On New Year’s Eve 2021 I flew to Bogotá Colombia and started my 2022 in South America. My friend, Esther, and I then traveled to Anapoima, a smaller town about two hours away from the capital city where we stayed on a Mango farm for the next two weeks. We found the job through workaway, and exchanged our labor on the farm for housing and food. The experience was absolutely once in a lifetime and I’ll never forget it!
Continue readingThis year 2021-2022, I am living and working in Madrid, Spain as an English Language Assistant and Cultural Ambassador. I live in the city center of Madrid and I work in a suburb in the south of the city, called Navalcarnero. I teach in a public bilingual secondary school, also known as high school, for ages ranging from the youngest being 11 years old to the oldest 19 years old. In Spain, high school is the American equivalent of 7th-12th grade. I was so nervous to get this placement because of how close in age I am to some of the kids. However, I am very happy and thankful to have this placement and to be at this school.
I applied at the end of January of 2021 through NALCAP, the Spanish Ministry program. This is a free program and is one of the biggest ones. It is competitive in the sense that it is first come, first serve regarding the number of available spots in the program, and getting your first choice region. There are many other English teaching programs in Spain, in all of Europe, and the world. The guidelines on how to apply are on the NALCAP website. When the application opens, you select the top three regions you want to be placed in, so you can’t choose the exact city. For example, I chose Madrid as my number one choice, knowing that my school would be anywhere in the Comunidad de Madrid, not just in the city. Then you choose what age level you want to teach, ranging from the equivalent to preschool level to high school. I chose primary school as my top choice, but got my last choice: high school.
My job as an “auxiliar de conversación”/ language assistant/ cultural ambassador, however you want to call it, is assisting in English/bilingual classes and exposing the students to a native speaker, and sharing American culture. With me, the students get a two for one: I share with them my Chinese American culture and perspective. In my classes, I’m either doing a presentation for a portion of the class of a topic the teacher tells me to do, doing speaking activities from the workbook with the students in pairs or just chatting with them to get them to practice in a “real world” example, or preparing the 4 ESO students for their Cambridge Language Exam.
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This past summer, I went to Lisbon with my boyfriend for about 10 days, where we saw museums, historical sights and experienced amazing food. Throughout our trip, I was able to not only practice my Portuguese, but also show my culture to my boyfriend and have him experience the culture I was raised in. We stayed in Lisbon for the whole trip, while also doing day trips to other cities and towns in the area. Having visited many museums, I also learned a lot about the history of Portugal, especially during and right after the Salazar dictatorship.
Continue readingSince seventh grade, I have actively been learning the Spanish language. Once I reached high school, I began to grow a love for the Spanish-speaking country, Colombia. I love their food, listening to Colombian music, their history, its landscape, telenovelas, and the overall beauty found within the country. Needless to say, for years, I’ve been wanting to travel to Colombia. Not only to gain fluency and to explore the country, but to pursue my honors thesis. The amount of times I have switched my major at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is mind-blowing, but something that has always remained constant in my field of studies is my passion for humane immigration reform in the United States.
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I originally decided to choose Spanish as my major because I wanted to learn a new language. After my first semester at UMass Amherst participating in the Spanish program I am now questioning what will my future career be, and how can I relate my Spanish major to that field. I want to be a teacher, and after reviewing the STEP program for Spanish majors at UMass, I have decided that I wouldn’t really enjoy teaching a language as much as I thought at the beginning of this semester. Now I have decided to double Major in History and Spanish completing the STEP program for History, because really my fascination with History is what led me to major in Spanish in the first place.
Continue readingIn 2015, I met my mini-me. I was fourteen, she was eight. We met at her home outside the city of San Pedro de Macorís, Dominican Republic, on an enclosed campus that houses over 200 disadvantaged children. Despite our age gap, I felt more connected to this child than to most of my friends. We met on a sunny morning after my eighth grade class arrived for a week of service. We were on a tour of the home when two little girls snuck up beside us, giggling to each other. One of them was my mini-me. She grabbed my hand and I asked her, “¿Cómo te llamas?” It was that simple question that sparked a now five-year relationship. We never left each others’ sides for the rest of the week, building our friendship through nothing more than the basic Spanish I knew and shared human experiences that didn’t require language. It was a unique combination. I was appreciative that most of our activities didn’t require us to speak. Heading into the trip, I was fearful that that only words would allow me to bond with the children, but I was quickly proven wrong. My mini-me and I walked around the terreno hand-in-hand, we played countless games of tic tac toe, and she painted my nails five different colors. Still, I asked her simple questions and she gave me simple answers. I struggled to find words and she filled in the blanks. There were times when oral communication was necessary but too difficult, and we had to resort to physical gestures.
Continue readingMy experience with the Spanish language and culture is slightly different than the majority of students I have met throughout my time at UMass. When I was 11 years old, my parents sat my brother and I down and told us that we would be leaving the town we had lived in our whole lives to move to a third world country. At this time in my life I had never even traveled outside of the United States. After many tears and much resistance, I eventually tried to come to terms with the fact that we would be expanding our worlds and moving to Costa Rica.
Continue readingLas summer I learned of the volunteer site called Cov-Education that focused on helping students with extra help during the Covid pandemic. The first student I was assigned to tutor never reached out to me. So I was a few weeks without touring. I didn’t expect to gain much but to tutor students in English and Spanish. However, a nonprofit organization president reached out to me a few weeks after finding my profile on the Cov-Education site. She asked me if I was okay with tutoring students outside of the United States because she needed a tutor for students who lived in the US but got deported back to Mexico. I agreed and ended up working with teenagers in Mexico. I started making lesson plans and had to figure out how to reach out to these kids through video chat. I learned a lot about myself, about teenagers, and teaching in general. I thought that if I put a little faith in myself everything would be okay. I learned the workload it is to lesson plan, teach, and the importance of being prepared. My experience in teaching these students has been a fantastic and eye-opening experience. I have learned the best way to aid them in learning while also trying to make it easier for them to adapt to learning through a screen. First, what took me to surprise is how ready they were to learn and their excitement every time they understood a concept.
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After graduating in December 2018 as a Spanish and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies major, I had a soild yet broad understanding of what kind of work I was interested in. I had always wanted to be an educator, but I wasn’t ready to commit to being a teacher. I loved working with kids, valued education, and saw the importance of social justice. I applied to a handful of different jobs in the non-profit and education worlds, but I wasn’t overly enthusiastic about any of the opportunities I had applied for, and I was not getting many calls back.
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Since graduating in the spring of 2015 with a Spanish major and Portuguese minor, my life has certainly taken some unusual and less-than-expected twists and turns. For me, that’s been completely fine. Even before I graduated, I never saw myself becoming the typical “careerist” type. At least not right away, and definitely not until I found myself in a fulfilling position working for a company with a suitable ladder to climb, so to speak. So what did I choose to do instead? Teach English abroad of course. This was quite fun while it lasted. Probably the most memorable two years of my life to be honest. But looking back, it wasn’t the English teaching aspect that really made these years stand out for me. It was more the fact that I had this amazing opportunity extend my foreign language education for two consecutive years. Each time in completely new, yet equally engaging and exciting international environments.