PERSONAL STATEMENT Silvia Vargas, Translator and English Teacher

I received my first English class when I was four years old. Since then, when I think about my days at primary school, the first thing that comes to my mind is that day. The first lesson in my red-covered book was vocabulary related to animals. A smiling goldfish, with the word fish above it, was on the first page. If you want it, you can be happy even in the worst conditions. My father had left home when I was one year old. As a consequence, I lived with my mother, my brother, my sister and my grandparents. We had some economic problems. We all six lived in one single rented room with two beds. But in my mind there was only space for English. That day, when I returned home from school, I was so excited that I could only speak about the goldfish. In felt happy when I did my English homework. I possessed a natural ability to learn foreign languages and I started to be at the top of my English class from the very beginning.

When I was eight years old, I started to experience seizures and sudden faints. Doctors did a series of painful examinations to me, before they discovered that wha...