A New Opportunity

Summer-Zaire Bell is an eighth-grader at William Alexander Middle School and received an honorable mention.

He walks through the sliding glass doors of John. F Kennedy Airport after his seventeen-hour trip with his siblings and father. He comes from the dry heat of Liberia, West Africa and enters the breezy, sunny weather of New York City. Eddie characterizes it as “chaos,” but also “exciting.” Orchestral sounds of horns honking, people chattering, and footsteps hitting the pavement. A sea of unseen faces flowing like a river to their destinations. A mixture of anticipation and excitement washes over his eighteen-year-old body, as New York would now be his new home. Coming to a new place can be hard, especially when you will be calling it your new home. Didn't it feel… overwhelming?

Eddie Kingston was born in Liberia, a country in West Africa. He lived there until he was twelve. This is where small boys could run freely on dried mud soccer fields and kick balls barefoot, while little girls could assist their moms or siblings in a variety of ways in the household. But it wasn’t always as peaceful as that. In December of 1989, the civil war of Liberia occurred. “My life didn’t start and finish in Liberia. When I was twelve years old, I left a warzone. I went to Ghana to find safety. To be honest, the cause of the war is unknown to me. However, I do know that many individuals were unhappy with the government and many people tried to overthrow the government.” He remembers things being great. School was fun and he had a lot of friends. Then suddenly one morning on his way to school, there were soldiers patrolling everywhere. He did not know what to make of it. He was a kid. It was weirdly exciting, like a movie. It happened for about a week. Then one day, they were all sent home from school. That was the last day of school for him in Liberia.

Eddie was ecstatic upon his arrival in New York in 1994, and he was eager to learn more about the city. The only thing Eddie knew about New York was how it was portrayed in movies and on television. For example, movies showed living your best life in a hotel room like Macaulay Culkin did in “Home Alone: Lost In New York.” Or the amount of dance breaks or singing scenes in the street like in “West Side Story.” So he went in with certain expectations. However, it was really insane how wildly overblown these things were in reality.

Although the movies portrayed an image of how people lived in New York, not many show the troubles or challenges people face. When Eddie first came here to New York, he had a very strong accent so he was very self-conscious. “I was afraid that kids were going to laugh and make fun of me, so I didn’t talk a lot,” he recalls. He spent a significant amount of time listening to rap music in order to get rid of his extremely strong accent. He purchased a disc-man, which is

a compact disc with headphones attached. This was the method through which he intended to improve his American accent.

While there weren't many big surprises, he was particularly taken aback by one in particular. "I was surprised by the vast amount of Black people I saw in Brooklyn. In my home country, the majority of the population is Black, which is to be expected in a country that is predominantly composed of a single ethnic group. When I first arrived, I was under the impression that these neighborhoods were mostly populated by White people." Being around a group of individuals who looked like him made him feel more at ease, and it also helped with the culture shock. He made a few friends, mostly through soccer. However, he didn´t have many Black friends because at the time, in Brooklyn, the only people he could find that played soccer were the Italians in Bensonhurst and the Russian Jews in Midwood. Later on, he found friends from other communities like Haiti and Jamaica.

Needless to say, relocating from a place you once called home to a new one can definitely be hard on a person, on both an internal and external level. I'm not familiar with everyone's level of experience when it comes to making a significant adjustment like this. However, after knowing more about Eddie and his experience, I realized that he went through an extremely trying time and that he was being very courageous in the process. Perseverance is important in life-changing situations like this; accepting the challenges along the way, and choosing to keep moving forward whilst savoring the journey.