Well, my father and my mother immigrated to the United States in the
early '80s.
I was born in the early '90s, growing up in Brighton Beach.
I grew up in I guess what I would call a Muslim
enclave
surrounded by little Russia. We had our local mosque, our doctor,
our dentist, our grocery store, our school. So it was a very tight
in the community. Everyone knew everybody else, and it's still more or less
the same up until today. Building community, I like to think of community
as a multi faceted
entity, so I would say it was nebulous between the school,
the mosque,
and other social networks that we had because we were an immigrant community,
and we largely still are an immigrant community,
we tend to gravitate toward one another much more strongly.
And so, building community was something that, thankfully, for us came naturally,
Pakistani Muslim Americans.
Although I do have to say that there have been challenges and obstacles,
given the fact that I grew up in a different culture than my
parents. I am sort of like the American
child.
My generation is... I guess what you call the bridge generation between
the culture of back home and the culture here.
So there were some barriers connecting with the adults,
but they appreciated the fact that
we're sort of,
I guess, puncturing our own unique identity
while not completely giving up or completely abandoning the past in this
new sort of landscape that we find ourselves in. So community,
it was something that was easy, but it also had but its challenges.