Do you know what it’s like to be new in a different country? Having to leave all your family behind and start all over. I’m sure you don’t, but I do. Family was everything I had when I was a small child, and having to give that up was not easy. It was even harder for my parents. I was separated from my father when I was four years old so that he could come to the US and start his life, so that he could bring my mom and me later. At seven years old was when I first saw my father in 3 years; that day was the day I got to the US.
Barely being here a month, I refused to eat anything. I wanted to go back to my home, Cuba. My mother was worried; she was loosing weight by worrying about me. It had been 3 months, and I had lost over 15 pounds. I was making my parents life impossible and to top it off, I didn’t want to go to school. I knew no English and people were racist and they would separate me from their groups because I didn’t know English.
Everyone here was different. The teaching was different, and English was hard to learn. I felt segregated by going to ESOL classes. I would go home and cry every night, and that would break my mom’s heart. I was in my first school for about a week and then I kept complaining to my mom and she took me out. I ended up in a school that was mostly bilingual and they would use your lunchtime for ESOL so that you didn’t feel separated from the students in the classes. For once, I felt accepted in a school and everything seemed to be going good for me in school and at home.
Months later, a horrible tragedy happened in our family. My uncle, my mom’s brother, had been in a terrible motorcycle accident. He suffered from severe cerebral hemorrhage, and died within a few days. We were all affected. It was a heartbreaking experience and although I was too young to understand, it did affect me. My mother wept and was depressed for over a year, nothing we did helped. It was hard to see my own mom, the woman who so lovingly and caringly was always behind me and strong for me, had been broken down into pieces that could not be put back.
Even though, my first years in the United States took some getting used to, it was all worth it in the end. Our family passed through a stage where everything was just going bad, but since we stayed together, we got through it. I’m happy that I was given the opportunity to come to a new country and have a different lifestyle. The hardships we faced coming here to the United States only made our bond as a family even stronger because we had to depend on each other.