 My mother she after six months of me being around her she said to me Elena I want to be a Muslim and she started crying. She said you you're just an amazing person and I feel like I want to be you know part of this and so For me that was everything she she ended up taking her shahada and After she took her shahada my sister did and then my other two brothers did and Alhamdulillah, you know 25 years later my family became Muslim and So Another another story I want to go into is the fact that my brother when he went to umrah. He made two du'as one of those du'as was That his family become Muslim His second one was at the time that he had taken a shahada He was married and his wife decided to leave him She did not want to be with a Muslim and they had three children at the time which you know to him It was very heartbreaking He had to decide either I'm gonna save myself or continue to be with my family And he said what good am I gonna be if I'm gonna stay with my family if I'm not good with God And so he decided to you know to take a shahada and and go that route and so Subhanallah, you know after we all became Muslim His wife ended up getting married to a Palestinian and his kids were raised in Islam So Allah, but you know so all of his du'as were were answered to him So the power of the walk and I always say just pray to him. He's there waiting for us We leave him. He never leaves us. You know, he's waiting sitting there waiting for us to pray to him so You know, then I ended up saying okay now I you know, I have my family But how do I enter the community space? Right, so I think this is very challenging as well But also what I got out of it was the fact that we always have a perception of us not being accepted Right, we feel like automatically we're the outsiders But realistically we're really not because the shahada is so powerful And what we felt to realize is that we just gained billions of brothers and sisters Like anywhere you go in the world if you see my sisters in Islam if you see a hijabi, you're like, okay I'm good, you know This is now just normal to us. And so I Had to figure out how to get connected to different types of community and so I just Organically walked up to everyone. So I'm on a come my name is Elena And I am Latina and that's what I started to do in the community I would go up to people and I would shake their hand and that was like me breaking that barrier of feeling like I'm an outsider and so sometimes and I always say this ask Questions because when you assume things they're not actually what it is and so One of my main focuses was okay. I'm gonna try to just be myself Because Islam is not really trying to change who you are. It's trying to enhance you and It's trying to bring you on the right path This is all we're doing some people say that you know Islam is it's so hard and it's really not a law gave us the tools to make things easier for us And so Alhamdulillah, you know by me reminding those reminding myself of those things and actually being Educated in in Islam too. So that was very important for me. So through those efforts. I ended up, you know Getting married by the way, my husband is sitting up here. My shalom. He's Palestinian And and I was able to adhere to different culture, right? So I'm a Latina. I like Spanish food I love to be around family and friends and so I'm getting married into a Palestinian household They like food too, but you know, I like the sazon the sofrito. I like to put a little Spanish stuff in the boon So I would go back and forth with my mother-in-law and she would make the Arabic food And I would throw in my Spanish seasoning, you know So that was like a good little, you know, that was her, you know, welcoming me me welcoming her, you know And it was just an amazing, you know connection, but again, that doesn't happen all the time I was fortunate enough to be married to someone who was Open-minded religious and he saw me as a Muslim, you know And and so when you connect with people you look at them as just a Muslim We are brothers and sisters Alhamdulillah