First-place essays are posted below. Find the names of all winners and honorable mentions to the right.
Juan Baires, Elementary Division, Grade 4
An obstacle in my life was moving from El Salvador to The United States when I was eight years old. In El Salvador the people were poor, so my mother worked all the time to pay for our education. She didn’t want to pay so much for our school, so we moved to the United States. Now she doesn’t work all the time, but she still has two jobs.
When I came here I was sad because I missed my friends from El Salvador. When I got to my new school I tried to forget about what happened, but I couldn’t stop thinking about El Salvador. When it was recess time I didn’t play with anyone because it reminded me of my friends. When My teacher gave me homework I didn’t understand even when she explained it to me, but I still tried to do my homework everyday.
One day I told my mom about my problems at school and I started crying. Each day at recess I still sat on the bench alone, because my only friend wanted to play with other people. One day I was sitting on the bench and two boys were saying bad words. A teacher came over and they blamed it on me. I didn’t understand and I got in trouble because I didn’t know how to say what happened. From that day on I didn’t play at recess. I just stayed in studying English until I learned.
I feel stronger because I learned English. Now I can defend myself, I understand homework, and I also made new friends. I even help my older brother and younger sisters with their homework and I also teach them new words. When I learned English I learned how to read, write, and participate when the teacher asks a question.
In the fourth grade I thought I wasn’t going to have any friends, but the first day I found ten friends. I was proud to have so many friends. Some of them spoke English and some of them spoke Spanish like me! I told my friends what happened last year and they said they would play with me at recess.
My fourth grade teacher has a friend who taught us some words in Chinese. I think her friend should be an ESL teacher. If she taught at Truesdell I would want to go and learn how to speak Chinese. If I could do that I would know three languages. If I knew Chinese and a new student came to Truesdell from China, I would be their friend. I would make sure that nothing that happened to me would ever happen to them.
A note about Juan’s piece. We had to cut it
down from about 1,000 words. When I gave him the assignment he went
home and wrote nine pages in his journal. I thought that cutting it
down to under 300 words would cut a lot out of his story. His essay is
about 450 words. Sincerely, Ms. Pearce-Bristol (Juan’s
teacher)
Julio Montiel, Junior High, Grade 9
On August 7th, a Monday evening, our brotherly routine of playing video games begins. This time it is Zelda, the hero who collects objects for a journey to battle the big monster. Fidel, my younger brother, from the waist up, is chubby, a regular kid who loves video games. But his legs stick out from under his shorts like shriveled branches choked off from water.
“Are you hungry?” I ask. “What do you want? Pizza?” Besides making food, I changed Fidel’s clothes, diapers, and gave him bathes. Cutting the pizza into slices, I then cut Fidel’s into smaller bite sized pieces.
Soon mom came home. Flopping on the bed next to us, she let the day of house cleaning go. She soon fell asleep; my younger brother followed. With Fidel’s snoring, mom woke up to give him his medicine. He returned to snoring, which helped me fall asleep. In-out, in-out, in-out…then nothing. Until words I can never erase came screaming from my mother. Words that continue to echo and haunt me. “Fidel is dead!”
Both legs were cold and no breath came from his mouth. All being in one bed, in our one room apartment, we noticed even the slightest change. His head was sideways, eyes closed. Peaceful. The wheelchair was still folded up by the door. I cried.
Unfortunately, there was not a heart of Zelda to restore his health from his battle with Myelomeningocele Spina Bifida. He was one month away from his eighth “shunting” surgery to relieve the Hydrocephalus, a fluid in his brain. He didn’t tell us his head hurt this time.
You don’t know where you’re going, unless you know where you’ve been. I can’t erase the past. That would be like erasing my brother. At first I was angry and mad, maybe guilty, wishing it were I. I treated others poorly, didn’t want to talk, feeling myself change with the intents of evil. I wanted to give up, failing in school, until on a Black Diamond slope at White Tail with the Burton Chill program. I still want to put my hood over my face and hide, but this time strapped to bindings on a snowboard patterned with clouds, I felt different. This time I didn’t give up. My confidence wasn’t broken. Going through the mogul park, I felt like Mario of the video games with the Super Leaf, free, off the ground. But we always land.
My journey isn’t over yet, the pain is still there, but for at
least a few hours a week snowboarding I felt like it was okay to be
happy, okay to feel that I was allowed to live instead of or without my
brother. Okay to know that I could snowboard with perfectly healthy
legs and not feel guilty. I’m not proud of this story, it’s
not happy. But I draw on my brother’s courage not to give up.
What is my future? I don’t know where I’m going really, but
at least I know where I’ve been.
