Looking down at the shiny knobs of the shower unable to figure out how to work them Jennifer broke down. Thrust into a world with a father and stepmother she didn’t know, in a country whose culture she didn’t understand with a language she couldn’t speak, for the first time that day she truly realized her knew reality and that she wouldn’t see the family she was so close to for years maybe even decades. Back in Haiti her family was placing their hopes of coming to America on her: she knew she must be successful and that heavy weight she would carry for the rest of her life. In Haiti the only vision of America she had was what she saw on T.V. now that she was in America T.V. was her escape and comfort. Through movies she taught herself
…show more content…
Every time they’d talk she’d remind her that her brother couldn’t go to school without money and hung the sacrifice they’d made for her to go to America over her head. In Haiti there was a common belief that her mother shared that anyone in America was automatically rich. “I felt terribly guilty about my brother not being able to attend school as I had been able to. I knew what fate he would face it was the same as everyone else’s in Haiti’s. He would grow up uneducated work menial jobs and the money would go in with all the other families money to be spent how they decided not him, and his wife would be chosen not by love but by the first person he got pregnant and this cycle would continue till broken. I desperately wanted to be the one to break it for him but couldn’t make them understand that I simply didn’t have the wealth they believed I did.” Depression showed itself as another hurtle in her life that she would overcome. She managed to smile like she always did and get through the days but it came in waves that mainly affected her when she was all alone at night. One of those lonely nights all the pressures of the great responsibility she felt came to a tipping point and she took a knife in her hand. Courage or cowardice? She didn’t know which stopped her that night but she went back to her room where she discovered art as an outlet for this
Every time they’d talk she’d remind her that her brother couldn’t go to school without money and hung the sacrifice they’d made for her to go to America over her head. In Haiti there was a common belief that her mother shared that anyone in America was automatically rich. “I felt terribly guilty about my brother not being able to attend school as I had been able to. I knew what fate he would face it was the same as everyone else’s in Haiti’s. He would grow up uneducated work menial jobs and the money would go in with all the other families money to be spent how they decided not him, and his wife would be chosen not by love but by the first person he got pregnant and this cycle would continue till broken. I desperately wanted to be the one to break it for him but couldn’t make them understand that I simply didn’t have the wealth they believed I did.” Depression showed itself as another hurtle in her life that she would overcome. She managed to smile like she always did and get through the days but it came in waves that mainly affected her when she was all alone at night. One of those lonely nights all the pressures of the great responsibility she felt came to a tipping point and she took a knife in her hand. Courage or cowardice? She didn’t know which stopped her that night but she went back to her room where she discovered art as an outlet for this