Working on the American dream

In America, when a child reaches the age of 16, he or she is let loose to work, but in Nigeria, a person of that age is still a nursing baby. When I came to America, I thought my first duty was to go to school, but the first thing my brother told me was to go around and start looking for a job. It seemed strange to work while going to school. My brother said I am in a different world with a different culture.

At first, I did not know how to look for a job. In my country, a person who wants a job writes his own application and encloses all the certificates that may qualify him for the job. Here, a person just fills out a prepared application. I began to do as the system required, and I was lucky. I was hired in a grocery store to be a cashier for $6.50 per hour.

Having completed the procedure required for me, I started working. My first day at work was like my first day in school. Everyone there was anxious to know my name. Being an African, I happen not to have an English name. My name is Chukwuemake Anyanwu. At first, I did not know how best to pronounce my name to my co-workers. So what I did was to write it down, pronounce it, and ask them to say it. I was surprised to see that they could not say it. When I said my name, they all stared at me as if I was speaking Greek. Some started laughing, and I was not happy about that. I stopped talking and just did my job.

When my supervisor recognized that I was feeling uncomfortable, she called me and told me to give them a nickname they could call me to avoid misunderstanding my coworkers. And before I could say anything, she cut my name and used the last four letters for my nickname. She said they could call me “Meka.” In fact, I was not happy about this nickname. I felt uncomfortable at work, especially when they called me Meka. I asked myself, “Is it because I come from Africa? That’s why they give me a nickname?”

I bagged people’s groceries and sometimes helped them outside with their items. I wanted to be a cashier and had applied to be one, but they did not let me. I thought the reason they did not let me do the job was because I came from Africa and I did not have experience. I thought they did not think I knew all the names of the American currencies or I did not know how to operate a register.

I tried to convince my supervisor that I could do the job, even though I was not from America. They needed for me to learn more before letting me have the job I wanted. I had difficulty figuring out the reason I was turned down so many times. I remembered what my brother always told me, “Don’t wait to be told what to do. Find something to do to keep you busy. Always prove to them that you can do it.” In fact, that was what motivated me. When they discovered that I did not know how to operate the register, they put me through training and let me operate the register.

This job was my first job and I learned what it is like working with people I do not know and I have gotten to know a lot of things. I learned how to be friendly with my coworkers, without even thinking how they treated me the first three months I worked with them. This is the experience I had in my first job because of being culturally different.

(Mike Anyanwu is a student in Dr. Susan Gitonga’s Developmental Writing 0093 class.)