Shirley Garcia, a senior at Lake Shore High shares her experience of coming from Bogotà, Colombia to the United States. She is a new student this year at LSHS and plays on the girls soccer team. 

Garcia came here at the age of 16 and is now 18, being here in the US for about 2 years. 

She shares that she came here with her family mostly for her dad’s career. 

Garcia said, “It was kind of hard, at first I wasn’t very good with English so it was kind of hard to understand other people.” 

Some of the things Garcia had to do when she came here was changing schools and had to leave a lot of things behind. 

At first, Garcia knew a little bit of English, but it was mostly hard to learn the slang. She said they learned English in schools like we learn Spanish and German here, but it’s very basic. Garcia made it known she started learning English at 15 which was like a year before she came.  

Garcia said that everything here is different, in Colombia, everything is close by and you are able to walk everywhere, but here you have to drive everywhere with everything being so spread apart. 

She also shares that the states are pretty different here than in Colombia. 

Garcia says she liked it here but she misses Colombia sometimes. She says that the only other family she has here is her uncle.

She said she would like to travel back to Colombia but it’s gonna take a couple years. 

Garcia plans to work for a couple months after high school and visit a couple of states in the US before going to college next year.