From Africa to America: A Coat of Many Colors

By Emma Eminash

Life is about confronting challenges and living our dreams. And for one young girl growing up in East Africa, overcoming negativity and striving for the American dream would be her greatest journey.

In From Africa to America: A Coat of Many Colors, author Emma Eminash shares a fearless chronicle of her migration from Africa to America. Speaking to the differences between life in Africa and life in Americacovering topics like spirituality, culture, and dating and marriageEmma shares touching and humorous stories about adjusting to American life both professionally and personally, and she also gives advice for how to master the clichs of pop culture in the United States. And for newcomers to American soil, her testimony will especially provide valuable lessons about the lifestyle and the people they are likely to encounter each day.

From her most sorrowful, vile moments to the fortunate joys and pleasures of living in both Africa and the United States, Emma shows how we can defeat our inner battles against anger, jealousy, loneliness, offense, self-consciousness, and other negative emotionsall the while providing a guidebook for helping people adjust to new lives in a new culture. Seeing the world through multicultural eyes will offer a wisdom that is universal and that speaks to people of all ethnic, religious, and cultural identities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781532009174

Emma Eminash

Emma Eminash was born in Uganda and migrated to the United States to pursue her dream of becoming a journalist and writer. Not only fulfilling that goal and earning her BA in speech communication, she went on to become an inspirational teacher who uses her writing and wisdom to encourage students and adults to pursue their professional dreams. Emma currently lives in Aurora, Colorado.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

THOUGHT MONSTERS

I USED TO HAVE MANY THOUGHTS AND beliefs about different people in America in the early years of living in this country. I had to keep them to myself until I could understand and delve into what my thoughts were rooted in.

Not many people reveal their thoughts. We would be embarrassed, hated even, if people knew that our thoughts were weirdly contrary to the norm—or what they consider normal for a person to think. Just imagine if you were driving your car or walking down the street, and everyone passing by knew everything you were thinking. Just imagine if your thoughts where written somewhere on another person’s arm as they passed by. I believe we would be in trouble all the time.

What if we knew what presidential candidates were really thinking? It would be easy for us to pick out those who have our best interests at heart. And we would have an idea about who would flush us down the toilet. We would also know what they were planning for the future, and who was for our country and who wasn’t.

Aren’t we all lucky to walk around only assuming good or bad things about each other but never being sure? If it were easy to find out every person’s thoughts and know all their actions yesterday, today, and forever, we wouldn’t need lie detectors to prove whether a person was lying or telling the truth.

If one’s thoughts were on a screen for all to see, everyone would know if that person disliked someone with all their guts. The one disliked would be asking, How can anyone be thinking that about me?

People probably wouldn’t have friends, and they would put up walls or even hide from each other. I also imagine that people would be in a lot of pain and would cry a lot. We would find people crying or fighting everywhere we went. We would find people crying and trying to explain themselves to the people who had watched that screen, saying, I thought that about you, but it’s not really what I meant.

It would be a sad, sad world. It is good that these thoughts we have tend to disappear with time because thoughts and feelings about issues, people, and so forth, really do change over time.

Thank God that all my weird and even not-so-strange thoughts are not a problem for me anymore. The experiences I have gone through have taught me to tolerate and have compassion for people of all shapes and backgrounds. But getting closer to God is what changed my perceptions the most.

CHAPTER 2

AMERICA: MY MATURING CABIN

A MERICA IS WHERE I HAVE DONE most of my maturing. I had most of my childhood experiences in Africa, but America is where I learned to make mature, adult decisions. While I have learned a lot, I’ve also been challenged. As human beings, we go through experiences we don’t know how to handle at first, but later we explore various solutions on how to conquer our problems. We might feel like we’ve been slapped initially, but we end the scenario with a smile on our face. There were problems that enveloped me and battles I lost, but I have tackled many of them and made it through to the other side.

I have talked about the challenges I’ve faced while living in America, but I have also accomplished most of my dreams. Some came at a price, which I will speak more about later in the book. Some of my dreams weren’t gigantic things; some were simply character traits I wished to rid myself of. We cannot achieve gain without paying for it. If we could accomplish our goals through others’ efforts, or without hard work or cost to us, we would have a hard time treasuring our achievements.

I always had an admiration for news, but I didn’t know when, where, or how I would become a reporter. Once I did it, I knew it was part of my divine work. I wanted to be of service to humanity, but I never knew how to do it because I didn’t see myself as beneficial to people. I couldn’t see how I would come to be known that way. But as God would have it, one day I would look back at what I’d brought to society and the world, and I would breathe a sigh of relief.

My friend and mentor Lydia Allen says there is good and bad in everyone. I have found that to be true. In America there are many amazing people, but they are not just in America—they are everywhere.

