9/11 Prejudice

Letter to the editor

Being an aspiring woman from the Middle East, I had for many years known that my destiny could not be accomplished in my home country Egypt. I was a grade A student, wanting to be a medical student but not being able to, because women are not supposed to be growth drivers in an Eastern country where they have little to no voice.

As many others, both from the eastern and northern communities, I’ve always idolized America as the land of opportunities. The American ideals and symbols drew me to their country with a scholarship to Harvard University to be majoring in Internal Medicine alongside with minoring in Women’s health.

After graduating from Harvard University with a 4.0 GPA, I lanced a job at Mayo Clinic, located in Rochester, Minnesota. Despite my different skin colour and an Egyptian accent, most of the hospital patients preferred me as their nurse alongside the American colleagues that I had.

Roughly 20 years after I immigrated to the land of opportunity, a horrible tragedy happened. On 11 September 2001, two planes crashed into the twin towers. While the tragic appeared on the television screen in the room I was currently treating a very patriotic American man in, he gave me this cold look because my skin tone was indifferent compared to his. I was in the middle of closing a wound on his arm, but when he heard the news about planes crashing into the twin towers, he tugged his arm to himself and demanded me to find another nurse, who would be available to close the rest of his wound.

Not all immigrants come with bad intensions. I would never want to harm a country that welcomed me with open arms and a loving heart, inspiring me to help others because they helped me. Just because some people of my skin colour, or from my native country area, can’t control their actions, it doesn’t mean that we’re all of the same kind. That would be the same as saying as everybody who commits mass school shooting in America are white, frustrated teenage boys.

(Maybe I was also just unlucky that it was Donald Trump I was treating during the incident, but that’s none of my business.)