For some, childhood cut short

With animated gestures and longing in her voice, senior Yudi Rodriguez is sketching the details of her life in the Dominican Republic. She can rattle off the date of her arrival in the U.S. as casually as other students rattle off their birth dates—it was the day she left her idyllic support network in the Caribbean for a world in which neighbors take five months to get to know each other, she explains.

Now, says Rodriguez, she's resigned herself to living in the U.S., but the resignation has come at a price. "I want to prove to the world that immigrants can succeed," she says. And more importantly, she has to prove to herself that the journey away from her homeland was worth the trek.

This element of pressure, combined with both the trauma of switching locales and the trauma of war or poverty that drive them to the U.S., can force ESOL students to mature faster than their American-born counterparts, says Robert Talbot, instructional specialist for the MCPS ESOL/Bilingual Affairs division.

Life or death matter

ESOL 5 teacher Genie Holmes agrees with Talbot's assessment. "These students are learning English not as a casual foreign language but in the context of life or death for the entire family," she explains. She also notes that ESOL students, who make up 12 percent of Blair's population, assume responsibilities as representatives of their communities.

Senior Brandine Stacy Sanon, an ESOL 5 student, compares her role at home to that of an average American parent. "I come home and I cook; I have to take care of two kids; I have a job at the beauty salon," she says. Her litany of chores bears a stark contrast to what she had grown to expect in her native nation of Haiti.

Trauma and trust

For other Blazers, it is their native country itself that has forced them to become adults before their time. Freshman Menneh Moko's beaded braids click against each other to emphasize the slow head shakes that begin whenever she talks about Liberia. "I loved it there: I loved the food, I loved everything," she says. But there was plenty for her parents to dislike about the war-torn nation they fled.

"Security" was a loaded word, says Moko. "They could kill you because you had a TV or a computer or something in your house, for no reason at all," she says, referring to the Liberian military forces sent en masse to combat Guinea-based armed opposition groups. "It was so scary."

Such an ordeal has an enormous impact on how a child will grow to view the world, explains Constanza Singer, a representative from the MCPS Bilingual Assessment Team. "It depends on their personality, on the familial reinforcement they're getting, on their innate capacity to trust," she says. "But undoubt-edly, the exposure to a trauma at an early age will impact students' outlook and development."

A basic disconnect

Natalie Waltz, who teaches ESOL 3 at Blair, agrees with Singer's theory. Although she encourages her students to join clubs and attend dances, she recognizes a basic disconnect between ESOL students and their American peers. "Both in the countries they come from and through the whole immigration process, a lot of our [ESOL] students have had to acquire a high level of maturity very early on," she explains.

Perhaps that's one factor that makes ESOL students feel isolated from the rest of Blair, says Joseph Bellino, Blair's ESOL department resource teacher. According to an informal Silver Chips poll of 70 ESOL students, 79 percent have felt cut off from "the Blair experience" at some point.

In addition, says Sanon, even the richest citizens of other nations can come to the U.S. penniless, primarily because they can't obtain certification to practice their chosen profession, like medicine or law. As a result, any activity "that's not church or bringing in money" is frowned upon by her parents.

Waltz adds that a major factor in this isolation is the discrepancy between the amount of free time of most Blair students and that of ESOL students. "Most [ESOL students] are working, and when they work, it's not so they can pay for a movie; it's generally to support a family," she explains.

Holmes attributes this discrepancy partly to family-related factors. "Because of the familial diaspora that tends to accompany immigrant families, many students have had to take on roles that will allow them to fill in for missing family members," says Holmes.

For example, sophomore Priscilla Kai believes she has been doubly burdened by the absence of a parent and two siblings. Says Kai, "My mother and brother and sister are still back in Africa. I have to send them all money and do their jobs here."

Swimming with the mainstream

In the end, Talbot says, the enhanced maturity of ESOL students is a function of the situation, not the students. "If you took any American high school teen and transplanted them to the middle of South America and told them their success, their very life, depended on how much they learned, I guarantee you'd see some pretty dramatic changes," he says.

And, in some situations, Rodriguez feels she is the average American teen. As she waltzes into her 5B Silver International class, she drapes her red "'03"-emblazoned senior t-shirt over one arm, crowing to her teacher, "Mr. Bellino, I got the shirt!"

"Sometimes I can't believe I'm here, can't believe this is real," she later explains as she considers the difference between her responsibilities and the lifestyle she sees among her peers. "But sometimes, I just want to spend time with my girls and be a teenager!"