Draw My Life - Ameer matani

Hey YouTube, this is Ameer Matani here or as i'm known online Stike, Stike05, or here on YouTube as Stike96 this is a video of me showing where I started my life or at least all I remember of my early years, all the way up until where I am now I may not be as old or as successful yet as most of the other people doing draw my life videos out there but I thought i'd still go ahead with this video as it seemed like a pretty awesome thing to do and sorry if I seem to jumped around a lot between events, but believe me shortening down my life to only a few minutes was a challenge i have worked on this for many days to make it as great as possible, so i hope you'll enjoy it. So let's start!!! So my life started on the 2'nd of December, 1996 in a place called Hayes that's in London, England. I don't really remember that much about that time, although I can kind of remember the house's garden with it's greenhouse and outdoor bathroom. My sister Emily was also born while we were there in that house, on the 31'st of December, 1998. The crazy thing is that my sister was actually meant to be born on Boxing day. So as she says, she was always meant to be born on a special day. Our TV also fell on my sister's head at some point too she wasn't really that badly hurt though but I think there is still a scar there. Anyway going back to my story one of the biggest things in my life, well not really for me, becuase I was too small to think about it, but for my family was the fact that I was found to have Leukaemia a type of deadly blood cancer. Of cause I didn't really care too much about it, I was too young for that. I actually used to love going to the hospital that they had some sort of console, probably a PS1 at the time. They had a football table and a whole load of other good stuff. We also got a disabled badge so we could park in the disabled parking areas, went to a whole load of special events funded to cancer groups, and for some crazy reason I used to love it when they put me to sleep for operations, god only knows why. The whole thing was great in my eyes, in my family's it was horrible it was so bad that we moved that we had to move near to my grandparents because we need their support. I got over cancer before I was really aware of the danger I was in because of it, so to me the fact that i had didn't seem that big even though it was. But thanks to God, the NHS, and my family and friends I have recovered. Still during this treatment i had to go to school my school life was pretty ordinary from that remember, I used to play Football every day, used to be a bit of a pain to my teachers and my parents, and used to like to hang out with my friend mike who used to have this Spyro game I used to love. I think it was also him who had these epic pc games, well they were epic a the time you know those games kinda Frog Frenzy style looking at them now they seem so old, but back then wow, they were crazy good. So around a year after I was cured from cancer My dad wanted to go live with his side of the family many of whom were still living in Jordan so we all went i remember the first day in the school, let's just I was an example of how not to act on your first day of school. I was only eight in grade 3, or year 4 in the english system but I still should have known better than to cry for the whole day, well I can't remember if it was the whole day or if it was that my mum was called in to collect me, but I cried for ages, i'm surprised I didn't become dehydrated. I was lucky to have one friend at that school everyone else either didn't want to talk to me or bothered me. The school itself was crazy we couldn't even run in the playground, and there were these set days when we could use the play equipment. They also made you make up unexpected holidays on the weekend so if you've got a snow day during the week you'd have to make it up on the weekend, and how could I forget the national anthem we had to sing every day. They also used to pile us with homework in both english and arabic. I would have failed without my Aunt Kacy helping me out, her first language was arabic so she was a great help. Out of school I was normally either in our family owned flat with my grandmother downstairs, or with my cousins, the daughters and sons of Aunty Kacy. My grandma who unfortunately passed away just after us leaving Jordan later on, used to love playing card games, I used to love playing card games too. With my cousins Farris, Ghania and Noor, we used to pay a lot on the PC and the PS2 most of the games were by the company Capcom and one of our favourites was Onimusha I did have two other cousins but one was normally with his friends and didn't want to play with us, and the other was just a little baby. They also taught me rollerskating, and played Basketball with me. Nour and Ghania, well more Ghania really loved horror stuff whether it's movies or games or those things you buy from the shop, that make it look like somebody stuck a knife through your head, we all used to find it quite funny. There was also this shop that sold the tastiest chicken ever close to my cousin's house. Me my cousin often used to walk there and get some probably too often, I was fat by the time I went back to England, but then lots of people that age seem to be anyway, Faris certainly wasn't though, he was also thin from what I can remember. anyway going away from our sizes, the houses in Jordan where really bad, well our house was anyway, we had a tank upstairs with water that had to last us between refills that happened once a week, and the gas has to be bought from these canisters from these trucks that produced this horrible music or maybe it wasn't bad at first, but after hearing about it day after day after day it became so annoying. In 2005 we went to jamaica for my uncle and aunty's wedding. The hotel was a highly ranked, all inclusive which meant unlimited food and drinks and many other great things. It also meant having a massive pool with things like a little hut to get drinks from to the side of the pool and we were able to drink them without ever having to leave the pool, it was so