Brazil Born New Yorker and His American Experience

Growing up in New York, you’re bound to run into someone from every continent, race, culture, and religion. Being exposed to this is thrilling and can make your head spin sometimes, other times though it can confuse you as to where you really belong. Arriving here at the age of 3 months, I had no idea what was in store for me, and how the culture I would be growing up in would be so different from what I was born into. While I have the label and have lived the life of an American citizen, that doesn’t take away being born in a small, rural town located in east Brazil. If I were to trade life styles from city to rural culture, it would completely affect my development and my life as whole. To trade places would mean giving up certain privileges in my life such as education, health care, and human rights; and to be put up to the challenge of an entirely different way of living. The opportunities afforded to me just by living in America, are vastly different from what I would have if I was still in Brazil. For that I am happy and honored to have been able to trade places.

Upon arriving in New York in 1996, my parents made it their primary duty to raise my brother and I to be grateful for any and all opportunities. We came from a small, rural town on the coast of Brazil, that at the time was extremely under developed. Neither of us were able to receive the health care that we needed under the family circumstances we were in down there. At the time, while health care was deemed in the country as a human right, it was still extremely expensive and scarce. After being adopted and brought here, my parents were able to not only afford health care for us, but also the needed vaccinations, treatments, and therapies that were later deemed ...

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...e are more than I could ever hope for there. I’m extremely lucky to have gone through the education system that I went through growing up, because I’m now able to continue through college and hopefully onto graduate school to pursue the field of my choice. I’m lucky for the health care that is here that saved not just my brother’s life; but made it possible for my parents to afford therapy for me to learn to not only how to speak, but walk, and write when we found out my developmental skills were slowed. I’m lucky because by coming and living here, I have been given the opportunity to make choices about my life, that would otherwise have never been offered to me. Growing up in New York has exposed me to so many different cultures, and while they may not all mix together, they each open new doors of understanding for us as individuals and as neighbors in a community.