My parents and I worked hard enough for me to attend the University of Benin in Nigeria, where I earned a degree in sociology. After leaving the university, I taught high school in a rural village as a part of the national youth corps program. It was here that the cultural heritage of hard work paid off the most, as I was able to see it at work in both myself and my students, who were as eager to learn as I ever was. We pushed each other harder all the time, striving towards a better understanding of the reasons why we were the ways we were, and why the world was the way it was. It is a thirst for these understandings that I believe lies at the heart of all quests for knowledge. This is especially true of modern Ibo culture, that had answers to many of these questions but has found it necessary to abandon these answers in search of knew ones, arrived at by new means. There are...
But there has also been a loss of culture, and this has led to some uncertainty.
I never felt that uncertainty so clearly until I came to the United States. Here in America, no culture is really fixed or certain. My identity seems to change a hundred times a day, and there is little I can do to control this. But in my heart. I know that I am Ibo, descended form tribal chieftains and healers. I am also the son of my parents, both teachers, and a teacher myself. My culture stays with me in that it reminds me to take pride in myself and the work that I do. When the uncertainty seems to be taking over, I remind myself that my identity is not tied to the external world's perception of culture, but to my interior sense of it.