awesome. We also went on a boat trip on a river. I loved the trip to Jamaica, it was a great escape from the troubles of Jordan for a while. Backtracking a little bit, my brother Luther was born in Jordan on the 15'th of December, 2004 He was a cute, little baby on our trip to Jamaica, and my grandma, you know that the one that lives on the floor underneath us in our flat used to love him a lot. She was devastated when we left Jordan after two years. That's just the thing about our family though, we have family all over the world, and it seems that no is the right place to live sometimes, but moving seems to be an unavoidable part of our lives and unfortunately it's something I just have to put up with. So after Jordan we went back to England after living with my grandparents in England for a bit, my parents found a house down the hill from my grandparents that they ended up buying. So we moved in and because my grandparents were so close we could go to their house any time we wanted. Behind my house was an apple tree I always used to climb and an allotment that had things my Grandad plants in up until this day. I was a video game addict at the time I used to love Red Alert 2 from the Command and Conquer series, my brother and dad actually still play that game up until now which pretty nice I did occasionally go outside though don't worry, we had parks all around us I used to go to there was one up the hill from us, one right next the house, and one down the hill from us. The people there were better but many of them took a long time to get to know me I don't really blame them though i had this terrible Jordanian accent at the time, not that Jordanian accents are horrible or anything but mine in particular is horrible. I did feel for the first year that if didn't fit anywhere, the people in Jordan used to not like me because I was considered British and that the people in England used to not like me because I was considered an Arab. The following year they started becoming friends though we used to play this game where we had to hit a goal crossbar with a football of cause we played proper footy (football) too though. We used to mimic the premier league and celebrate goals just in the same way, i.e. jumping on each other and nearly flattening each other. I also got glasses around that time that I hated and to say the truth still hate. So i asked for the actual classes year five was ok, but year six was epic, we have this awesome teacher who we used to call Mr V, everyone wanted to be in his class, the thing I remember the most about his classes was the clear up time where we had to clear up whatever we were doing before the simpsons music he played on his laptop finished. We also had swimming lessons in that school, I hated swimming lessons. After school me and my sister used to go to the athletics club where we did all sorts of sports, I also went climbing and occasionally swimming, and in high school I stopped the athletics club because I couldn't reach there in time after school, I continued swimming and climbing. High school was good, it was scary at first being surrounded by all those older kids, but I found it ok after a while. There were these girls who tried bother me but I didn't let them, and there were also many Arab kids there so I fit in really well. There was also this ice-cream van, or iccy van as we called it, that used to sell sweets outside as well as ice-cream, it wasn't all good though. There were these scary PE teachers, one of them looked like a rugby player who could easily flatten you and the other always wore these sunglasses and used to be a bit better but still scary. We also used to have to wear ties which I used to hate. i started to find my place with computers in that school though I used to love computer class then, but I didn't really do anything big, you know like learning programming languages, but I loved videoing and photography since I was in Jordan and took any opportunity to take a video or a picture, i'm still kind of the same now. Anyway as for school I stayed there for one year before we went on our next journey, this time to Saudi Arabia where we are now. We traveled to Saudi Arabia when I was in year 8, which worked out to be around 2009. I remember the first day well I can't remember what time we traveled so it may have been the following day but I didn't want to leave our hotel on that day, to me moving to saudi seemed like the worst thing ever to happen to me. My dad did manage to get me out the hotel somehow though it was summer when we went so the heat felt unbearable, it was better than i thought though, I thought you wouldn't be able to stand outside or you'd die or something. On the same day we got our first taste of how passionate the Saudi's are about safety, when we went to the bathroom we saw there was a power socket in the shower, to be fair it wasn't directly in front of the shower, but it like here and the shower was here not just for that reason, but for some other reasons too we moved hotel the next day. The new flat was in Al-Khubar where we are living now, and I still pass that hotel, that has been taken over by another company and I always remember our first days there. As days passed I got to know all the things you need to know while you are in Saudi Arabia, like women can't drive, the abaya thing, and that if you don't know a guy's name you can call him Mohammad. I still don't do that though I find it weird. Very soon I grew used to the saudi customs and traditions, and i don't believe everything or follow everything but at least I know about it. After searching many places we finally found a place to call home, it was pretty small but it was a start. We had some pretty nice neighbours and a coke machine across the road, there was also outdoor area to rollerskate and play footie in. Though it was nothing compared to the massive park next to our old house, but it had to do. We also got our first flat screen TV there, I was so excited. i mean how can't you be if this was your old TV. we had the longest holiday ever that year as the school in england finished before the schools in Saudi and in turn the schools