Rough Draft

We were all fidgeting. It was our last day of kindergarten and we all wanted to start our summer. The clock read 1:55 P.M. Only five more minutes. I looked around the room and saw all the familiar faces I was friends with. Ashley, my neighbor and best friend of all time. She had an amazing birthday party planned in late June. Peter, he was so cute, I had admired him from afar all year and was hoping to get a chance to talk to him at Ashley’s party. Then there was Ms.Geiger, our teacher. She was tall for a woman and always walked with a sort of elegance you only see on the runway. She was pulling back strands of her dirty blonde hair that somehow always looked beautiful while sniffling. She was sad we were leaving and was touched by the presents we all had brought her. I was going to miss all of this, the playtime, the nap time, and the special lunchroom for us younger kids. Yet a whole new life was waiting for me, a life of a big kid, a 1st grader, a 7 year old. In first grade we would be allowed to enter the big fields outside with the tall monkey bars during recess. Summer was the perfect time to practice my skills at the local parks and it was only 1 minute away. The bell rang just then and I ran out as quickly as I could and jumped on my mom who was always waiting outside.
“I have great news honey! Get strapped in the back seat so I can tell you all about it!” I hopped in, buckled up and waited for her to continue. As I waited for her to continue I looked at her face. She was so beautiful. She had creases on the side of her eyes that to me represented experience and wisdom. Her hair was cut short at her shoulders dyed a dark red color. Her red hair was always my favorite; it reminded me of my own Hispanic Little Mermaid Princess. She was smiling from ear to ear, one of her best characteristics.
“I bought you a ticket to go see your family in Colombia for the whole summer!”
I was shocked. What was this? She had gone from The Little Mermaid to Ursula herself. A traitor and backstabber. My summer was ruined and all she did was grin. I was to leave the day after tomorrow for three full months to meet this group of strangers I was to call family.
Two days and a short flight later I was getting off the plane in Cali, Colombia and was to greet the people that were to torture me for the next three months. I was getting my last bag when I saw an old woman holding a sign that read my name. I may have only been six at the time but I could at least read my name. I approached her slowly. Her face was worn, as if she had had a hard life; she seemed to have a permanent hunch and was dressed in the tackiest floral print dress I had ever laid my eyes on. She recognized me and lunged at me with her arms wide open. I hugged her back softly thinking to myself this must be grandma. After I escaped her death grip I got my grandfather, my aunt Patricia, my uncle Chacho, my cousin Christian and my cousin Federico introduced to me. They all just stared for awhile and began to ask how I had been doing. I would only respond good over and over again to be polite, but really did these people believe that this is how I wanted to spend my summer?
To get to the house we all rode in a van that reminded me a lot of the private bus that takes me to school. I had a loud family was the first thing I learned in Colombia. Miami has always been known for having loud people but my family was as loud as the NASA shuttles taking off into space. They all talked over each other and no one listened to what the other was saying. It was all getting to be too much when we finally arrived at the house. It was a bland, beat up white house. I had heard wonders from my mother for so many years and I was standing staring at a house that looked a lot like the portables in the back of my school. There was a garden area out front, gardens always meant bugs and bugs and I never got along. There was a gate to get in the driveway, then a gate over the door and then 5 locks on the door before you were allowed entrance. I felt as if I was going into a top secret threshold. The inside was the complete opposite, it was radiant. The antiques caught my eyes right away; the record player in the corner, the box TV set and the sparkling chandelier hanging above. It all had a royal feel to it. I must have shown the awe on my face for my cousins began to laugh when my jaw dropped to the floor.
“Didn’t expect this huh?” my older cousin Federico asked with a grin on his face. He was going to be a tall kid, he was almost his father’s height, or should I say my uncle’s height. When was I ever going to get used to this “family?” Federico had curly black hair like me and a slim figure for a boy of 12. Christian was kind of dorky; he was chubbier around the waist area and stuttered a bit too much for me to stand. He was one year older than me, earlier on the van ride here I had seen him playing with an ant, it truly made me question what was wrong with him.
The next couple of days flew by as I settled in. I was sleeping in my grandmother’s room for the first 2 nights until I shyly confessed to my aunt that my grandmother’s dragon like snores did not let me sleep at night and was gladly allowed to sleep in Christian’s room for the remainder of my stay. The first week I watched a lot of TV in Spanish, slept and ate. Once I was tired of that I began to play with my cousin Christian. He showed me how he played soccer outside in the driveway area and how the goal was to hit either the gate leading to the street or the garage door on the opposite end. We would play one on one and I would of course always lose. The game quickly became our favorite past time as we began a tournament to see who would win the most games by the end of the summer. I later also came to find that the ants he played with were super entertaining in a house with no toys. We would get a couple together and race them or put them on the wall and see if we could follow them. Eventually they would escape in any crook or cranny and leave our sight.
The poverty level struck me as incomprehensible. Everyday my aunt donated a plate of food to the family that slept on the sidewalk across our house. If we got lucky the mother would let us play with her daughter while she helped my aunt clean around the house. The poverty level was definitely higher than what I was used to back home and at the time I never realized that it was caused by the Guerilla warfare going on all over Colombia.
Although the neighborhood looked old, the people seemed worn, and the “fun” activities I would love to do were too expensive for my family to afford, I was having the time of my life by the end of that summer. Christian and I became extremely close and my aunt became a second mother to me. Everyone was always so happy to accommodate the little American girl. My Spanish skills sharpened while I was there and began when the day came for me to leave I bawled like a baby in my aunt’s arms. My mother had definitely given me a superior summer than I had ever thought possible. My life had changed permanently; my eyes were opened to another world, another culture. I learned the value of family and the substantial things that awaited me outside of Miami. That September I entered the first grade with stories that surpassed any pool party my friends had attended. I was already anxious for the next summer to come and rush back to Colombia to continue getting to know my family.