Meeting with Milla 6

     I had my second to last meeting with Milla last Friday. I met her youngest son, Santiago. He was on campus with her, and we spent the majority of our meeting walking to and from the post office so she could mail some papers to Venezuela.

     Milla was busy preparing for her oldest son's birthday party, which she held last weekend. She told me all about how it was going to be dinosaur themed, because both of her boys love playing with their dinosaur toys so much.

     She had just finished taking another exam, this one for TCU. It sounded like this was an entrance exam for the university for students in the Intensive English program. She didn't understand why she had to take it, since she's planning to go to TCC next year, but she had to take it anyway. She said she was very distracted during the listening portion of the exam but ended up scoring 30 points higher than the last time she took it, which was weird to her.

      Santiago played like any other little boy while Milla and I talked. He kept getting distracted by bugs on the sidewalk as we walked, so we had to wait for him to catch up with us a lot. He is a very smart kid. Milla kept making him translate his sentences back and forth so I could understand what he was saying in English. He did it with very little effort and has no accent speaking English.

     Somehow we ended up discussing church services, and Milla told me that she enjoys going to services in English rather than in Spanish. She said that services in English are more orderly and the message is more clear. She thinks her kids benefit more from going to an English-speaking service, which is why she switched to that service permanently.

     We also discussed the school system here verses the school system in Venezuela. I told her about a friend of mine from Germany. He turned 21 last week, but I had thought he was turning 19. I had somehow lost two years of his life because I didn't understand how the German school system works. I knew that he had taken a year off from school and then come to America to study at TCU, but I figured that meant he was my age.

     As it turned out, they start school when they are six years old in Germany, and then go for 13 years, so they graduate high school when they are 19. Then he took a year off, and then he came to TCU, which made him 21. Since I hadn't known about the German school system, I decided to ask Milla bout the school system in Venezuela.

      Apparently in Venezuela, college is a lot different. What you study in university is what you end up doing in life. It's not like in America, where we can major in whatever we want and then choose a different job later. She studied political science in college, and that trained her for her job as a lawyer. She didn't have to go to a separate school like we have to here.

     The most interesting part of this meeting for me was learning about the school system in Venezuela, because it allowed me to learn more about Milla's culture. I feel like sometimes Americans are so caught up in our ways that we don't stop to think that the rest of the world may have a different way of doing things. I appreciated that wake up call.