The winds of a new beginning

Hi everyone! I have created this blog so that I could be able to tell others about the stories of my family. You may asked what made me to write about these stories and the significance of it all. To explain this, it goes back to High School.

In eleventh grade I had a great english teacher (Ms. Poeppel if anyone knows her) who I first told one of these stories. It happened when we had to take our school pictures for the yearbook. We were in line and she asked me how her teaching was. She recently came back from Germany where her husband had been working for three years. As the conversation progressed, we began talking about the great title, "Cronicles of a Death Fortold" by the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez. On the subject of Marquez's books, I told her about what my Grandma told me about how she grew up and raised her own brothers and sisters because her parents were killed by lightning (later on I will tell you more about this). Ms. Poeppel at the time was writing a book and she tought that these stories would be great in a book.

During my studies at the University of Maryland I took many classes that involve worldly experiences. The one class that really interested me was MUET200 during my freshman year. As the course description described it:

"Perspectives of world popular music as contested terrain, in terms of gender, nationality and aesthetics. Students will read case histories of specific movements, social commentaries on genres.The unifying factors are cross-cultural perceptions and displays of national identity, cultural retentions, stability and change." -Testudo

The one section in this class that interested me was the Mande Jeli of Senegal. These people had the task of story telling about their past history and stories. This is what I plan to do with this blog, tell the stories of my family so that I can have a form of data base so that in the future, these stories can continue to live on in the lives of others.

Some of these stories seem very farfetched. Granted, like the game of telephone, stories that are told orally often get changed or modified. I will be telling you these stories the way my family have told me. Fiction or Non-fiction, take your pick because most of these stories seem very ridiculous. I'm not the best writer so bare with me and in the next post, I will be telling you a story about a lady that Mom told me about when she first came to the United States.

Thanks for reading! :D