Resting my 10-year-old mind from a night of worry, I gazed at the houses through the window of my family’s red four-door Saturn, which gave me a feeling of protection from this new unfamiliar world that passed before my eyes. The wood houses seemed unprotected and weak compared to the fenced brick houses I was familiar with in Venezuela. Knowing only what my mother had taught me to say in English, “I don’t speak English,” I did not know how people in this new country would react toward me. Would they be nice? Would they even make an attempt to communicate with me? Knowing Spanish and some Italian, I was terrified of what the outcome of that day would bring to my new life in the United States.

“The first day of school should be a unique experience”, I thought. I would make new friends, meet new people, and learn new things. Oh, how wrong I was! With my tight-fitting jeans, white long-sleeved shirt tucked in, and slick brown hair combed to the side, I felt like a Martian standing in the middle of a New York school. Everyone dressed in ways that were totally different from mine, their hair was flowing as it pleased and their pants were on the verge of falling off. I figured that if I stood next to the restroom during recess someone would speak to me, since everyone has to go sometime. Walking through the tall white door of my new house after school, my watery eyes revealed only little of the anguish within me.

“No va a ser fácil, y tampoco te vamos a ayudar”, my parents simply said, refusing my request for help on understanding the essay topic for the week. As I stared at the paper with letters organized in a foreign manner, my father brought out a little red dictionary and calmly said, “This should help.” But this reassurance was not terribly comforting. Once I was able to understand the assignment, I wrote, in Spanish, about how my summer days had been. Suddenly, though, I realized my teacher did not speak Spanish. I would have to translate the essay back to English, word by word. This created what seemed like an immense amount of work. But in time I became more comfortable with the language, and soon I no longer had to look up every word in the little red dictionary that had become a sort of mentor to me. My parents’ strategy of forcing me to work through these language barriers on my own helped me develop a sense of independence, self confidence and a strong grasp of English.

When asked to analyze a story character in the seventh grade, I no longer worried about how tedious that task would be. I could write my thoughts and opinions just like everyone else in the class. I could learn, express ideas and communicate with others at my school. I was finally accepted into an environment that I had no idea existed just three years prior to that point in my life.

I even achieved goals that seemed impossible at the beginning of my journey. Writing for the high school newspaper and taking Advanced Placement classes have been great achievements for me, since only seven years ago I was struggling to communicate with my peers. Attending college at OSU will be the start of a new journey into a life that will never erase my roots, but will give me a better understanding of everything in the world.