My Journey
- Sintia Megerdichian
- glendale
- IRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF
- 17
My parents had an immigration problem when they wanted to come to America. After my parents had got married in Iran, they wanted to start a new life and start a family in America but they weren’t citizens to come here. My father and his family including my mother all wanted to come to America after their marriage because they wanted to work here and they wanted for their kids to go to school here.
It took them a while to try to get out of Iran but they did it and the first stop they had to make was Austria. They moved to Austria and they had to live there for a few months because they couldn’t come to America right away. They lived in Austria for about 6 months, after a while there they moved to Germany, and in Germany that’s when I was born. It was October 30, 1991. We lived in Germany for 2 years after I was born. After Germany in 2 years, my parents had said we should go to America.
They had told me it was really hard going to America as immigrants. There was so much work to be done and so many papers to sign. They had started getting the paper work done to be citizens and it took a couple of years for it to be completely done. During the time of the paper work we were still in Germany, but right after it was done we had come to America. That wasn’t all that was done; my father's parents wanted to come here and start a life as well, so they basically had to go through the same process but theirs took longer since they were way older. They had been living in Iran for a while their whole lives practically and now they had wanted to come America. My father's parents wanted to be closer to my family and also they also needed to take care of me while my parents went away to work. Money problems were a bit harsh at the time because we had just moved there and it was hard to get a job right away. My mother had done all the paper work for my grandparents and it took a while as well as ours to complete. My grandparents as well went to live in Austria while these papers were doing being completed.
After a couple of years, about 3 years the papers and cards were done being completed in order for my grandmother and grandfather to come and live in America. They were approved citizens and were happily coming to live in America with us. At first they didn’t live with us right away because my grandfather was too old to work. They had learned that there were places they can stay were the government takes care of them because they were senior citizens. It had taken years for all of this to happen, sometimes it felt like it would never happen because of how long the paperwork took, but after a while my family had came here and we were so happy to finally be free.