I decided to interview my father, who is 64 years old. I started asking him about his childhood days. He was born and raised in a small countryside located in the south of the Dominican Republic. He has 5 siblings, 4 girls and 1 boy (he’s the second oldest of his siblings). Back in those days my grandmother was a typical housewife who stay home and do all the housework for her family, she used to wake her children up every morning made them breakfast and sent them off to school with my grandfather. Lunch had to be ready and served at 12 O’clock every day, which was when her children and family arrived home from school and work. As a tradition in my country my grandpa used to do lunch with the family rest for two hours and then get back to his farm, which was how he provided a living for the family. Back in those days specially in the countryside kids had to work in a way to help support the family so by the time my father was 9 and his brother was 8 they were hard working children. The would go to the farm after school and help with the chores which included milking cows, cutting grass for the cows and help his father kill animals for poultry.

As a tradition in the 60s, the ladies of the house had to help with the house chores like washing clothes in the river closest to the house, help my grandma with dinner and clean the house. Back in those days Santeria which is a ritual to saints was very popular, although everyone in town used to go to these ceremonies for any saint day, my dad and siblings weren’t allow to, due to the fact my grandparents weren’t believers of this cult, They were catholic. They were followers of this religion because My grandfather was raised with European Hispanic traditions, they were a family from Spain who was sent to Dominican Republic to work in the sugar system. My dad would tell me that although he was prohibited to assist at saint ceremonies he would enjoy those get together very much. My dad would often sneak out and go to the ceremonies with all his childhood friends, they danced at the rhythm of the drums with girls, played around and ate all the candies given at the ceremony, it was so much fun for him until the day my grandpa found him there, he got hit and had punished for 2 weeks.

When my dad was 13 a huge hurricane hit the island, it was devastated more than 9,000 deaths. The crops and were destroyed and a lot of the cattle died, also lots of houses were affected including my dads, Because of this situation my grandpa decided to get a job out of town (2 hours away from home). About 3 months later his family got terrible news, my grandpa was driving a sugar truck and got hit by another truck, he died instantly. This was a tragedy to the family and 5 years after this my dad’s family moved to a more modern city looking for a better lifelihood and education.

About his school years there was only 1 big public school in town, which was from elementary to high school. almost all relatives, friends and neighbors attended to the same school. The school population wasn’t ethnically or culturally diverse only economically because there was not private school so kids of rich families in town would attented to this school, the difference of money was felt. students from upper class would get better seats in the classroom, in the lunch line these kids were always the first ones, special attention to them in field trips to the city, it was just obvious the way kids were treated when they were from a known family. His closest friends were the sons of my grandpa’s godfather, they had the same age and had been friends since they were little, for the Christmas holidays the 2 families would meet and do the festivities together. They also would often walk to school together, hang around in the neighborhood, and play baseball for the school team. My dad would tell me he loved math and science in middle school, his dad helped him with all his math homework, he used to tell my dad that