in Saudi reopened later than the schools in England. To be fair we needed those days off though, we saw a lot of horrible, I mean HORRIBLE schools but we finally found our school, ISG Dammam. At first glance I didn't really like the school but as we were given a tour of the school and I got to think about it a bit i loved it. On the first day in grade 7, or year 8 in the english system. I just sat at the side of the class sad with my life. I had this impression of school kids there you see, I felt that there were going to be just boring, lifeless kids who just studied all day and sat on their seats while listening to the teacher who wouldn't even let you breath without telling you off. How wrong I was though the students here are just epic, two guys brought me around the school to some parts I haven't seen before, and everyone was basically the opposite of how I saw them. The people in school are from all corners of the world, there are people from Egypt, Korea, India, America, Lebanon, England, you name it, there is probably at least one kid from there. The crazy thing is though that even though they were all from different parts (of the world), they got along better than anyone in my previous schools, even though they were all mostly British. On our first year we had this school bus with the kids that always used to sing Spongebob Squarepants every single morning, it was so annoying. Apart from them and my geography and language arts teacher which were the same teacher by the way, more on her later, everything was great in school on the same year i got to go to China, the people there were kind of like a temporary family, and the teachers were like my parents before that time I never had that feeling towards anyone. While we were in that country we basically lived on sticky rice and pizza, the other food was either not halal, So I couldn't eat it because i'm a muslim in case you didn't know, or it just didn't look appetising. We went to landmarks like the temple of heaven and of cause the great wall of China, where my camera decided to run out. It was a great experience that was like no other and I'm really glad that I went i do plan to go back and take pictures of the great wall one day though. Going back to school, I also made my best friend in grade 7, who loved tech like I did, and many other things I loved. I even remember having an argument about which web browsers better one, I promise we only faught once about that though, we did fight about Apple and Microsoft quite a bit though. We also talked about video games alot and sometimes just above the things like our countries of course i had the rest of school to be my friends though and I never wanted to leave the place, that I initially didn't want to step one foot into. At that point my Geography and Language Arts teacher was my arch enemy as of now we are OK, but back then I hated this teacher. She used to give his work that I thought was too hard for us, and the thing is that we had her for two subjects, and worse still the subjects were one after another. We had problems from the start to the end of the year. In grade eight we were part of this group of teachers, well we call them a gang, and they always hanged out together, all of them apart from my health teacher. I had this great teacher who said the funniest things at you. She loved me so she was OK with me, but if you got on her bad side, let's just say it wasn't a good idea to get on her bad side. She would always take up half the period by telling us her life stories, the rest she would take up trying to rush through the lesson. Unfortunately she passed away when i was in grade 8 (I think it was actually grade 9). As for the other teachers if you did one thing bad to them, all of them knew about it. I was in their good books so I was ok, but my sister who was in grade 8 wasn't as lucky. Around the same time we felt we had to move house, we had two houses to choose from we definitely chose the right one though. It turns out our cousins chose the house directly oppisite us to move into they were small though and we girls, not saying that boys are better than girls or anything but I find it hard to mix in with girls, so I didn't really go to them that often but they were still great company, as were their parents, but I found it hard to get close to them. Anyway going back to the house, it was a major upgrade from our last house, we no longer lived on the bottom floor so we only had a balcony for our outdoor space but the house itself was really big anyway and there was also an outdoor area downstairs where we sometimes played swingball. There was also a small park just a small walk away, we also got a new driver, it was sad to leave our old bus but at least we didn't have to listen to the people singing Spongebob Squarepants every single morning. I don't really remember the people in our new bus that much because we only stayed in there a few months, maybe even weeks before we switched transport. One day our driver announced to us that there will be a new family in the bus, there wasn't a lot of space so we all sighed. We all went into this kind of small compound. It was actually one of the places we considered living in, but we didn't. A woman and two twins got into the back on the bus and moved to the back of the bus, next to where I was sitting. I sighed, I felt tired so I didn't want to talk to anyone new. The boy sat in the front so I thought yay, one less seat that had to be somehow found in the back. So I've been in Saudi for quite a while now, and even it was a multi-cultural school I haven't heard an english accent in ages, well apart from my parents, my brother and sister. Not that i like British people more than any other group, but it was just a matter of it's epic to have somebody who knew where I was coming from to talk to. So me and the mum we had a little chat on the way to school even though I was tired and as the days went on I started to wonder what the boy was like in the front of the bus. I saw his mum and sister, but I wondered what he was like. Little did I know that this boy in the front would be more than just a person to talk