Meet Aye!

So, who am I? To start off, my name is Aye. I am 16 years old. I am currently a sophomore student at Hutch-Tech. I speak Karen and English and I have lived in the United States for almost 7 years. To go deeper into my background, I was born in a refugee camp on the Thai-Myanmar border. My family fled from the civil war in our home country which led us to the U.S. I’ve lived and grew up in a refugee camp for most of my life. I love this country, the United States, dearly and look forward to becoming a citizen. I’m always thankful and grateful that my parents brought us to the U.S. because the people here are caring and friendly. This country provides me the best education I could ever ask for. It is hard to get an education in refugee camp. This is a little information about my background.

I started working at MAP in October of 2017. So far, I’ve enjoyed working here. My favorite part of the job at MAP is working in the farm, especially when we planted the garlic. I also encounter challenges on the farm, such as picking weeds, but working on the farm is still my favorite part of working here. MAP is my first step that will lead to my career job. Although I may not be sure what job field I would like to be in the future, I have some interest in working as a dentist, elementary school teacher and maybe a Registered Nurse.

Working at MAP gave me the opportunity to save up my money for my trip back to my home country. I always want to visit my family back home and brag about how wonderful America is.

There are a lot of things I like to do when I’m free. I like to research things about my background such as my language, country, and people. I also like to research and get to know more about other ethnic groups and their languages. I’ve been editing at Wikipedia for maybe more than a year. I only edit the S’gaw Karen language page so don’t worry about me messing up other pages at Wikipedia. I edit the S’gaw Karen language page because there was nothing on the page when I first discovered it. I speak that language and have knowledge about that language so I started adding information to the page. I look through other pages as an example to building the S’gaw Karen language article page. I have not added a lot when comparing to other languages articles but I added probably 10 times the information that it originally had in the article. I am proud of myself for doing that.

My favorite food is ramen noodles and spicy mango salad. My favorite vegetables are kidney beans and broccoli.

My favorite part of the food system is the producer or production because without them we wouldn’t have as much food as we have today. For example the farmers work so hard to produce many kind and many varieties of vegetables and raise a lot of animals for the community to eat.

So there’s a time when me and my family had to walk through the snow and get groceries and food. At the time, we were new to the country and we were not used to the new environment but we needed to get food. Our whole family walks to the store so we could carry more food home. The weather was also bad. It was a struggle but I don’t think it is as bad as running away from the soldier and crossing dangerous rivers to safety. This is an example of when me and my family encounter challenges when it comes to getting food. There may be challenges my family may had encounter in refugee camp in order to get food and survive but I don’t remember any.