and loaded my luggage on the bus and stood there with my friends while my parents were talking and meeting with new people. At last it was the moment of Good Bye so I gave my parents a hug and got on the bus with my fellow friend Aarav, the bus ride was an hour and around 15 min. The bus ride was fun so we barely knew when time passed by and we reached our campus " Snively''. When we reached there we had to take our luggage and put it in the main hall, we were asked to take a seat on the couches and we found out our bunk mates in one room and with a coincidence I was in a room with everyone I wanted to be with. So we took our luggage and put it in our rooms, when we came back down the Councillors Jeremy and Savaugn took us on an adventure in the forest so we will be well familiar with the area. We had to walk on tight ropes with a partner on the other side then we had to take a rope than swing to the other side of the half which was super fun. The next adventure was we hall had to stand on a really huge seesaw and we had to

It was a fine day in Bentonville, Arkansas. I was thinking about all the fun that I would be having this summer with my two best friends, Percy Ross and Warren Drews. It was three o’clock and it was finally summer. This was a great year since I had no major injuries unlike last year when I broke my arm. The following six months were the worst months of my life. To make it even worse, it was during summer. I was injury free for an entire year, until the break occurred.

During the Summer of ***** I made my way to training camp. The sweltering Summer air was unforgiving. It felt like a cloud of heat was just entrapping me wherever I went. I had to travel for what seemed like days to reach the training camp. The buses were infrequent and covered in filth. The insides of those buses were almost twenty degrees warmer than the outside. I literally fought people to be next to the windows because I was sure that if the bullets weren’t going to kill me, the heat exhaustion would. After what seems like years in that awful bus (Mule) I reached the training camp.

Not many people can say their biggest life lesson was taught by a bus. On October 23, 2015 I was shown to never take my life for granted. Lakeside Rams football was ready to face Dequeen for the chance to win a conference championship. The intensity of game day was electrifying even though it was a humid, sultry, and rainy day we loaded the buses with our earphones in preparing ourselves for the night ahead.

I still remember what happened the night that I thought my life was going to change completely, and I knew it would be a struggle for me both emotionally and academically. That night my parents had gotten into a huge argument of which my dad was hiding something from my mom and his phone and everytime she would bring it up he would get really tense. Yet that night he couldn’t handle it anymore and began to yell at my mom which made me be in shock and scared. I started to panic and had no idea on what to do except to cry and yelling them to please stop. I started to feel pain in my chest and that’s when I realized my anxiety was starting to kick in which was the worst feeling. My mom noticed what was happening to me and stopped yelling and ran up to me to calm me down before my anxiety would get worse. The rest of the night the tension was still felt in the air and, I knew that from that day forward nothing will ever be the same at home, and I wouldn’t be the same person both in school and home. When I had gone to school whatever my teachers were talking about or teaching I was unable to focus. I still did any work that was assigned to me, but it wasn’t all of my effort that I could have put into the assignments because the dark hole was slowly pulling me in deeper to it. I knew that this changed would be something that would take a while t

Being a 17 year old African American girl I’ve been through a lot growing up and still I am going through a few things. But I’ve overcome all of those things that happened to me in my life. I am a very hard working , outgoing, confident young woman and I think if I didn’t go through the things I’ve been through I wouldn’t be the way I am now.

As a nine year old girl, I didn’t think much about life and what the future held for me. I mostly thought about riding my pony, playing with my friends at school, and playing on my family’s farm. I didn't think much about how quickly my life could completely change at any minute.

I moved around quite a bit as a child and one move my family and I made was to Federalsburg, Maryland. We lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere and there wasn’t much for me to do. I joined the towns swim team to keep myself entertained and while there, I met a lady and her husband, both of whom are neurologists. I sat and talked with them every chance I could get; I was utterly intrigued by how fascinating the kind of work they did was. The lady, Gina, explained to me that being a neurologist isn’t easy, but satisfaction fills the soul when helping treat a patient. Moreover, she explained how interesting the brain is, “It’s a puzzle waiting to be put together.” I knew then that I wanted to be a neurologist and help put the puzzle pieces together.