KATIE LIESENER: The whole time, the reality is seeping in.

They know.

They know I'm a fraud.

I'm not a professor.

I'm an idiot.

SALIL PATEL: I was about 15 years old and there was a knock on the door.

Little did I realize as I headed to the door that my life was about to change again.

ESTELLA NGUFOR: And I asked myself, "Estella, what happened to you?"

She told you she was lonely.

What did you do about it?

♪ WES HAZARD: Tonight's theme is "New Chapter."

Starting a new chapter in your life can be thrilling or terrifying.

And usually, to be honest, it's a little bit of both.

You're balancing your own uncertainty and inexperience against resourcefulness and hope.

But no matter what you face, you're sure to learn and grow from the experience.

Tonight, our tellers share their stories of facing new challenges, adapting, and growing.

♪ LIESENER: I'm Katie Liesener.

I live in Providence, Rhode Island.

I have been a storyteller for over ten years now, I would say, and a teacher of, you know, writing and storytelling.

And I also am a writer, I have a background in journalism.

You've done, you know, over a hundred shows across nine states and I'm just curious-- what is something that stands out as really memorable?

Like, you know, whether it's a specific moment or, you know, something that you felt over and over.

The first example that comes to mind is in my sort of mid-'20s when I came out as gay, I come from a very conservative religious family and also culture.

So I, I'm very aware that that's not how... that not everyone would be welcoming of that.

And just being able to stand up in front of people and tell them about that experience, tell them about the losses that I've experienced, like with my family was really, uh...

It was really formative.

And I understand that, you know, you've also done a fair amount of storytelling instruction and some producing.

Is what you're telling students and people on shows that you're producing, is it the same thing that you tell yourself?

Are you're giving them the same guidance?

Yes, I just try to encourage them to, to be themselves, to tell a story like you're telling it to a friend.

Because I think that authenticity is the number one thing that feels good when you're storytelling and also that the audience responds to.

♪ So shortly after my 25th birthday, I go to a friend's murder mystery party and I'm dressed like a henchman, in a necktie and a newsboy cap.

And across the room, I spot a guy in a fedora who I used to tutor with in our grad school writing center.

So I'm like, Hey!"

And you know, we start chatting and he tells me that he runs a college writing program now and is looking for adjunct teachers for the fall and would I be interested.

I mean, at 25, the word adjunct means nothing to me.

I'm just like "Oh my God, this is my chance to be a college professor."

Because, you know, I had professors who legitimately changed my life, And I always wondered, like, what it would be like if I were the one up there.

Like how I would help open students' eyes to the beauties and challenges of the world around them.

So when he asks me, I say, "Yes.

"Yes, I'm very interested."

Well, based on his recommendation, the college hires me to teach a first-year writing class for freshmen.

And about a week before the semester starts, I go into the Campus Security Office to get my I.D.

card and I hand the paperwork to the officer, and take a seat and smile for my photo.

And as he snaps the picture, he says, "So, you a freshman?"

I'm both blinded and befuddled.

"No, no...

I'm, I'm faculty."

"Oh."

Now as the 40-year-old I am today, perhaps I might be flattered by his mistake.

But at the time, with a fresh ring of baby fat around my face, I am deeply unnerved.

I mean, if I don't look like a professor to this guy, what am I going to look like to my students?

Do I have any business being a professor?

It's not like I have a PhD, just a Masters.

And actually, I have no real solo teaching experience.

In fact, one of the ugly truths about higher ed is that, while at every other level teachers get rigorous training in pedagogy, at the college level, no one is teaching teachers how to teach.

Well, when I go home that day, I'm realizing that perhaps I don't know what I'm doing.

So in a cold panic I go out, I get a book called "What the Best College Teachers Do."

I also invest in a blazer.

Well, in the nights leading up to my first day of class, I am tossing and turning, imagining every nightmare scenario.

Until, finally, the big morning arrives and I go to the classroom an hour early.

And it's a beautiful high-tech classroom.

There's this fancy digital projector, and a projection screen, and the computers are all embedded into the desks.

And I use this opportunity to kind of rehearse my professorial schtick um, and check my fly.

And, you know, try out a few jokes and transitions and check my fly.

Really feels like it's all riding on the zipper.

But as 8:00 a.m. nears, the students start to arrive.

Showtime.

I start by taking attendance and then launch into my first transition.

"Well, now that I know all your names, "I guess it's only fair that you know mine.

You can call me Professor Liesener."

