English essay: Prejudice

English story – Prejudice!

Written by: Tamara Thompson

SØS 15/9/2010

I am a Kurdish girl from the east of Turkey from a town called Van, which is not far from Iraq and Iran. My parents and grandparents grew up in this area with a mixture of Turkish, Irani and Iraqi people.

I have been used to growing up listening to the Turkish language at school and Kurdish at home with my parents. It can get very confusing hearing so many languages.

When I was about 8 years old my parents moved to a faraway country called Denmark. I had no idea where it was, they just told me that it was cold and no-one could speak the two languages that I had learnt. I was very young, so I didn’t think that much about it. But it was so hard saying goodbye to my friends and family, all the people I loved and always had known, I had to say goodbye too and I had no idea when I got to see them again. I cried a lot as we said farewell!

But it was even worse when I came to Denmark, when I really started to miss them. I cried day and night, and it was really hard for me to settle in.  We lived in a town called Ishøj, where lots of foreigners lived. So there were a lot of different and strange languages. I actually thought a lot about, why there weren’t that many Danes living there, because it was not far from the beach, clean and it had everything that a town needed. I asked my parents how come they weren’t that much Danes in our town, they just said that I was too little to understand. I didn’t think more about that.

I started school in another town, I didn’t know why, but my parents said that it was because it had a good school. My parents were very anxious about me getting an education, it was very weird because they never really said anything about that, when we lived in Van.

They wanted me to learn Danish as soon as possible. It was very hard. I had to listen to tapes all the time, and I tried to speak it in school. There were only Danish kids in my school. My parents could not speak or understand the language and we did not have that much money, so they could not afford for me to go to an evening class, so I could learn Danish quicker. So it took a lot of time to learn it.

The Danish kids weren’t that kind to me, and I didn’t understand why? They didn’t really want me to fall into place in their society. I didn’t really make any friends.

As I got older my parents had to tell me what all these weird things were about. I was a normal kid like them, just with a different skin and hair colour. Why didn’t they like me?

They told me what prejudice was and that it was also very hard for them to make friends with neighbours and at work. It was like people were afraid of us, they didn’t smile at us when we walked on the street, like they did to all the other Danes.

My family had a very hard time. We all agreed that it was probably best to move me to the school that was in Ishøj, where there are a lot more foreigners. Now I am very happy and I have a lot of great friends from my school. They are all from a lot of different countries. They have had the same experience as me with Danes, they are not that kind to us. But I have learnt to ignore it. Even though it is very hard!