Most of the fears I had about life have disappeared while living in this lovely, beloved nation. I had to confront them head-on. There have been peace-disturbing episodes during my stay in America, but I will not forget the feelings of happiness I have experienced from time to time.

CHAPTER 3

TALES FROM PEOPLE RESIDING IN AMERICA

A S I THOUGHT ABOUT STARTING THE book-writing process, I developed an urge to find out how other people—especially people from other countries—have lived in America. I wondered whether they had experiences far different from mine, and I was sure that readers would love to know that as well. I got a chance to talk to gentlemen from West Africa and South America. I met a lady from an Asian country, who expressed her thoughts too.

The story begins with a lady I call Wallow. Wallow is a forty-seven-year-old salesclerk who works at a mall in the United States of America. While Wallow finds some people in America to be friendly and kind, she finds others to be very rude. I visited Wallow at the mall one day to gauge her experiences working and living in America.

Wallow spoke of her disdain for a government that helps people who do not bother to look for work. She lamented that the same individuals who refuse to work wear expensive jewelry. She talked about a friend who lived far beyond her means. Wallow had asked her how she’d gotten the money to buy the items she possessed. The friend had told her that she’d used her food stamps to buy her expensive jewelry. Wallow was shocked that while people in other countries were starving from lack of food, people in America used money designated for food to buy material things.

Wallow says America has changed her. Not only does she have enough money to pay her bills, but she got married in America, and her husband has a good job too. Wallow has been in America for eleven years, but she has not driven a car for fear of driving in reverse. She says her husband has tried to teach her, but the fear of reverse still holds her down, so she opts to take the bus.

Wallow hopes to return to her country of origin later in life to be with her family. While she did find and marry a husband in the United States, she would like to have the support of her family as she gets older.

There is also Road, who came to the United States when he was nineteen. He is now forty-five years old and talks about the many opportunities there are to make money in America. Road is the father of three boys. He works as a construction worker. While he loves his country of origin, he insists it is not a safe place to raise children because of the drug business and people he refers to as crazy.

Still, he gives the country he came from credit for being less stressful and much cheaper to live in. He said that when people own a house in his country of origin, they don’t have to pay rent or anything else. He also recalls that utilities like water and electricity are much less expensive. Road feels that life in America can be frustrating if you want to live in luxury. He said that the only way you can have what you want in America is by working hard. Road says he feels like a rich person because he can work a lot and buy the things he wants.

Road came to the United States legally. It was not easy, but he did it. He feels that others who are not coming to the United States legally should not be allowed to have the same privileges as people who took proper measures to have their citizenship. Road also said that despite the opportunities, many of his family members don’t want to move to America. They wouldn’t mind coming to America to work, but they would want to return home six months later.

Overall, Road wouldn’t exchange living in America for anything. He is sure he will never live permanently in his biological country. He advises others who find life stressful in America to find some hours away from work to spend with family, and to only buy things you can afford in life—with no extra stuff.

The third tale is about Peach. Peach is from a small country near Togo, West Africa. Peach is all too familiar with the struggles and hard work immigrants face in coming to America. In Peach’s story, he talks about the difficulty of making enough money to produce forward progress in America. At the time of this writing, Peach has been in the United States for eleven years. He holds a bachelor’s degree in finance and once held a position as financial adviser at a bank. Peach planned on staying in America two years to pursue a master’s degree. He was hopeful that credentials from an African college would expand his professional opportunities and up his pay grade.

Things didn’t work out as planned. Peach was told that he had to have his bachelors degree from a US college in order to start on a master’s degree in the same field. He didn’t have enough money to both work and go to school, so he kept working and decided to look for a different job instead. He was able to land a job in accounting. He was laid off in 2009 and now works as a bartender while studying to become a certified public accountant (CPA).

Peach lived a luxurious life back home, but he learned that living in America required a person to scale down in order to survive. It was hard for Peach to take a low-paying job after finishing college. Even though he is working toward getting his CPA, sometimes he feels low and wonders what he is doing in America!

Peach has considered returning to his homeland, since it is not a bad place to live if you have money. It’s also much cheaper than living in America. But in his native country, laws are not enforced. People get away with anything.

Peach decided to keep his eyes on the future and take life one day at a time.

CHAPTER 4

AMERICA AND 9/11: STANDING WITH AMERICA

P EOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE come to the United States for a myriad of reasons. If it isn’t you, it might’ve been your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, or great-great-great-great grandparents.

When you’re fortunate enough to live in America, you appreciate what you have. You continue doing this country a favor by praying for it and for other countries. You pray because if there isn’t peace where you live, there won’t be any peace anywhere else.

