Editor’s note: A month before he died, freshman Julias Maina wrote this autobiographical essay for his English class. The Budget is reprinting it here with his family’s permission.

If you ask me, I find life to be a journey. For the way I see it, my life is a mixture of varied occasions. Some will make you laugh, some will make you cry, some will be there to benefit you, and some will be seen as only there for your loss. I live a pretty complicated life, and I find my life to be harder than other teenager’s lives. I grew up in Kenya which is not a very wealthy country like America. It has a population of over forty million people. It is located in Eastern Africa. The language spoken formally is Swahili but we do teach English in school thus my reason of understanding it. The schools there are different from schools here. Teachers have power and authority over the pupils and so does anyone else. If anyone else sees another child misbehaving, they have authority to take matters into their own hands by punishing him or her in the most suitable way according to them, which can be with a cane or even worse. It is not that children do not have rights, for they do. It is just that they normally follow the saying: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

I grew up with my mother and my sister. My dad had come to America to work, so I learned how to be a proper gentleman from the professionals. In Kenya there is a primary school, a high school, and a college. There is also an elementary school and a kindergarten, often referred to as “lower primary” and I used to be in primary school, which lasts to eighth grade. I used to be in eighth grade, so it was my last year in primary school. I was going to be a young and responsible adult soon. There was normally a test called the Kenya Examination of Primary Education (KCPE) and you had to do it in order to go to high school. The better you did on the test, the better the high school you went to.

I had my own fears of high school and the test. I heard from others that in high school you had to undergo bullying from older students as a welcoming to manhood. When I heard the news that I was coming to America I was too overjoyed to even be in school for the last week. I could not believe it.

Coming to America was a little bit hard because I had to leave everything I grew up with behind. I knew it was beneficial, for America was, as I had heard, “the land of opportunities.” My first day in America was very confusing, for no one spoke my language and I had a deep accent. I found everyone to be very nice and respectful and there for my assistance. My first week of school was very hectic and fast, but I slowly got to understand the way of life. I actually enjoyed the first couple of weeks of school, but I accidentally had a fall while playing baseball in school, which led to admission in the hospital. I was really scared but I had courage. The doctors diagnosed the fall to be a tumor and later it developed into cancer. At that time I was frightened and did not know what to do. I had a session of radiation and a few rounds of chemotherapy. I had an MRI, which is a major scan, a few weeks ago and the tumor seemed to have grown a little bit. Right now I am on experimental medication and I am doing much better than I was a few weeks ago. I can finally reach a conclusion that life is a puzzle and you never know what the future holds, and the only way to discover it is to have courage to take the next step.