Friend

I was just as shocked as everyone else when I first met my friend Uzo, his life has been everything but regular just because of his skin color and nationality. In fact, what makes him so distinctive is the mixture of both his black skin color and Ukrainian descent. 
My friend was born back in Soviet times from an African father that he has never seen and a white Ukrainian mother. Despite the fact that his mother was Caucasian, his skin color turned out being as dark as it could, his hair was as curly as any other African child’s and every feature of his face had nothing in common with the other Ukrainian children that he had to play, study and grow up with. To make it more clear, there has never been one black person in his little town named Kharkiv, therefore, his birth was more than one of the greatest topics to discuss for all of the communist old-timers living there at that moment. 
Ever since my friend was born, he has always been sightseeing for some and the main character of jokes for others. Nicely said, his mother became an outcast that was no longer accepted by the society. The poor lady lost her job and the social position in the communist party. Luckily, by that time it was already the very end of the 1980's, the end of the Soviet Union existence, consequently, the rules were not nearly as harsh as they were in the earlier decades. Nevertheless, the fact that a child was born not from the local comrade but from a person with a completely different nationality and race; put the family of two through numerous hardships. Even though Uzo was abandoned and not understood by the society, my friend grew up to be a very humble and hard working teenager. The offense that he was taking in from others was not all due to racism, but rather nationalism that was blooming the small cities such as his own. 
As soon as he started making some income he decided to escape his motherland and move to the United States of America, which as he stated was then known as "The