My Fake Apology

I should really learn never to make promises. Especially not promises about my writing.

Remember that short story I said I was writing?

Yeah, still not done.

Remember that blog post I said was imminent?

Well, it's written.

...in my head.

That counts, right?

See, in my defense, I have been doing a lot of writing for school. You know, being a journalism major and all that.

I just finished two really great articles today about the experiences of some intercultural students, and I realize that I shouldn't say they're great because it's my own writing, but I feel like I can say they're great because it's my own writing... anyway, I want you all to be able to read them!

And then you'll know that I actually am still writing!

I'm writing this post last so that the two articles will be listed directly below it (look at me, besting technology) and I sincerely hope that you all read them! They're about some very interesting people that I feel very lucky to have had the privilege to meet and talk to, even if the articles skimmed more of a general surface than a personality piece.

Now, I would like to make a promise.

I promise you that I will be posting two articles soon.

Very soon.

I bet if you scroll down they're already there.

(Best promise ever.)

A Place of Her Own

                Some people find a new hobby to break up the monotony of their work. Andrea Guevara decided to find a new country.  At the age of 31, after years of working as a corporate lawyer in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, she needed a change of pace: something that didn’t involve her company, her government, or the crime rate of Caracas.

                When Andrea got on a plane for Colorado last spring, the President of Venezuela was still Hugo Chavéz. Having risen to power democratically in 1998, he was doing everything he could to alter Venezuelan laws and allow himself to stay in power forever, according to Simon Rimero of the New York Times. In his obituary of Chavéz, Rimero wrote about the former President’s dreams of becoming a caudillo. Chavéz even penned a new constitution after his inauguration in 1999 that stated the presidency would be decided by election for six-year terms, and presidents could be re-elected for successive terms – with no end date in mind.¹  The effects of this desire did not go unfelt by the Venezuelan people. “I’m not glad about all the things that he suffered, because he suffered from cancer. But I feel a relief at some point when I find out that this terrible man was dying,” Andrea said. Elections held following Chavéz’s death in March, 2013 appointed a new President within two weeks. Already out of the country at this point, Andrea did not have a chance to participate in the vote. “I was angry about it, because that was not the right procedure to follow… it was my first election that I couldn’t vote since I turned 18, and I vote every single time,” Andrea said.

                The political turmoil was not the only reason that Andrea wanted to leave Venezuela behind. Her job as a lawyer for Pepsi-Cola was becoming dull, and she felt the need to make a change. “I felt tired, I was sick about everything. I was sick about traffic, I was sick about my work, I was sick about everything. The whole environment. And I felt like I needed to do something more for me and for my career, because I love what I do. So I decided to come here and improve my English because I know that it will be a big issue, an obstacle, to get admission into any program,” she said. Though in the process of earning the equivalent of a master’s degree in her home country, Andrea packed up for Colorado in the hopes that, once here, she could find a master’s program that would help her perfect her legal English and better her chances of finding a job with an American company. “I’m just looking for quality of life, and I don’t have that in my country, unfortunately,” she said. While perfectly qualified to be a lawyer in Venezuela, Andrea is hoping to learn legal English so that she can continue to do what she loves while also enjoying that quality of life offered by the States. “I’m afraid I’ll send someone an opinion or answer some email and my English is not good enough and they will say ‘Oh, this person is helping me with this issue but she doesn’t understand English, how can I trust [her]. I think that English is a tool that is really helpful and today in the corporate world you have to learn another language,” she said.

                By moving to Colorado, not only did Andrea better her chances of getting into an English-speaking master’s program, but she also found a different pace of life that suited her much better than the high-strung paranoia of Caracas. “Colorado is so friendly. It’s peaceful, and for me, that’s the way it makes me feel. Safe and peaceful. I don’t get frustrated about things that used to make me [angry], and I really appreciate it,” she said. Many people who know the name of Venezuela’s capital may not know its nickname: “The world’s murder capital.”² In 2012, OSAC reported 100 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in the Miranda state, an area that includes much of metropolitan Caracas. “I like to go to the movies, and [not] pay attention to if I’m smoking a cigarette and I have my window down. I couldn’t do that in my home country,” Andrea said. Colorado’s slower pace and safer environment are the flip side of Venezuela’s coin. “[I can] walk in the street, and take out my dog, and do silly things that aren’t silly: they’re important things,” she said.

                The transition to living in the States wasn’t too tough for Andrea to handle. When her parents got divorced, her father moved to New York and her mother moved to Mexico with her new husband. She got her fair share of traveling visiting the two of them, as well as her brother and sister who both moved to Spain. No stranger to new places, the choice to move to Colorado was one based on personal need. “The program that I wanted to apply [to] is here, is at DU. So I came here for that reason. Second, because my [family] is all around the world and I just want to find a place for me, in the middle,” she said.

