Book Excerpts

African women come from a deep-rooted and rich cultural heritage that guides our values, beliefs, and successes. It makes us resilient and shapes our family values, religion, food, music, and educational values, influences our work ethic, and way of life.
This deep-rooted, rich cultural heritage, and shaped values, may easily create chaos and immense cultural clashes when African women migrate to places like the United States. These cultural clashes can be anything from struggling to maintain their language, ways of dressing, food, music, and their overall way of life. They may also struggle with how they worship at the church or the mosque. Additionally, they may encounter challenges with instilling their traditional beliefs and values in their children within the host country's culture.

We interviewed eleven highly successful immigrant African women for this book. Each of them received the same questions using these questions as a guide, the women shared their practical experiences and challenges, and how they overcame professional barriers to achieve success. These are stories of resilience, rebounding, hard work, triumph, and actualization. This chapter covers the results of the interviews we conducted some are in question-and-answer format, others are summaries of the conversations we had with the respondents, based on the questions we asked and the answers they gave.

Every day in our professional and personal journeys, we encounter challenges that require us to make decisions that may impact us and those in our lives. It is easy to carry the burden and to blame ourselves. Some situations can make us doubt our abilities and lose confidence in ourselves. However, that approach does not yield any positive outcomes. Our mistakes, failures, or rejections don’t define us. Rather, they are opportunities for us to show the strength we have within us.