Archive:Stories: Difference between revisions

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+{{cquote|I am the last hope and dream of a man who struggles in a foreign land.
+My father, Jose Paz, grew up with his uncle’s family in El Salvador. To them he was another mouth to feed—they fed him like a dog with scraps and leftovers. Still, he has never forgotten what he considered their kindness. He understands that they could have left him to be an orphan in the streets, that they chose to sustain him as an act of generosity. Sometimes he was so hungry that he would venture out into the forests around Suchitoto looking for fruit to eat.
+Looking into my father’s eyes now, I see a dark tunnel in which he is lost. Frantically he searches for an escape. The only sound for miles is a dim whisper of hope. He hopes that I will succeed and have a better life than he has but sadly he cannot help. He has little money and less education—having spent his childhood in the scorching sun doing manual labor. He doesn’t know the language, can barely navigate American culture. He was once a towering figure—a super hero in my eyes, but in his own eyes he is a man whose hope entirely rests on a son he cannot help in any way.
+I try to reassure him—he has been my inspiration. Not only a hard-working man, entirely selfless, but a courageous man, a crusader for justice. We left San Salvador, where he was a taxi driver, because he and many of the other drivers had been organizing to oppose the political repression and one by one they were being killed for it. He didn’t tell me this for many years—that he lived in terror of losing his life, of having his son grow up fatherless as he had.
+My father has great expectations for me, but I have even higher aspirations for myself. I am the light at the end of that tunnel that envelopes him. I am the reward for all of his struggle. And for me, the pressure of his expectations is a gift, not a burden. When his mother passed away, he crumbled in tears. I had never seen him cry before—but his weeping did not make him any less of a super hero in my eyes. His fallibility, his humanity makes him more of a hero.
+He lives with no regrets having refused to accept the destiny of his circumstances. It might have been easy for him, as a child, to let hunger drive him to the life of an outlaw, to rob and even kill as vengeance against the world for leaving him alone. But he rejected that surrender. He was too strong to seek false strength. Many times in his life he has fallen, but he refuses to stay down. That is his greatest gift to me—the knowledge that I can fall and rise again just like him. Just like Maya Angelou’s poem, Still I Rise, I will fall like any other human but “like dust, I’ll rise.”
+What's the point of my story? Wiki has helped me in school all along, all the years in school when i've had to do research projects or papers wiki has always been there for me and for the world for free. }}
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 {{cquote|As a family physician I see a broad range of problems in my practice. While I am proud of the fact that my training exposed and prepared me for most that I see, on occasion I'll need help, whether to brush up on what I already knew but was rusty on, or to look up something new that I had never known before. Whenever possible, I turn to Wikipedia as an unbiased, commercial-free source of information that is crisp, concise, as it is complete. It would truly be a sad day to see the loss of such a valuable instrument.}}