Citizenship Day 09-04-2008

Last Thursday, after almost 20 years of living in the United States, I became a citizen.

I was really concerned that it wouldn't happened as we needed to travel to Gulfport, MS to the United States District Court Southern District of Mississippi. If you remember, Hurricane Gustav made landfall somewhere in Louisiana and residents in both states were asked to evacuate. Our hotel, Hard Rock Hotel in Biloxi, was closed and it had just re-opened.... just in time for us to get a good night sleep.

My parents, sister, and I moved to the United States in October 1988. I was 10, had just finish the 4th grade, and spoke no English. We lived in North Miami Beach for about 6 months and I attended Hibiscus Elementary School - 5th grade with Mr. Brown. He was very kind to me as we couldn't communicate with each other except for numbers. I studied Math in 5th grade and nothing else. I learned English that year - not sure how - but I think it was mostly from watching TV and a reason as to why my English grammar is bad... especially when it comes to past-tense, sentence structure, etc. lol!

After 5th grade, we moved to Orlando, FL were I attended 3 different middle schools as I was getting shuffle around between different schools in the area that thought ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes. I had many wonderful teachers and my 8th grade math teacher recommended a magnet program for high school. I got the application and somehow got accepted to the program at Edgewater High School - Engineering Science & Technology (EST).

The program had around 100 students and they were/are very talented people. During my freshman year of high school, I felt out of place....from lack of education, talent, status, etc. School had not even started and I was behind already in Math. We were required to take Calculus class our Senior year and to make it I had to take 6 years of Math in 4 years. Lots of summer school! Our family didn't own a computer and I needed to be able to write programs for it (Basic and Pascal programming). And there was much more ups and downs.....at the end of high school... my exposure to a good school & program, and great friends (incl my husband now!) created many opportunities and I'll always be grateful for the friends, teachers, and others who were there for me during those times.

In my Senior year of high school, as everyone was planning for the future and sending college applications and receiving acceptance letters, I was worried of my immigration status. I got accepted and decided to attend the University of Florida with my best friend Kim - we got a dorm room together, put a deposit down, and we started to make plans - all of these plans came to an end when the college did not consider me a resident of the state. This meant that tuition cost was out-of-state (a lot higher than in-state tuition!), I couldn't apply for government loans, and pretty much it meant that I couldn't afford to go to school at UF or at another state university. I was so disappointed and heart-broken. Luckily, in my last semester of high school, I had attended a class that was taught by our local community college, Valencia Community College, and they offered a tuition scholarship for 2 years of school. So, I was no longer worried about tuition cost. Now, it was only books and other accidentals. I started school at Valencia in Aug 1996 and started working part-time at our local theme park, Universal Studios in October of that year.

In 1998, I graduated from Valencia and my immigration status was different so I was able to transfer to the University of Central Florida. I still was unable to apply for government loans or any other type of loans offered by the school, so I started to work full-time for Universal while at the same time attending school full-time. Universal covered 75% of the tuition cost of two classes per semester so I was responsible for books & the remainder of the tuition cost. So call me crazy...but for the next two years I worked 5 days a week and went to school 2 days a week. I don't know today how I was able to manage all that I did then but I did manage to graduate Cum Laude in May 2000 with a full-time job.

I started my professional career at Universal in 2000 and during the next four years I met great people and learned a lot of practical stuff. {I just noticed that I'm writing a book...so I am going to wrap it up!}. In 2004, I got married to Jon and we moved to Jackson, MS. I guess the rest is history or at least history in the making.

I no longer have to worry about my immigration status, submit forms & money to the INS (Immigration of Naturalization Services) for interviews, employment status, background checks from the FBI (yes, the FBI has done a background check on me!), fingerprinting with ink or electronically, etc. I no longer have to spend hours and hours reading form how-tos or have to wait for a reply from the Texas office or wait hours and hours to speak to someone at a local office or drive hours to another office and wait and wait more. As you can tell, there is a lot of time spent on waiting and a lot of money involved.... my last fee was for the N-400 form or the application for citizenship and last year the fee was around $400 ...this year the fee is close to $700. I can tell you the name of the Original colonies, the author of the Star-Spangled banner, the number of amendments in our Constitution (BTW it is 27) and which amendments are related to voting rights.

And come November, I can vote....so no more taxation without representation. lol!

If you're still reading, thanks and have a wonderful week.