to, that he would become my new best friend and a person I would go on to call a brother rather than a friend. So for the first day we said nothing much but later on we started talking about tales of him and his brother he had to leave behind in England, he really had a great life. We did talk a bit even after we came out of the bus, but nothing really more after all he was only seven at a time why on earth would I want to hang out with a seven year old. When I had so many friends my own age to hang out with, and besides I already had a best friend Ahmed. It was my sister Emily though that told my mum about the family, and said that they should meet up over at the park next to our house, they only lived down the hill from us so they could easily reach it. After a while we went round to each others houses, my parents and the family's parents became friends, we then decided to share transport and take turns paying for it. At first the mum used to come with us on the bus (actually was a seven seater), but after a few weeks she decided to stay at home after also wasn't working at the school, and really only acted as an escort for the kids. But now she just has to be the escorts instead, so in the morning and after school, I now became like a father while I was at school. I would pick them up and drop them off once we reached school, and make sure that they have everything when they left, which they normally didn't. In case you were wondering this school is from KG1 to grade 12 so we were all in the same complex. So Connor, the son of the family, and me started talking more, because he didn't have his mum anymore to talk to. He even started hanging out with me and my friends in the morning before class, he really caused a scene and I often saw a crowd of people around him. as time went on we began to think of each other as brothers rather than friends and although I made sure that I never got in the way of him and his actual brother. Anyway lets fast forward to 2013 So Ahmad has unfortunately left school, so have Max and Josh, who were twins who were also great friends. I have made new friends though that of cause can not replace my old friends to me people have no replacements, and until today I miss hanging out with Ahmad. Connor has also grown up and doesn't cling to me as much as he used to do then, and now hangs out with his own friends kind of like their leader, now they all crowd around him instead. His mum also started working in the school as a teacher, my brother Luther is where Connor started off his life in Saudi, so I now see him doing some of the things Connor used to do alot of times. He also has many friends and invited his first non family friend over to the house a few months ago. Emily is the leader of the basketball team and is doing great in school. I also had my English and History (actually geography) teacher back from grade 7 for three quarters of Language arts this year, but she left on maternity leave. We made up by the end of the year and I liked her, so it was sad to see her go. After she had to leave. We also went to Jordan last year to go and visit our cousins, and we went back to Kuwait this year to see where my dad grew up, and I have been to Mecca twice, which to say the truth was a bit of a dissapointing area, which was not that nice at all, other than the actual mosque of cause. The buildings are always towering over it, kind of belittling it. Other than that everything and everyone at the moment is doing great. And apart from the fact that some of the school was knocked down because some guy decided to build a road straight through it, and that i'm now in high school about to leave this great period of my life I am living in, everything is great. We also moved house again to an area far away from Connor and his family, so we have to get separate transport. As for the new house we are now living in it is great and has a great view over all the houses, there is also this land for sale in front our house that used to be a place where they (workers) used to build stuff, i'm not sure exactly what stuff though. We are all wondering what will be build on that site, but who knows maybe it will be another park. Even with all the changes coming to Saudi, it allowed me to experience a school that is full of cultures who will welcome anyone who comes to their doors, rather than reject them. It also let me experience an entirely different and sometimes strange culture, but most importantly gave me a brother who will be there with me for the rest of my life, despite the age difference. I am now working on creating videos with my blood brother Luther over at the channel 2aMinecraft which we plan to continue making videos for when we have the time, and I also create videos here at Stike96 about tech which I love, in the future I only plan to get bigger on YouTube and to do better in school. Because if there is one thing I know, somethings are just worth fighting for, sorry I had to say that, *whispering* it's not my fault if I like Starcraft. OK really though, one, Ok two things important things I have learnt from all of this is that you can never control the future, and that everything I mean everything even the most horrible, terrible things happen for a reason. Because after all without my illness we may have never moved from Hayes, which in turn may have not lead to the events that lead to my dad wanting to go to Jordan and so the events go on. Now looking back I see that if even one of those events didn't happen, I may have not had the great experiences I experienced, or would have not met the epic people I met and be in the place called by very few as epic, but looking at all the experiences I had as well as the many I didn't have time to mention, I don't think I had that bad of a life after all. So tomorrow when you wake up, know that you are waking up to a new day, one that's filled with new memories that will live with you for a lifetime, and new experiences that may never be relived. After all each day will only come around once, never to be repeated to the end of time. thank you for watching and see you all later, and of cause don't forget to smile.