We appreciate other countries too because they surely exist for a reason. If another country catches a bug, and no one cares about it, that same bug will spread to other countries. For example, if there’s endless fighting with weapons by different factions in a little town somewhere in America, and no one ever notices, that fighting will extend to larger cities and never cease.

If not dealt with, dictators spread their controlling ways to other continents. This is when other people have to care. And it doesn’t just happen with war; it can happen with things like poverty or disease. If a certain population isn’t helped, disease and poverty can spread elsewhere.

As humans, we can’t help each and every soul who is dying of poverty. We can’t get rid of dictators in every country, or fight every civil war. But we can do whatever we can, and leave the rest to the One high above. America is a superpower, and so far it is a nation comprised of many who can afford to assist the souls in and around it.

But still it is not heaven. Anything can touch it. We need to pull our sleeves up to pray for this more-than-fabulous country. Before 9/11, I personally didn’t think that anything terrible could happen on this soil. But even America is not invincible, and 9/11 taught us that. It is something we will always remind the next generations about so they won’t just sit and relax about things.

We need to understand that there are people who will not spare lives. These people do not care whether you are a doctor, child, businessperson, single mom, taxpayer, or international humanitarian volunteer. All they care about is going through the back door to achieve whatever purpose they have planned out.

No one just sits around when they see a truck coming at them. They take action. Innocent lives were taken on 9/11, and we will always remember that. From that day on, I knew I needed to always remember America in prayer. America has given more than freely to other nations. Missionaries, churches, and others who might not be affiliated with any organization have adopted children and visited the poor. Praying for America is the least we can do to say thank you. There are people out there who want to paralyze and destroy this nation. We have to do whatever we can—through prayer and educating ourselves and others that such turmoil is real and can happen.

There are people protecting America from the outside. Meanwhile, those of us on the inside can do the same if we have this dear country at heart. This country can keep being what the world has known it to be: favorably victorious! If we keep the good fight of faith, America will always stand, no matter what. America has stood through a lot already. With continued prayer, it will survive and remain who and what it is.

CHAPTER 5

STRONG DESIRE FOR THE PRINCE

J UST IMAGINE YOUR THOUGHTS BEING TAKEN over by a person who doesn’t know you, a person you wish you knew. But you have no idea how you will ever meet this individual. You know almost everything about this person, and you wish you could get near enough to be face-to-face. That was how I felt about America before I witnessed it with my own eyes.

It was 1988, and I was a young girl. I remember being very emotional because a Uganda Airlines plane, a Boeing 707, had crashed at the Leonardo Da Vinci International Airport in Rome, Italy. The plane’s pilot, whose name was Stephen, was a very handsome young man. He was a brother to one of my mom’s friends. In the days following the plane crash, people in Uganda talked about it constantly. The thing that struck me most about this particular plane was that many of the rich and prominent people of Uganda had been on it. Ugandan people talked about what the victims had owned, the property and children they had left behind. The whole story was just purely sad.

This incident is connected to my experiences in America because of one of the passengers on the plane. He was Reverend Kirinda, a new pastor whose home in Uganda my family went to for Sunday service. He was a good man whose dreams had just started coming true. He had been living in America for a number of years and had just returned to live in Uganda for good when the crash claimed his life. I was unsure of his age, but I believed he was somewhere between fifty-five and seventy-five. The reverend had been in Uganda only two years when the plane crashed.

While Reverend Kirinda had decided to come back and live in Uganda forever, his wife hadn’t done so yet. She was still living in America and had finally decided to move to Uganda to help her husband pastor the church. That was when it really hit me that bad things could happen to good people. There were many stories about the plane, the survivors, and even what had happened that caused the plane to crash. The whole situation made me cry, but through that experience, I learned to accept life as it is. On beginning a new life in America, I learned that lesson very well.

People far and wide have not only admired America but have desired to go there. I used to watch American news and movies (in addition to the Indian Bollywood movies). I overheard Ugandans saying that if they went to America, all the problems tormenting their dear lives would be washed away. Whenever someone’s relative living in America or a European country visited, the people in Uganda treated that visitor like a god. People would ask this person to take them with them when they went home.

When I saw Reverend Kirinda at Sunday services, I used to silently covet the fact that he had been exposed to everything in America, that charismatic country that so many people wanted to at least visit. I admired the different ways that he and his wife dressed and talked. Just the fact that they had been living in America made me admire them.

When I heard about the plane crash—and that the reverend was one of the victims—many things made me emotionally torn, one being a weird thought that hit my mind. The late reverend had been a kind, helpful, and honest man of God, but I kept on thinking, Oh my! He will not be going back to America for sure? Is he really dead?

