Exploration Two: Lily Eldadah

Hello everyone! My name is Lilyan Eldadah, but all my peers and classmates call me Lily. I am currently a freshman at Ohio State University Marion Campus, studying Health Sciences. Although I am starting to like OSUM and all the faculty and students, OSUM was not my first choice. I plan to transfer to OSU Main Campus next semester, to finish my undergrad there. I do not want to live in Ohio the rest of my life though; hopefully, I can move somewhere big like California or Florida. My fun fact is that I have traveled overseas many times over the last five years of my life. I have traveled to Italy, London, Egypt, Libya, Palestine, and Jordan. I loved being able to travel to those places and experience all the different traditions and customs in those areas. My favorite place was Palestine, since my background is from there. When I reached Palestine, it was during the holiday Eid, which is similar to Christmas here, and it was absolutely marvelous to see all the decorations and celebrations happening not only in the houses but also on the streets. Living in Palestine for the few days that I was there helped me experience the hardships that the people there go through every day. Things as little as electricity and water, I took for granted, while the people in Palestine would have to wake up at the break of dawn just to fill up water to have drinking water for the day. Also, they only have electricity for a few hours of the day, which was really painful to live through, but helped me become more appreciative of the things I had back home in the United States. Anyway, I have lived in Worthington, Ohio district almost all my life, but I was actually born in Libya, Africa. When I was one and a half, my family and I moved from Libya to Egypt, and 6 months later, we moved to Columbus and have not moved since.

Here is a picture of some my high school friends and I from the last day before graduation. Since I graduated a year early most of my friends would still be in high school for another year, so it was not too hard to say goodbye because I would still be able to come back and visit them whenever since they would be at school.

On Monday we were assigned to read the first two profiles in Holding On by David Isay and Harvey Wang. I learned so much in the first profile by “Steam Train” Maury Graham’s profile. One thing that really stood out to me was that the hobos would keep pebbles in their pockets and throw them at the ground to show the new group that they are “one of them”.

For my research part I read “Steam Train Maury, 5-Time Hobo King” to learn more about Maury Graham and I learned a lot of new interesting things. The most interesting thing I learned was that he lived as a hobo for his whole life! He would go door to door asking to work for food each day. I think that is amazing to have been able to do that and survive. He ended up settling down and getting married, and later had kids. It is crazy to figure out how much there actually is to know about hobos and their lives. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/us/23graham.html?_r=2&