By: Julia Kovacova

Imagine one day you are uprooted from your safety net, your bags must be packed, and you suddenly leave your hometown to a foreign community you have never seen. In instances this can be the situation for many.

I had the opportunity to interview Ms. Wright, one of the French teachers at our high school as well as senior Dominika Jarosz who can relate to this experience.

When Wright had first come here on vacation at age ten, Wright described it as a Hollywood like place, saying it was sunny all the time and that everything was indeed bigger than in Scotland. At first, Wright was excited to move.

“But then when it became real it was a little scary leaving our family anf friends, changing schools, going to a different country. Even though we had family here to come to it was stil quite intimidating,” Wright said.

Furthermore, jumping across the pond was not as simple as some may imagine.

“It was exciting when we first got the information we had applied four years before we actually got approved,” Wright said.

The tedious process of traveling down to London at different times and meeting with immigration officials did not make it easy. Good things come to those who wait, and finally Wright, her sister and their mom were able to move to Michigan! With a fresh start on their shoulders, the family did not know what was awaiting them. I had asked Wright what was the differences between the two countries were.

“Scotland’s a very small country and if you live 30 miles away from someone in Scotland you feel like you live a long way away. Whereas in this country people think nothing of driving 100, 200, 400 miles,” Wright said.

Wright also explained that back in Scotland the family did not own a car, for they did not need one because of the public transport and means to walk around easily in a small town. Leaving one part of her heart back in Scotland but seeking new opportunities in the United States lead Wright to decide to become a french teacher when she was influenced by one of her elder ambitious college professors.

“I have 24 cousins in Scotland and nobody went to college. And it wasn’t expected that they do, that was just they go and they find a job leaving high school and that’s what you do. When I came here it was the expectation my mom said ‘you’re going to college, we’ll figure out a way to make it happen,'” Wright said.

Wright noted that there was more opportunity here than back then in Scotland. Wright had been required to take French in high school, and if studetns in her class did well, the school would decide to give students an additional language. German was Wrights’s other language in high school. Wright ended up spending a summer with her college proffessor “the little old lady” and was taught right outside of her backyard in France and took Wright and other students on adventurous, historical day trips.

“It was just such a neat experience and she just inspired me to go on with French and then combining that with liking to work with kids..and it inspired me to become a French teacher,” Wright said.

From a different perspective is Dominika Jarosz’s story, a girl who emigrated from Poland to Hamtramck when she was only eight years old. Jarosz’s Dad had come prior to her family to get settled in.

“We went to our first house which was in Hamtramck and it was a lot smaller and crammed and I had to share a room with my brother and at first we had to sleep on the ground,” Jarosz said.

Jarosz describes the hardships she had to face as a young girl living in a foreign environment. For Jarosz, the whole thing was a culture shock: she went from the small town countryside to houses that were squished close together and narrow sidewalks. For Dominika, it seemed like everything was on top of everything. One of her most accomplished struggles was learning English.

“What are you gonna learn as a first grader.. just like you learn foregin languages here..you don’t really learn enough to communicate especially when you’re in first grade. So learning the language was pretty tough,” Jarosz said.

There were benefits along the way when Jarosz was able to skip second grade and move right to third.

“I knew the material so it wasn’t that hard because in poland we start education a lot sooner and it gets into different subjects a lot quicker than here get babied in everything so it was kinda different,” Jarosz said.

It took Jarosz about a year to get accustomed and comfortable in her situation. The differences between the countries greatly impact the way people live their lives in Poland. Jarosz noted that everybody here is doing everything so quickly and people in Poland are more laid back. Also, public transport is big and the family only owned one car back in Poland. Dominika recounts having no problem biking ten kilometers to see her grandmother, but here it is quite unlikely.

“Everybody took trains everywhere and buses. I guess its more social when it comes to transportation because you see somebody in the train you see somebody in the bus and you know them,” Jarosz said.

Perhaps a sense of a tight-knit community is one thing what we may be missing. As the years have rolled on Jarosz has been back to visit Poland but says she wants to reside and go to college here. It is always important to remember that we are only human and it is possible to live in any condition others do, while we  all come from differnet cultures- we are one community of humanity on this earth.