A young woman gives birth to a child in a country where she has little opportunity to meet her child’s needs. Lacking the support of the child’s father, the young woman leaves her six-year-old in the care of her parents and emigrates to the US. Years later, the child’s mother makes arrangements for her to join her in the US. The teen is pressured to leave by those she loves, for they believe it is best that she be reunited with her mother and take advantage of the opportunities that life in the US have to offer. So with no advance notice, the teenager must say goodbye to her grandparents to whom she is deeply attached, board a bus with a distant cousin whom she has met only once, and begin the long journey to the US. This is the story of the emotional impact of that event on the child’s life.
Pre-reading:
- Adults often make choices for their children. This is especially true when they are babies and cannot choose by themselves.
- Think about different stages of your life. Some ideas may be: Infancy, young preschooler, young school-age child, teenager….
- What choices have other people made for you at different stages of your life? Do you think they made good choices for you?
- Have you ever made a choice for someone else? Who? When? How did that work out?
Saying goodbye to people we love is very difficult. When we leave a place and say goodbye, we don’t usually think that we are ever returning. Have you ever said goodbye to someone knowing that you would not ever see the person again? Who did you say goodbye to? How old were you? Where were you? How did you feel?
Post-reading:
- Imagine you are the writer of this story. Write a letter to your grandmother. You may want to tell her about your journey, about how you miss her, about your new life with your mother.
- Towards the end of the story, the writer says she felt like she was in a movie scene.”I felt as if I was living a scene of a movie or soap opera.” What do you imagine is in the scene? Draw this scene on a blank sheet of paper.
- The final line of this story tells us that the writer’s heart was “beating only because it had to”. What do you think the writer means by that? Did you ever have an experience where your body was working on its own, without your mind, heart or spirit? Share this experience with a classmate or in your group.