When I was 7, I had yet to face any real hardship in my life. By the time I finished elementary I was already in my fourth school, but at the time I didn’t really notice any significant changes in my life or the effects of moving around so much. I had my best friends at school, boys chased me on the playground, and my mom drove a Suburban. Things were relatively simple.
On my eighth birthday, we were on a camping trip in our RV - again, simple, southern lifestyle - when my parents broke the news that we would be moving again. At that point, although I was old enough to know what it meant, we had never moved outside Texas, so I assumed this would be the same as all the previous moves. Unfortunately, my life as an 8-year-old was about to change drastically as I found out we would be relocating to Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, following Christmas break during third grade. Currently, I describe this lifestyle change to people by saying that I grew up really fast. Everything I expected my life to be like was reversed in Venezuela. I arrived in the country with a clean slate and was evacuated at age 11 with very different ideas about life in general. We lived in a gated community of mostly American families, all working in the oil business. We were provided very high security from the get-go and still things had to be improved day by day. I became accustomed to the menacing stares and fingers grasping my light blonde hair and knew Americans were not necessarily welcomed with open arms.
I made it through the various food shortages with little complaint and looked forward to visits from family overseas, who would bring us Bisquick and brown sugar, among other things. I made it through the occasion when my school bus was held up after our driver almost side swiped another vehicle—after that, our school buses were escorted by security cars in the front and back. I made it through the time we returned from a day out on our boat, to realize our house had been robbed. I had just gotten new rollerblades and I don’t think we ever replaced them. I made it through the shooting at my school—“it's just fireworks,” they told us. I made it through three years of keeping my head down and eyes averted, never going anywhere alone, and always noticing hearing about the terrible things happening around me.
We left on very short notice—in 2007, Hugo Chávez nationalized multi-billion dollar projects in Venezuela’s Orinoco oil region, creating a lawsuit with the company my father works for. We were evacuated from the country a week later. We spent the summer not knowing where we would live when the school year started again. My mother, sister and I moved back to Houston, while my father stayed behind in Caracas to close up the office—it was deemed unsafe for our family to live there together. I felt as if my old friends from Houston were still the happy-go-lucky kids they had been when I moved away and I wasn’t any longer. I felt colder, like I knew too much, because I had experienced things in Venezuela these kids would never experience in their entire life, as most of them would never leave Houston's suburban bubble. That feeling of being different has only worsened over time, but I am forever grateful to not exist within that bubble. I grew up when I was 8-years-old and only now am starting to let loose.
