My name is Jamilet Escobar, I am a Sophomore and I’m from Fairfax, VA. In 2013 I moved to El Salvador and I lived there for 9 months.

When I moved to El Salvador, I knew that everything was going to be different like the Food, Language, People, School Systems, The way of living..Everything.

The food in El Salvador was not good because there was no nutritional value in it and also since in El Salvador there are a lot of flies, and the flies would land on the food and flies carry bacteria/diseases, so people get sick quite often.

At the school that I attended, they have English classes and it wasn’t literature or reading, it was the language English.

In El Salvador, they do not teach the proper English, they tend to mix up the words and vocabulary.

The people in El Salvador were very nice, well at least some were. However, the school systems were terrible, at the school that I attended, school started in January and it ended in October.

We didn’t have any breaks like we do here. In El Salvador, they do not know what Spring Break is.

The Salvadoran Independence is always celebrated on September 15th and on that day, we had to march for 4 miles since that is the tradition that the people in El Salvador have.

People over there listen to different types of genres of music like Oldies music, Pop, Rock, Cumbia, Bachata, Reggae, Reggaeton, R&B, and Rap.

Some people in El Salvador lives in very poor conditions. I’ve seen people sleeping on the sidewalks, sometimes in front of the stores. El Salvador is really dangerous right now because a lot of people are being  killed by the gangs and the police doesn’t do anything to stop them.

It is really dangerous over there because if you wear a certain color that matches the gangs color then the gangs could possibly keep you as a hostage or something even worse.

I came back to the U.S. on September 20th, 2014.

I felt really relieved to be back home in VA. It took me a few weeks to adjust the environment again since i had been out of the country for 9 months.

The U.S. is a great place to live because we have more access to a lot of things and in El Salvador they don’t have that much resources that we do here in the U.S..

For example we have access to technology unlike in El Salvador.

The food is different here then it is over there. People here are nicer and the teachers here actually helps the students when they are struggling.

The School Systems here are better, we can express ourselves freely and nobody judges you here.

We are exposed to many diverse cultures and traditions. Everything here is more advanced then it is in El Salvador. We should be thankful the we are in a land of opportunities.