Bond 

As I walk into the classroom, I hear one of the students say, “I can tell by his looks this kid going to be a failure.” When you first come to a new country where you do not understand the native language that the people speak there your life can be very hard and challenging at first, for instance, there can be a big language barrier which makes you inferior to others, people belittle you because you do not understand them, and people can take advantage of you. 

I was born in a little village on an Island which could sink called the “Dominican Republic” located in the Caribbean in the Atlantic Ocean. When it comes to the people there, they know each other as if they’re related by blood, the food there is to me by far the best food in the entire western hemisphere. The most crucial part about the little village where I was born is the fact that the families were always together to the point where there was a sense of enmeshment between each other, families had the strongest bond you could ever see people have, always being together throughout the worst storms they could face, supporting each other and always having each other backs, and throughout the happiest times in their whole lives.

The society there might seem normal but behind every wide smile there hides a psychopath filled with anger and ambition to seek power. People like to pretend, they hide how they feel whether to please others or to not stand out to others, but for us it is a completely different story. Ever since we were born, we are set on a path filled with treachery, violence, and betrayal. Ever since I was born my parents have always wanted me to have a better future. My mom, a wonderful teacher who has devoted herself to making everyone she meets become a better person. My dad, one of the most hard-working men who always puts family above everything else. I remember my last year in Santo Domingo, I was in 4th grade and my mother was the teacher for one of my classes. She one day told me “Son we are going to America tomorrow”. Those words she told me made me want to cry because just like myself everyone in Ecuador wants to go to the United States. “The land of the free” is what some might describe it or even “the land of opportunities”. The United States to people living outside, is like heaven, the best place you could possibly live. 

We ended up moving here to the United States the following weekend and decided to live in the Bronx for years to come. When we first got here my mom put me in a school which only taught in English so that I could better adapt to society and start to learn English, when I entered a classroom for the first time here in the United States I was met with cold stares and people looking at me in disgust, the teacher with a bad demeanor told me “Go sit in the back of the classroom” which I was very confused because I didn’t understand English whatsoever, but a girl in the back waved at me and told me to sit next to her in the far back, to my surprise she spoke Spanish which made me very happy since she could help me understand what was going on and translate for me. We started talking to each other in Spanish since that’s the only language that I spoke, telling each other things like: “Cual es tu nombre” meaning what is your name, and “De donde eres” trying to get to know each other better, but then another classmate called out in an aggressive tone and said “Be quiet new kid in this school we only speak English” which I replied with the only word I knew in English “Sorry”. To my surprise, for the first time in my life, I felt like speaking Spanish was wrong which made me not speak in Spanish at all for the years to come, and for the next couple of weeks I was tormented by the constant bullying and discrimination all the students had towards me because I could not properly speak and pronounce English, I also had a hard time scoring good grades because I could not accurately understand the things the teachers taught and the quizzes they gave, but at the end of the day, I knew deep down in my heart that I shouldn’t let anything that was going affect me and prevent me from being successful in life and moving on. 

To this day I am thankful to my family for bringing me here to the United States a place where the impossible can become possible through hard work, and I am also thankful to them for always believing in me and hoping for the best for me, and I promise to always look forward and that no matter how hard life gets I will always push pass my problems and make you proud mom and dad.