Even while I cried and prayed to God that the souls of those lost would rest in eternal peace, I didn’t forget to ask God to take me to America. I also told God that if I could go to America, I would do journalism and help people somehow. By then I was just praying without overthinking the prayer. The journalism part was probably because I really loved to read about American celebrities in magazines, and to read Ugandan newspapers as well. So I thought I would be part of the team that reported the news.

As an adult, I’ve come to realize that when we’re children, we pray to God for stuff, but we don’t dwell on what we’ve prayed for. We don’t get anxious and frustrated that we’re not seeing what we asked for.

As adults we tend to doubt that our prayer requests will actually happen. We need to embrace our childlike confidence in God and pray without fretting, doubting, or being negative, so that by the time something arrives, we’re alive to enjoy it. One way to keep the negative from taking up too much space is to read God’s Word, because it becomes part of us as we read it. We can speak it aloud to our circumstances and feel peace about whatever is going on. Praying and speaking scriptural truths leads to confidence that our prayers will manifest.

I used to love reading information about America from the Ugandan newspaper, New Vision. I also loved reading American celebrity magazines, which I was obsessed with for some time. The information of greatest interest to me was centered around American politicians, singers, and movie stars. One of the most prominent American politicians I always read about in Africa was John McCain. Perhaps it was because the international news section of the Ugandan newspaper talked a lot about what he had said. I thought he must be the most popular politician in the United States.

I dreamed of moving to America and becoming a magazine writer. Years had passed since my 1988 prayer, and I didn’t even remember that I had prayed it. Even when circumstances where not the best in Uganda, I didn’t expect to come to America—even though my mother was residing there.

Among other reasons, my mother wanted us to come to the United States to acquire more education about different aspects of life, so she wouldn’t have to work night and day trying to send money to us for school tuition and to other family members. She also wanted us to learn to multitask and handle money better. I was not good with handling cash myself. Whenever my mother sent me cash in Uganda, the tuition was paid, but the rest of the pocket money that was supposed to meet my emergencies, I spent eating out. It wasn’t cheap eating out. By the end of the week, the money was gone, and I was sending her a message to send more. There were times when she said no. Then I had to eat in the school’s dining room.

When my brother and I came to the United States, my mom’s load was lightened. Even though she didn’t have to send money to us anymore, she still helped her cousins’ children in Uganda, whose parents had died of sudden illnesses, and those who simply didn’t have enough money to keep their young ones in school.

Meanwhile, in the United States I learned to juggle many tasks at the same time. I had to learn to be responsible. I worked and went to school and made sure other commitments were fulfilled as well. I helped pay the bills and made sure they were paid on time. Since I had never paid a bill before coming to America, I had thought they could be paid whenever a person got the money. That was not the case in America.

I remember arriving in the United States during the summer, and I enrolled in college as a speech communications major with a minor in journalism. I thanked God for each day I studied journalism in America, because during my childhood years I hadn’t even imagined having the opportunity to do this.

The media in America, as in so many other countries, does a lot. In America there are laws to protect reporters. I know there might be some things they don’t report about, but for the most part, compared to other countries, information is right out there like falling hailstones. In other countries, especially in Africa, a lot of information might be censored. If a reporter uncovers information that is true and vital for the country to know, but that would be damaging to a popular politician, the reporter might never live to sleep one more night in his or her bed. Some reporters have strong and persistent hearts and do not fear reporting exactly what they know or have seen.

I eventually got to write for a newspaper in America after I graduated, although it wasn’t a celebrity magazine as I had predicted. I still loved to read celebrity magazines, but I grew out of wanting to write about celebrities. I wanted to write more about topics that also encompassed other people’s lives. We never know if the news about celebrities is true, because only a few of them will let you in.

During my college days in America, my mother helped me out a lot, including driving me to work and to the bus stop during winters, and paying my bills. I still had to work to keep up with a new country. I learned how to handle planning for the only money I had by getting some of the more important stuff done and letting the less important expenses wait a while.

I’m glad that something that started out as a prayer long ago came true later on. God hears us, no matter who or where we are. I know He was a part of my coming to America, and I know He doesn’t want me to only take from America but to give back. He knows our heart’s desires. I have watched my favorite celebrities over and over, and I’m over the obsession I used to have about them. I do love to watch some of them in movies or to watch some of the really good TV shows. I have also witnessed politicians debating and campaigning for the presidency and other positions in America. I thank God that they don’t have to use coups to enter into positions, especially presidential ones.

The majority of Africa is growing and getting better slowly, although differences are still evident. The majority of young people in America work and drive a car from the time they are sixteen.

In Africa, because of the few jobs, it is rare to find young people working because there are no jobs available for them to work at. Only those whose parents or parents’ friends have enterprises would be