Personal Narrative: Personal Experience

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Bustling urban slums engulfed my field of vision, as I found my found my way to the temple. I was surrounded by people in a foreign land shouting frantically in a dialect unknown to me, as I made my way through the waves of commotion. The environment was overwhelmingly foreign to someone like me, a naïve 12 year old who spent his whole life up to this point in the quaint neighborhood of Riverdale in the Bronx. I clung onto my mother who was one of the few people with whom I could verbally communicate. One would expect me to feel like an outsider in such a situation, isolated by the barriers of culture and language which differed completely from anything I’ve been exposed to. However on that day in Kathmandu, Nepal, I discovered the power and…show more content…
For the entire first week of my stay I was kicking and screaming-miserable. Due to my family’s Nepalese heritage, I was forced to come to this country for a time of 2 weeks. I had no interest in being taken out of my comfortable little world and put in a new one; in fact I dreaded it. I was bashful in nature and almost feared all these foreign people. People that were so vastly different from Americans at this point simply scared me. Silly, yes, but I was still very much a child. My writhing digestive system as a result of the new food did not help. Nor did the fact that my mom was the only person who could speak English with me there, despite being constantly surrounded by distant relatives trying to communicate with me in Nepali. Everything culminated to produce a sick, scared, miserable boy who just wanted to go home to the states; to the familiar. This was the first…show more content…
A group of my relatives, including my mom, set up a huge sitting blanket in the middle of the crowded plaza. If anything scared me in Nepal, it was the alarming amount of strangers in such poverty, the likes of which I had never before witnessed. We brought trays and trays of cooked food. Samosas, curry chicken, assorted vegetables, endless rice, and roti. As the lines of poor villagers in the temple that day formed around the serving table we set up, I was assigned to help serve food. Just as feelings of fear started bubbling up inside of me, they were quickly dispersed by the reaction of the villagers. One by one I saw the faces of the villagers light up as they accepted food onto their plates. Ancient women, small shoeless children, religious travelers, old men with long beards. They all expressed such gratitude and kindness towards me. I did not seem to understand, how they could be so cheerful and warm, despite the poverty they were in. People who I originally felt lived in a different world than me (whom I might add I previously regarded as nothing short of “aliens”) suddenly became a lot more familiar. On that bright and sunny day in the temple, it eventually turned into a celebration as my relatives and visitors alike started chanting Nepalese songs and dancing. I found myself dancing with the villagers themselves, completely comfortable around them. I truly felt an intimate communion with these people, regardless of how
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