By Johan Falcon
Having lived in three different countries, I have had to adapt to the differences in each of these countries. Peru, Spain, and the US were the three countries in which I have lived. And these countries are located at a far distance from each other.
The first country where I lived was the country where I was born, Peru. Peru in the west of South America. For me, it’s been the best place where I’ve lived because I only lived there up until when I was 6 or 7 years old, and I didn’t know anything about life. I was so comfortable living in Peru with my whole family, but what I didn’t know was that life in Peru was the hardest of these 3 countries. And to have a better future for my brothers and I, my parents decided to go to Spain. And since I was very young, I don’t remember very well what many things were like in Peru, so I can’t say as much as I would like about Peru.
In Spain, instead of living on the peninsula like I did in Peru, I lived on Lanzarote, an island in the Canary archipelago. This archipelago has 7 islands, and Lanzarote is further to the right of the archipelago, being the closest to Africa. Because Lanzarote is a volcanic island, there is not much vegetation in the whole island. The thing that I remember most about the island was that it was not too big. Since it was not very big, going from one end of the island to the other only took me approximately 3 hours by car. This made the trips from one place to another on the island not very troublesome.
The way they taught in Spain was the same as what I have experienced here in the United States and in Peru, with the only difference that I could find was that in Peru there was much more homework. In the schools, the teachers were the ones who went to the other classrooms when the periods were over. Which means that the students had the same classmates throughout the school year.
At the beginning my life was very good in Spain, I was little and there were not so many things that I had to worry about, except for school. After 4 or 5 years, I don’t remember why, but my father lost his job, and in that time, work began to be scarce on the island. It was increasingly difficult to find work, a problem that also affected my older brother. Thanks to the fact that most of Lanzarote’s income is from tourism, my mother got a permanent job cleaning rooms in a hotel. I also wanted to help my mother with the issue of work, but the problem was that in Spain the minimum age to start working is the same as in the US, 16 years, unlike Peru where it is only 12 years old.
My father, after getting tired of looking for work everywhere, decided to listen to my uncle who had told him to go directly to the US instead of trying in Spain. So he was the first who came to the US, and then he told my mother to go with him to the US because we could find a better future for my brother and me. My mother had to leave her permanent job, her friends, and my brother and I, and we left all the friends we had made in Spain.
In the US, I feel like I have had to move faster and work harder with a lot of things than I did in Lanzarote. Maybe the reason I feel this way about America compared to Lanzarote is that Lanzarote is an island, and I was also younger then. In my opinion, Spain is not very different from the United States in how the city feels and things like that. I never liked the parks in Lanzarote because for me they were too simple, but in San Francisco I saw many parks, and they had more plants in the parks and were bigger than those in Lanzarote. The schools, well, the truth is that they are all different, the language difference is obviously different, some exclusive places in each country also make it different, like Puerta del Sol in Spain and the Golden Bridge in San Francisco.
In each country I have had a different lifestyle that changed me and my mind while I was growing up. In Peru since I was very young, I didn’t know how difficult it was to live there, therefore, I didn’t feel worried about anything because I only did what my parents and the school told me. In Spain, I already began to understand more things while I was growing up, I made friends at my school with whom I went out to play and walk. I also realized how hard work was for my mother, and the difficult decision my father made to come to the United States. When I arrived in the United States, I had an idea of what life could be like here, but since I am now older than when I was in Spain, I began to have more responsibilities and stop doing things at my own pace, and the life that I imagined would be here, is much harder than I could have imagined.
