When Makula Kaba and Francisco Josue Valencia Velderrain moved from Ivory Coast and Mexico, respectively, and began their journeys as new students in Tucson, neither knew how to speak English.
The two recall how challenging and difficult it was to move to a new country during their freshman year of high school, enroll in new schools and try to make new friends, all without being able to speak the language around them.
Kaba and Valencia were among four students to receive the Arizona Student Success Stories award last year. The other two, a sixth grader and a high school senior, attend schools in the Phoenix area. Due to the civil war in her country, she said, she hadn’t been in school for about five years before arriving at Catalina High. So, in addition to not knowing how to speak English, she was behind in other subjects such as math and science.
The pandemic interrupted her in-person schooling during her sophomore year and, looking back on that time, she said she felt less shy interacting with her classmates on camera than in person. He said he moved to Tucson in 2018 because his parents believed that completing his education in the United States would be best and would open more doors for him. So he moved to live with family in the area, including his older sister, who was also a student at Palo Verde High School at the time.
“People told me that if I only had friends who spoke Spanish, it was going to be a struggle for me to learn English,” he said. “So I tried to speak with more people who only spoke English.” “My sisters told me I deserved it because they knew everything I had gone through. My parents were even more proud. My mom even cried,” he said.
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