DEPARTED FROM
Karachi, Pakistan
ARRIVED IN
Chicago, Illinois
YEAR
2015
AGE
16
What was your first day in the US like?
First day in the U.S… when I came to the U.S., it was late at night. It was 8 o’clock (PM) actually. I came in the day but it took so long with customs so we ended up coming out of the airport at 8 o’clock. It felt like a really different country because coming to a new country is a whole different thing. Looking at Pakistan, none of the streets were cleaned or anything and we came to the U.S., looking at all the streets clean and full of snow at the time. It wasn’t that cold but it was cold for me... for my family and I, because we came from a country where it’s so hot. I’ve never seen snow before so it was pretty cold for us. But the next day, as the “first day,” we were just sitting in the house, just talking to our family and stuff because we didn’t go out mostly because it was snowing. We came in the winter so we didn’t go outside that much but on the way, it was something really different looking at all of the buildings and stuff. It was something really… like heaven… a dream come true.
Was there anything that surprised you?
Everything surprised me. Looking at all the buildings, how beautiful everything was, the roads, how people went in one lane, no one was cutting each other off. It was just so much… everything was so much more organized and so much better. We were looking at lots of things that were happening. How everything was organized… that was impressive.
