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Courage

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Submitted By veti1103
Words 1114
Pages 5
Valensky Etienne
Dr. William Hobbs
College writing 1

The Trip with a Purpose

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore. (Faulkner)” The year 2007 will forever be a remarkable time of my life. Growing up in Haiti despite how much love and compassion I have for my country I knew that the life that I envision would not go as plan if I stayed. Leaving the country wasn’t what I would miss the most but it was the person who raised me my Grandmother. My father moved to the United State in 2003 after a week of disaster because according to some the way he made the money to be able to leave the country was not legal. Also that was a few month before the 2004 coup d’état, the overthrow of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. My father being a known police officer in the city of Port-de-Paix my family immediately became targets.
My father was long gone when the 2004 turmoil started, the only one to watch over the family was my older brothers and I but they were only 12 and I was 8. I remember one day while my mom was cooking lunch, my father own cousin came to the house threatening my mom looking for my father gun. At that time I thought that I couldn’t get any angrier. My own family, the same person I use to joke with at my grandma house had the audacity to bring a bunch of arm stranger to my mother house. There was gunshots every hour of the day, every day I would hear of someone house being invade by the same group of people. For a while before they started burning down government building and taking over the police stations, my sister and I had to wake up each day to walk to school because education is the only way out. The easiest choice was to become just like everyone else because the neighborhood kids I knew was doing it, friends, and family because everyone had to protect their own, but I knew that this wasn’t the

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