My name is Rachel, and I am from Manassas, Virginia. My school district growing up was 60% Latinos, and a majority of my school district speaks Spanish. Our district is also 30% English Language Learners. So my whole life, I have been used to seeing both Spanish and English-on school forms, in the grocery store, at the bank, at the mechanic, you name it! In my house in Virginia, we only speak English. My mom knows some Spanish because she is a nurse at our community hospital, but I did not grow up speaking the language. But now that I am in Colombia, I speak Spanish every day. Some days, it is hard because sometimes I cannot remember the right word for things and people cannot understand me. But every day, I am learning more, and I love speaking Spanish. I am also an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, so I love to teach and learn languages and think being multilingual is a superpower!
Before I moved to Colombia, I went to Penn State University in Pennsylvania and taught at a public high school there. Central Pennsylvania is very different from Bucaramanga, Colombia. I taught in a rural setting last year, and I taught 11th grade English to students whose first language was mostly English. It gets cold in Pennsylvania (like in Brooklyn!) and in the winter, there is a lot of snow.
