The year is 2004, Thailand. Two days after Christmas. A mother with her two daughters in her arms is running around crying, looking for her husband. Her shoes are dirty, her clothes ripped. The youngest daughter is crying. The older one still in shock. The mother doesn't know where she is, or how this happened. People are laying around. Dead. Children are crying. People's things are floating around. People's lives are spread out on the street. Is her husband still alive? Will her daughters have to grow up without a father? Is this the end?

One hour earlier.

The year is 2004. I am sitting at a restaurant with my family, eating breakfast. Everything is good. We are happy. Laughing. Someone in the restaurant is screaming, pointing out at the ocean. People are looking, laughing, crying. Some people don't realize it. Some people are already running.

My dad looks up. He doesn't say a word, just standing still, frozen. My mom stands up, staring with open mouth. Everything happens so quickly. Within a second, the world turns upside-down. I am crying while getting carried away by a stranger. I can't see my dad. I can still hear my mom, screaming. Water is splashing, breaking everything in it's way. The restaurant we were sitting at a few minutes ago is gone, broken down to the ground. I am holding my sisters hand. Hard. I don't want her to leave me. I don't want her to leave my side, leaving me alone.

The stranger puts me down. I can see my mom again, running against us. She picks us up, starts to run. I am asking her many questions. What is happening? Are we going to die? Where is dad? What happened to your shoes, your clothes? Why are there people laying on the ground? Are they dead? Are we dead?

After running around for a while, my mom finds a place for us to rest. A place far up in the woods, where the waves can't hurt us. I can see children, my friends I met at the beach. They are also crying. Some of them are bleeding. Some of them are all alone. My mom hugs them, comforts them. They laugh, happy to feel loved.

Later that day my dad comes back. I can not describe the feeling in my body. I want to cry, scream, jump, dance. I want to run and hug him and tell him how much I love him. I want to do all this because we just got back someone who we thought was dead. We thought we would never see him again, ever. But there he is, looking at us, running against us, hugging us. There he is, making our family happy again. There he his, making us able to share a story about a family who survived the tsunami.

A few weeks ago, my english teacher asked the class to write a text about our sentence. Something that you will be remebered for. At first I didn't understand the task. I didn't understand the power of someone's life. But now I do.

So what is my sentence? Who am I? Two questions hard to answer, however, good to think about. A sentence is described as "a set of words that is complete in itself". This means that my sentence has to describe myself as something complete for who I am.

So who am I? A girl, born in Sweden, 15 years old, living in Saudi Arabia, blond hair... There are many ways of describing me, however, what does it say about me. A sentence should be something that distinguishes me from the rest of the 15 year old, swedish girls in the world. Something that makes me the one I am.

This sentence, my sentence is "changing the world by small pieces, gaining it back by experience". It describes me as a person and what I am trying to achieve. My whole life, I have been trying to help the world, little by little. My mom used to help me sell my old toys and give the money to charity. She also used to help me donate money to charities online, such as UN. However, it is not always the big things that helps. Sometimes, picking up the trash after you, or taking the bike instead of making your parents drive you can help the world. Helping other people can also mean helping the world.

I realized this after the tsunami. After 2004, when I was close to lose my family. I have had nightmares about this ever since it happened. I have been scared of water, oceans and restaurants close to the beach. I have cried many times. However, I have also laughed about it. Not because it was funny, but because I have realized that the people around us have helped us. People I used to call strangers helped us. People that had lost body parts, were injured, and were without their family helped us. I am very lucky to still be here today, together with my family. I think this is the reason why this sentence, my sentence, describes me so good. Because I want to help the world as the world has helped me.

So what do I gain? Except from the experience and the feeling of helping the world, I also gain self-confidence. I know that I have done what I can do and helped the world in my way. No one can take it away from me. No one can take the confidence away from me.

This is what I have been doing ever since I was little and I think this is why my sentence describes me and the one I am.