I uncap a green marker and turn to write my name on the whiteboard.

"L-I..." Halfway through the "I," I know that something is terribly wrong because the white board is fluttering slightly.

And in that moment, my vision zooms out like it's an out-of-body experience, and I see that I am writing my name on the projection screen, pulled down over the whiteboard.

(sighs heavily) Behind me, total silence.

I don't dare turn my head, out of some fool instinct that if I can't see them, they can't see me.

I just kind of feel around for the string at the bottom of the screen and give it a subtle little tug, which snaps it up like a window shade.

(makes whooshing sound) Sweating profusely in my blazer, I just carry on like nothing has happened.

"L-I-E." Well, somehow I managed to white-knuckle my way through the rest of the class, but the whole time the reality is sleeping in.

They know.

They know I'm a fraud.

I'm not a professor.

I'm an idiot.

Well, afterwards, I just keep replaying the class over and over in my head.

I mean, the giant green capital letters of my name, the total silence from the class, not even a snicker.

Which actually is kind of strange.

Until I remembered that these are freshmen and that was their first-ever college class.

They might have been as scared as I was.

I mean, they've never even been to college.

They don't know what to expect.

I could have handed out markers and said, "We're all writing our names on the projection screen today," and they probably would have done it.

I don't have to pretend to be Professor Liesener.

I am Professor Liesener to them.

The question is, what kind of teacher am I going to be?

Well, that first class sealed it, you know.

Not the kind of teacher that's there to impress.

Because from that day on, I mean, I've had no trouble just being myself in the classroom.

I show up, like, overly excited at 8:00 a.m. and gushing over semicolons!

And, you know, markers are flying out of my hand.

I'm tripping all over myself, but, but I'm genuine up there and I speak from the heart.

And I hope that gives them the freedom to be themselves, too.

♪ My name is Salil Patel.

I'm a PhD scientist.

I was born in Uganda, in Central East Africa, and I grew up in the U.K.

But now I've lived in the U.S. for about three decades and I live currently in New Jersey with my wife and two children.

What have you learned?

You know, what has that journey taught you?

Like going from Africa to the U.K. to the U.S.?

It taught me to appreciate people but also to read people, and how to interact with very, very different people from all over the globe.

HAZARD: I understand that, you know, you're relatively new to storytelling and, you know, you've decided to come to this art and share your story with an audience.

What caused that desire?

How, how did you come to be interested in storytelling?

Well, I'm very proud of, of my sort of journey and I, I think I've bored my children more than enough with the, the tales.

And I, I use the stories now to, to motivate people at work, to motivate my teams.

And I think storytelling is part of helping people understand who you are, but also getting to know other people.

♪ It was a sunny summer Sunday, one of those rare nice days in England.

I was about 15 years old and there was a knock on the door.

Little did I realize as I headed to the door that my life was about to change again.

I was born in Uganda, in Central East Africa.

Uganda used to be known by the British as the "Pearl of Africa."

It's on the equator, so, beautiful weather, and our life was simple but really nice.

We had lots of friends, we had lots of family in the surrounding town that we were in and I remember it was always a very close-knit community.

And all of that beautiful life was changed when I was around seven, A dictator called Idi Amin led a coup and then came into power.

And following, you know, a lot of harassment, months and months of it, he finally ordered the Indians to get out, in 90 days.

The Indians loved Africa, but Idi Amin didn't love the Indians.

And so we left essentially with the clothes on our back.

And with the help of the British government, we ended up in the U.K., first in a refugee camp and then in the town of Swindon.

Now, Swindon at that point was predominantly white and a very working-class town.

A completely foreign environment for us.

And my father started working in a warehouse.

This was the guy who was a teacher.

My mother was traumatized by having to wear pants instead of her usual sari to work in a factory.

And I was enrolled in Park South Junior School, which was just down the road from the house that I was in.

When I opened the door that day, stood there was a friend of mine, a neighbor, an English white, white kid.

And he seemed to be reluctant to tell me what he wanted to tell me.

He was sort of looking at his feet.

Eventually, he told me to come outside and look at the wall.

And when I went out there, on the wall of our house, two-feet high, gold spray paint, were the words "National Front, wogs go home."

The hatred behind that message hurts, right?

But I wasn't so surprised, because that word, wogs, which is a derogatory term for dark-skinned people and the word Paki was thrown at me hundreds of times.

I even used to take different routes home to avoid the verbal abuse.

