Coming to America

Eduardo was 17, but people told him he looked 13 or 14. It was true, when he first landed in Miami, the immigration official asked him who he was travelling with -- in Espanol. He had responded in his perfect English that he was travelling on his own, that he was on his way to Austin, to start college. Everyone said school for school and school for college, and that was a little confusing initially. But anyway, the visa guy thought he was being insolent, and told him that he better get with it, if he didn't want to get kicked right back to his precious Venezuela.

The visa guy was tall, big, white and looked exactly like the first American Eduardo had met in Canaima, his home town of a thousand people, the gateway to Angel Falls, which meant that every week a lot of tall, big, white, rich Americans would fly in and exclaim what a backward but charming little place they'd arrived at, and whether there was an ATM nearby (which there wasn't.) Eduardo had never quite understood the fascination for ATMs and burgers. He had never seen an ATM, but he had had a burger, and had thought it was a perfectly good waste of perfectly good meat.

But he had found these big Americans intimidating, and they had always been disappointed when he told them that he would be their guide for the next two days. "But we paid $120 per person", as if they were paying for body-size. So he was 5 foot tall, and weighed about 100 pounds, but he was strong as hell, and when he had became head-guide, he had only been 16, and he was the best damn'd guide in all of Canaima, as the Americans would say after their 2-day boot-camp with him. They were okay, on the whole, Eduardo thought, these Americans. They were brash, loud, and relied a lot on luck, which they also seemed to have a lot of. They were also intrusive and annoying, but they paid well, even though Eduardo never saw close to the $120 per person they paid for their over-night river-adventure.

Austin was amazing, awesome, clean, cold, expensive, unsafe, boring, unapproachable and so on, depending on the month or the week. The students had been really friendly. The dorms were very comfortable, warm and noisy. Everyone "hung out" a lot, when they were not getting drunk. Eduardo missed Canaima, the rain, the river, his hammock and the Tepuis in the distance.

Classes were fun. The professors were not intimidating, and Eduardo was surprised that he did quite well in his first semester. He had always been a good student, and the scholarship that he had received from the government of Venezuela was well-deserved, everyone had said, but he had had his doubts about coping with the rest of the big, bad Americans. Which was the interesting thing. There were students from all over the world at Austin, from countries he had never heard of. He felt safe in the "diversity", as they called it. It was okay to be different. And that was the other interesting thing. Being different was actually expected. Everyone wanted to be different.

He wanted to be an Engineer, because his father wanted him to be an Engineer, and he didn't think it was a bad choice. But a lot of other students were English majors or Sociology majors, and he wondered what they would do when they left college. He knew he couldn't afford the luxury of majors that didn't have job-prospects, because inspite of the scholarship, his family was still paying through their teeth -- for his airplane ticket, for the clothes he had had to buy from the supermarkets in Caracas and so on. He often worried about this, and wished he could work some odd jobs, like some of the other students, at the library or the cafeteria, so he could send some money back home, but the visa guys wouldn't let him.