Pathway to Mexico - Fourth Grade

Have you ever looked back on your life and realized that the moments and experiences you never considered to be important were, in fact, the very events that have come to define your present? The small and simple details of life are suddenly significant when you take the time to glance into your past. It is then that you can finally see how each moment and experience not only shaped who you are, but also the path upon which you are still walking. I cannot put a finger on the exact moment I looked back and realized how my path had led me to Mexico; what I can do, however, is remember the moments that created that path.

The life of a fourth grader who happens to have twin sisters as teachers can never be a dull one. Fourth grade was a year in which I published my own books, worked as a newspaper journalist, discovered how water balloons are like division, and filled my classroom with a giant bubble filled with paper mâché animals. Fourth grade was amazing! Knowing where I am now, however, something much more exciting happened to me in fourth grade: I met Manuela.

I don't really remember her name, but Manuela will suffice for the purposes of my story. In reality, the brief nature of Manuela's presence in my fourth grade class led me to almost forget this small experience that I now remember as a defining moment in my life. One day I had no idea of her existence, the next day she was our new classmate, having arrived recently from another country and knowing very little English. She did not stay the whole year and I never learned what happened to her, but while she was in our class I tried to befriend her.  And then it happened, that moment I can still see in my mind like it happened yesterday: a fellow classmate came to me with a book full of drawings accompanied by Spanish vocabulary and told me that I should have it because I was so close to Manuela. Maybe it could help me to help her.

I didn't know what to do with it. Me? Learn Spanish? I still remember looking at the first page with a drawing of a house and what seemed like hundreds of different objects and people and feeling a mixture of incredulity at the thought that a ten-year-old could learn Spanish by looking at drawings, and an inner happiness knowing that someone thought that I was in a position to help Manuela by learning her language. I remember trying to memorize the vocabulary and use it with Manuela, but she was gone before I put my new words to much use. However, while I quickly lost my meager supply of Spanish vocabulary, I never forgot Manuela and the idea that someone believed I had the ability to learn Spanish and use that knowledge to help someone else.