And many a times I ran home because it was faster and, and nobody would pick on me and quite often, I was actually being chased by somebody.

And I remember being chased like a dog through people's yards trying to escape a gang of skinheads.

And if it wasn't that, it was even worse.

I was at a soccer game once and I had a knife put on my back.

Now, somehow, I was able to get through all of that because... well, I had no choice.

My, my parents were going through their own challenges and I really didn't want to burden them with, with my, my issues.

And I was going to figure it out.

And those things-- when somebody calls you a name, that's okay.

You can deal with it.

But when you go to someone's house, your friend's house, and you hear the father turn around to the mother and say, "What's the Paki doing in the house?"

That's hurtful, that's just not nice and, and when you're like a 13-year-old kid, that hurts.

Another time, I had to go and pick up my mother from a religious event.

I was supposed to take care of her.

It was dark, it was 11:00, and the pubs had just emptied out.

And as we were walking home, a car pulled up beside us, a bunch of guys pulled the window down and they yelled, "Curry eating c-words."

Before I knew what was going on, they went a little bit further, and a bunch of them got out of the car and started walking towards us.

My first instinct was to run, of course, but I see my mother there next to us.

And before I knew what to do, I'm looking at my mother and she's praying.

(laughs) And, whatever she said to Bhagwan clearly worked because those guys turned around, backed off.

They had their laugh, they scared us, and off they went.

So when I looked at those words on the wall-- yes, I was used to it, but those words, when they're on your wall, the hatred is on your doorstep.

And they also now know where I live.

So, the first thing I did was to try and cover up those words.

And we had some orange paint in the shed and that's what we used.

And I painted it once, and I painted it twice and the shadow of those horrible words were still visible.

And my father said to me, "Don't bother painting it anymore, "because if you do, they're just going to come back and do it again."

And so I left those words, and for the next three months, every day when I came home from school, I had to look at that as a reminder that Salil Patel may have loved England, but England didn't love Salil Patel.

And when I went inside the house, and by the way, as I was painting, there are lots of people looking on.

All of our neighbors had moved their net curtains and they were looking, but no one came out.

No one said a word, no one had our back.

And we'd been very nice to these folks.

We, we had... my mother had cooked for them.

You know, we were just good neighbors.

But they didn't, they didn't step up for us.

In fact, when I went in the house, some of them came out.

And I heard one neighbor talking to the other and say, "You know, well, they, they deserved it."

You know, "They knew what they were coming here for."

Now, to be fair, the other neighbor said, "Well, that's not right.

That ain't right."

Well, the the matter of fact is, we didn't have a choice and we didn't know what we were coming here for.

And so now I was the angry teenager and I said to my father, "Why did you bring us here?"

and so on.

And that day, my father gave the best talk of his life to me.

He explained to me that his own brother had been left behind in India and he had been able to go to Africa because he had passed some senior exams.

And my father said to me, "Look, you can go wherever you want.

But you're not going to get anywhere unless you get educated."

And so I studied hard and I got myself into university, and very few people went to university in those days.

And that was my escape from Swindon.

And from the day I got to university, I had figured out that a way to get to the U.S. was to do a PhD.

And that's exactly what I did.

And now I live in New Jersey, I've been in the U.S. for almost three decades.

So, is the U.S. free of racism, free of hatred?

No.

But the reason I like living here is in America, there are lots of other people just like me that came from somewhere else.

♪ NGUFOR: My name is Estella Ngufor and I'm coming from Cameroon.

It's a West African country, a very beautiful place to visit.

Professionally, I was a teacher back home and currently in the United States I am a residential manager with the Guild for Human Services.

You had a background in teaching and now you're, you know, in a slightly different career here.

I'm wondering what brought you to storytelling.

What do you hope to get from sharing tonight's stories uh, with, with, you know, our audience?

Back in Africa, there's a culture.

The culture of a people is being transmitted from generation to generation through oral literature.

You know, our great-great-great- grandparents did not go to school.

But how do we know our culture and where our ancestors began is because of the stories that they told us.

What would you hope that the people who hear your stories tonight take away afterwards?

Because of the complexities of the world today, everybody is suspicious of who this one is and what that person can do to them.

I pray that we can return to that simple community life that we used to have.

Trusting the people and showing warmth and love towards them.

♪ This is 2015, and I had just won the lottery, a green card visa into the United States.

My children and I were just so excited to move on, especially as we had just lost one that was so dear to us.

