I had a great childhood. Full of great memories, with great family and friends that surrounded me. I was born in Argentina, and my life completely changed when we came to the USA. My dad moved us for a better life. We moved to California, I was 9 years old. I still remember things about that day.
My dad wanted to show us around, he took us a supermarket. We were mesmerized! I had never seen a supermarket, he also wanted to show us how cool it was that you could get water from a machine....he did not know that you needed to have your own bottle to fill up, he was so excited that he put the money into the machine, and water started to pour everywhere! It's so funny to think back to that. He bought me a barbie, I think it must have been about 6 dollars, and that was such a big deal for me. My sister got a ball and my brother got a baseball mitt and a baseball. That's the first memory I have of getting something that meant so much.
I remember the first person I met, her name was Veronica. She was my first friend in the USA. I remember she asked me how old I was, I knew what she asked me, but I responded with "I have 9 years" in my broken English, that was about all that my dad was able to teach us before we left Argentina.
My parents put us in school right away, they didn't want us to be in the ESL program, so I went straight into a classroom without knowing the language. I only had an ESL teacher that would come in to help me for 1 hour out of the day, to make sure I knew what I was supposed to be doing. I learned English in 6 months.
