A New World

Imagine entering a place where your eyes are open but you cannot see, your ears are hearing but you cannot understand and your lips are moving but you cannot speak. That’s how I felt when I first entered  high school in America. Everything I faced was new - moving from class to class, bells ringing , standing in the line for lunch . I felt like I was dreaming. I also felt like it was going too fast, especially the teaching and the talking, the walking in the hallway, watching them staring at me and then laughing loudly .

In my freshman year I was placed in ESL ( English as a Second Language) classes. It was Monday morning during second period. As ESL students we were told to make a conversation with a native English speaker to practice our English pronunciation. One of the African-American students picked me to talk to.

   "Hi!” I said, “My name is Heri, what is your name?"

   “My name is Abigail,” she said.

   “How old are you?” she asked.

   “I am fine,” I answered.

   “No! I asked, how old are you?” she said loudly.

I heard, “How are you?” because she was speaking very quickly. Then she said, “I mean your age, are you fourteen, fifteen or sixteen?” After that i understood she was asking my age.

“I am fifteen” I said. But she heard “ I am fifty.” When I looked at her face she looked so surprised. When I saw her surprised face i knew she heard me wrong, so I took a pen and piece of paper and wrote 15 so that she understood, "I am fifteen."

The conversation was over. After that day i decided to never speak with anyone except teachers. I acted reserved and ,even if I understood what someone was telling me, I pretended that I did not understand because I did not want to be misunderstood due to my poor pronunciation.

I hated school but as days went by I started to realize that there was no reason for me to hate school. Therefore, I should be focusing on school and stop letting the language issue hold me back. I decided get to know my ESL teacher because I knew that was the best way for me to improve and to conquer the language problems  that I was facing. I began to feel that she was the light of my dark high school path. She recommended many after-school programs and activities for me so that I could improve my English . There was a program called “The Youth” that I joined, we met every Friday after school. The program focused on the problems teenagers faced in American high school.

I met different kinds of people in those programs and everyone had their own problems, and that’s when my eyes started to see things clearly, and begin to understand that as human beings we’re imperfect and we all have problems in our lives. What I needed was just to accept myself and accept any challenge I faced. And in my sophomore year I entered a place where my eyes were open and I could see, my ears were hearing and I could understand and my lips were moving and I could speak.