This was an opportunity for a new start-- to bury the emotions and to move forward, to look into the future.

Coming into the United States, we lived with family for a couple of years just so that we could put our feet down and be able to raise some money to get our own place.

We were all looking forward to that time.

2017, God blessed us and we got this beautiful, antiquity kind of Victorian-style house in a wonderful neighborhood.

And, you know, our apartment had this huge kitchen, which is always something I loved, and two bathrooms.

My boys are teenage boys.

Sharing a bathroom with them, of course you know what that means.

So it was my pleasure to have, you know, two bathrooms in our apartment, And my beautiful bedroom with the purple color, which is one of my favorites.

As we were settling in, I was looking forward to this time when my landlord will introduce my neighbors to me and... but that never happened.

Back home where I come from, when somebody's moving into a new neighborhood, you know, the neighbors come around, you know, to say welcome and they help you to move in.

They cook food and bring it to you just so that you can get that warmth, that sense of belonging into that neighborhood.

But that was not the case, and so I knew that that was a cultural difference.

Notwithstanding, I usually see my neighbor, you know, looking through the window whenever I park into the neighborhood, and I was hoping that someday I will meet her.

It turned out that we met under very bizarre circumstances.

It was this day that we took out the trash and I checked in and I saw some things that I still had to put in the trash.

So I ran downstairs and look for any bag that I could quickly untie and put the trash.

Especially since all the bags were the same color.

And as I was climbing up the stairs, I opened the door and there was this lady at the landing.

Stout, gray hair.

Very tense looking.

And she said to me, "Why did you put your trash in my trash?"

I was taken aback.

I knew that was my neighbor and I had been looking forward to meeting her.

But here we are, meeting for the first time under such gruesome atmosphere.

So I told her, "I am Estella," her new neighbor and I'm sorry about that.

"Nothing bad, was just vegetable that I wanted to dispose of."

I walked up the stairs and I met her and she apologized, and told me she isn't a bad neighbor after all.

And that it's just that she and the previous neighbor wasn't getting along too well.

So we exchanged all our pleasantries.

I told her about my sons.

She told me about her cat, that she lived with her cat.

And then we parted ways.

I then told my boys that every time they went out to bring out the barrels, because they were very, very huge, they should help her with hers and bring that in as well.

So one day, I heard this knock at the door.

When I opened the door-- wow.

That was my neighbor standing there with a card and boxes of chocolate.

And I was like, "How are you?"

And then she said, "I came to appreciate your sons "for what they've been doing.

"They've been helping me to bring in my trash can, "and they've been bringing my mail up, "the huge ones for me.

I want to say thank you."

And I was like, "Oh, thank you so much for doing this."

And I felt better, because to me we were beginning to relate even more better.

And we parted ways and we became more cordial.

We now could chat more when we meet at the parking lot, or when we meet at the hallway.

Then Covid hit-- bam.

Everybody was so uncertain as to what will happen the next day, or the next week or the next month.

Nobody knew what was going on.

But, of course, I kept going to work.

But what I noticed was that my neighbor's car was permanently parked outside.

There was no time I drove in and that car had moved, so I knew she was there.

And of course she was there because, again, I would see her sometimes, you know, looking at us through the window.

But on this particular day when I walked in, she came out as usual.

She said, "I hope you're keeping safe.

I see you and your boys going in and out."

I said, "Well, we are trying the best we can."

And she said she is so lonely and wish this was not happening.

And I told her that we just have to keep, you know, following the guidelines and doing what we can and making ourselves happy.

But that was it, I never reached out to her again.

And a couple of weeks afterwards, I didn't see her car in the parking lot.

One week passed, two weeks passed, and then my landlord break the sad news and told me my neighbor was gone.

Oh, God.

I felt so bad.

My landlord told me she died because she was depressed.

And I asked myself, "Estella, what happened to you?"

This lady gave you the clue, she told you she was lonely.

What did you do about it?

Was I beginning to forget where I come from?

Was I beginning to forget the warmth that I came with into this country?

What was going on with me?

I felt this guilt.

It chased me for weeks and for months because I was like, "You should have reached out to this lady more."

And trust me, when this whole Covid thing is behind us, I will open up my heart, not just to my neighbors within our building, but also to those around our block.

OKOKON: The Stories From the Stage Podcast with extraordinary, true stories.

wherever you listen to podcasts.

Consider supporting more great storytelling at give.worldchannel.org/stories ♪ ♪