A Challenging Trip
I felt butterflies in my stomach the first time I got into an airplane through my first long trip far away from my family. The stewardess interrupted my thoughts, asking if I would like something, I seemed very scared. I think she just read my mind because I was praying to God take care of us. I took a decision to move from Brazil to Japan unsure about the future, and apprehensive with problems that could come up. However, through that experience I learned that it is making decisions and facing the consequences of those decisions that we can grow up e become stronger.
I felt butterflies in my stomach the first time I got into an airplane through my first long trip far away from my family. The stewardess interrupted my thoughts, asking if I would like something, I seemed very scared. I think she just read my mind because I was praying to God take care of us. I took a decision to move from Brazil to Japan unsure about the future, and apprehensive with problems that could come up. However, through that experience I learned that it is making decisions and facing the consequences of those decisions that we can grow up e become stronger.
At home, I had felt exhausted hearing the same answer to almost all my questions. “Grandma, I’d like to go to the cinema with my cousins. Can I go next weekend?” or “Grandma, can I go to my aunt’s house on Christmas instead of the church?” – She always had the same answer. “You cannot do anything you want to do living in my house. Also, you are too young to make your own decisions.” I and my two young sisters had been living with my Grandmother since my mother passed away; I was five years old on that time. Grandma is a kind of admirable but dominant person who just tried to teach me based in her own experiences. According Grandma, she never was against her parents’ rules, and she taught me to be submissive like her. I accepted for some time, then I became adult and started thinking that super protection even justified by good reasons can turn a mess on anyone’s life. I was twenty four when I gather all courage I had to tell her that I was going to move to Japan; I was broke, unable to pay the expensive course in the university, and with a lot of debts. My father’s brother told me that a friend who lives in Japan was looking for someone to work in her restaurant. Giving apartment, food, the airfare, and a great pay, she was hoping uncle Afonso could find a good person to work with her. I saw sadness in grandma’s eyes when I told her about my decision to move to Japan, I thought that it was time to change something in my life. She argued against my decision but I was really strong about don’t move or change my decision, and on August 2000 I traveled through an unknown future.
Arriving in Japan, problems like language and the big difference between our cultures, almost made me repacking and go back to Brazil. It was hard, at first, to understand the language, I was aware about that. Six months before the travel I took English course because I thought it could help me; it was a basic course just to remind me what I had learned in school. Unfortunately, I couldn't find one person who spoke English in the village where I lived.
I believe that I improved a lot as an individual being away from my family, and being such a different culture. Able to take my own decisions, and bravely face all consequences of it, I feel strong knowing that I grow up. I had making other important decisions in my life such as come to America to study, and I have been living with the all consequences of it, I have to live in the same apartment of strangers because it is chipper then live by myself, I have to cook every day, actually I never did it in my Grandma’s house, I have to make time to work, to go to school… I think just us can live our own life, make decisions, do mistakes, and through our own experiences we can finally learned something. Living in Japan for almost five years helped me to discover I am stronger than I thought and helped me to learn how is important to make our own choices.
