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Ready to Cash In About $165 for eight hours of work is not bad, I think to myself as I'm driving home, the whiff of onion soup and crème brûlée still in my clothes. Then again, it's Saturday night and I'm not relaxing and kicking back drinks with my friends. No. I'm working because mamá needs help with the bills, and I have some of my own to pay. A year ago -- in a similar situation -- I would have wallowed in self-pity. I have a friend whose parents bought him a $21,000 Volkswagen for graduating from high school. He's not worrying about money. He's hanging out with his girlfriend at the house he shares with friends near his out-of-state college. Meanwhile, I'm driving the used car I paid for myself to the house where I live with mamá, her boyfriend, an uncle, an aunt and her husband and one of my cousins. I have to be quiet when I step in the dark house so I don't wake them up. Life. It's so unfair. I came to the United States in 2000 as a 15-year-old boy eager to live the life of an American teenager. But money was scarce, and my single mother had to pay lumps of cash to an immigration lawyer who helped us through the process to stay here legally. I didn't buy a guitar or a skateboard when I started making money at my first job as a bus boy. Most of the money was spent helping mamá send money to Colombia and paying the rent and the lawyer. When school let out that year, I spent the summer wishing I could go play in the pool like everyone else. But the days I wasn't busing tables I was helping mamá -- once a high-ranking government prosecutor in Bogotá -- at her housekeeping job. I vacuumed floors, I sprayed windows with Windex, I polished wood tables. We left the apartment at 7 a.m. and got home at 8 p.m. every day. I didn't make it out in the sun and into the pool. By the following year, we had resolved our immigration status and had saved enough money for my only sibling, my older sister, to move to the United States. We shared a two-bedroom apartment with a friend. Mamá, my sister and I lived out of the apartment's second bedroom. Space was tight. The floor squeaked. I worked different jobs -- I was a cashier, I was a staple-pusher, I was a horse walker, I was a landscaper -- to help at home and buy clothes to look cool in school. I'm 22 now and things are different. Before leaving work tonight, the restaurant's dishwasher asks me to help him fill out a W-4 and an employment verification form. He's a 19-year-old from Mexico who doesn't understand English. His hands are white and wrinkly from washing dishes, pots and pans all night. It seems his name was written with a typewriter onto the Social Security card he pulls out of his pocket, and that his picture was cut with scissors and glued onto his Work Authorization Card. This man's experiences flash before me. How much did he have to work to get here? How much did he have to pay for these documents? How many hours a week does he have to work now? My eyes swell up. I've been so foolish to linger and toil in how difficult things have been. I even used to hold antipathy for friends I thought had things easy, and I couldn't see how life has been kind to me. I was too stuck on my problems. Unlike this 19-year-old, I didn't have to smuggle myself into the United States. I finished high school. I went to college. I studied in France. I speak three languages. I'm damn lucky. What I want to focus on is other people. I've learned I want to be a journalist so I can help people. I have been much more fortunate than I have appreciated. I want to make a difference -- and I can make a difference -- because I've had many opportunities others haven't. When I get home tonight, I'm going to read the newspaper and go to bed. Tomorrow, I will do homework and play the guitar. On Monday, I'll commute to class. And when I graduate in May next year, I'll have the world before me. |