¹ Information on the 1999 Constitution found at www.venezuela-us.org/politics (Website for the Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela).

² Reported by Caitlin Dewey for The Washington Post, article titled State Dept. report for Caracas personnel: Crime level ‘critical’.

The Quiet Side of the Sea

When Vanilo Antonio walks out the door in the morning, it’s only what he hears that reminds him of where he is: in America. A native of Luanda, Angola, he has spoken English for years, but still finds himself doing a mental double-take when the people going to and from class with him aren’t speaking in Portuguese. “You keep expecting people to actually speak your native language, [so] from time to time you stop from the middle of the street and go ‘Where am I? What happened?’” Vanilo said.

                The 18 year-old learned to speak English when he was only six, listening to his older brother when he came back to Angola for visits from his new home in Texas. Though he has spoken the language for longer than Alvaro Tendula, a 20 year-old Angolan who began learning English in primary school around eight years ago, he still finds it strange to be completely surrounded by it. “[We have] about 18 languages… People don’t just speak in Portuguese, even on the street,” Vanilo said. A.T. reported a similar experience of not always knowing where he was when he walked out the door, and being thrown off by only hearing one language around him; especially when that language isn’t Portuguese. After becoming a Portuguese colony in 1575¹, the language of Angola was switched from the varieties of tribal languages that separated the country to one introduced language that unified it. That did not eliminate the use of these tribal languages, though, and overheard speech is much more diverse on the streets of Luanda than in Colorado. “While you’re walking around you might hear, I don’t know, maybe two to three different languages depending on where you’re at,” Vanilo said.

                Not only are none of the people on the streets of Colorado speaking Portuguese, there are also a significantly smaller number of them than on the streets of Luanda. “It’s always loud there. I keep expecting to get out of the house and hear a lot of noise; so traffic, people talking really loudly, the ladies selling on the street,” Vanilo said. He got used to always listening to his music at full volume just so he could hear it over the sounds of Luanda. “I still do it, even… before I go out the house I put my earphones on and I put the music on the highest volume I’ve got. [Here] when I leave I only hear music, but back home it was like, I leave my house, I put my foot out the door, [and] I can still hear what’s happening outside. [The quiet is] my reminder that I’m not back home,” he said.  The crowds that stay on the sidewalks in the States take to the streets in Angola and biking and walking is common, as cars are less than practical during Luanda’s rush hour. The morning work traffic often gets so bad that people even leave their cars and walk to work in order to be on time, according to A.T. “You see people just leave their cars right there in the middle of the road, and they call somebody from their house to go and pick up the car later after they leave. You just see an army of people in suits going out on the streets,” Vanilo said. Even the idle hours in Luanda are loud compared Colorado, and unless one is listening between the hours of 3 and 5 in the morning, there is no quiet to be heard.

                Other than the sound shock, the culture in America didn’t take much getting used to for either A.T. or Vanilo. Instead, they found issue with a non-human element of the state: the climate. The air in Angola is much wetter, and the temperature never drops below a comfortable warmth except during the rainy season. When they first got to Colorado, A.T. and Vanilo would play basketball outside, but found the game much more difficult than it was back home. “It was hard to breathe. You would really feel like your throat was completely dried out because of the altitude, and we still weren’t pretty used to drinking water all the time. We would only be able to play for tops twenty minutes,” Vanilo said. Besides being a much drier climate, Colorado also has a fair amount of altitude that is foreign to those from Angola. The capital is on the coast, putting the boys’ home roughly a mile below their current location. The altitude adjustment is one that is common for almost all newcomers to Colorado, whether from Angola, Africa, or Virginia, USA.

                Another struggle that Vanilo and A.T. share with many other college students is the distance from their family. Unlike American students, though, they are separated from their loved ones by an ocean, not just a long drive. Family life in Angola is also much more tightly knit than in America, with weekends commonly being spent with visits to or from extended family. “We would always get together... [spend] the day together, if possible spend the whole weekend, if not just one day, maybe Saturday or Sunday. We would be pretty close, always together if possible,” Vanilo said.

                Despite the distance, they still find a way to stay connected with their families. “You miss them all the time. You’re always trying to call them, whenever possible of course. You’re always trying to keep in touch, to know if something’s happening, if everything’s good. I actually talked to my father this morning,” Vanilo said. International cell phone plans, Skype calls, and internet communication make it easier to keep in touch across the Atlantic.

                Moving always presents obstacles that require adjustment, no matter where a person is coming from or what their final destination is. The similarities of culture between Angola and Colorado certainly made it easier on both A.T. and Vanilo, and the amenities of modern technology are helping to ease the distance of the move.  Like many other college students, they are experiencing the degrees of separation that come from being apart from family and friends, with two additional hefty obstacles: the English language and the Atlantic Ocean.

¹ Historical information from www.angola.org