Personal Narrative: Moving To America

When I was assigned to write a paper about a moment, event, or even person, in my life that altered its course forever, ideas started to instantly pop into my head. The divorce of my parents, graduating high school, moving away and going to college; the choices were abundant. However, after giving it some further thought I realized that all of these other impactful moments in my life were in some way connected to, and to a certain extent even caused by, when I moved to America from Guatemala.
The year was 2005, I was 8 years old, and I had just started my fourth month of third grade. I hadn’t seen my father in a couple of months and, though I constantly asked my mother, I couldn’t for the life of me remember where it was that he had gone to. The only thing that I remember of what my mother said to me when I asked her his whereabouts was that it was, “un lugar muy diferente” (this translates into, “a very different place.”) One day she told me that I was finally going to get to see my father again and I got very excited. There was one catch though, he was not coming back, it was instead we who had to move to where he

When you started to struggle as the level of toughness began to increase, you would simply decide drop out of school and start working. Even at the young age of 8 I had many friends who, having decided that school just wasn’t for them, had dropped out of school and began joining their parents to work. When this would happen all the teachers would do was wish them the best of luck. What is worse is that most of the time, the parents never having completed school themselves, did not see it as necessary to force them to go back. They would happily accept the extra help the child could offer in the form of a couple extra quetzals (the currency of Guatemala) to be able to put more food on the table. Why couldn’t we do this in