Ana is a newcomer student, who came to the U.S. from Honduras on January 16, 2023. She came here for a better education, because the schooling here in the U.S. is more advanced, and has more classes available to students. She also wants to help her parents out financially, and she has a better chance of doing that here rather than in Honduras.

For her the schooling is harder, mainly because of the projects. She doesn’t have as much freedom to choose when and where she can work on them. She is given class time, but she would also like to be able to bring projects home and work on them, or meet up at someone’s house (if it’s a group project) and be able to get some stuff done outside of school. 

Ana lives with her aunt and cousins, but she isn’t as close with her cousins as she would like. She misses her family, dog and cat a lot. She gets to call her parents once a day, although it still isn’t the same as getting to spend everyday with them. When she first got here it was harder to manage her feelings with being away from her family, and she became depressed since she was very close to her parents. The distance affected her greatly. 

Felix moved here from Guatemala on June 1st, 2022. He came to help his family and to have a better life with more opportunities. He’s staying with his cousins, who he has a strong relationship with. 

Felix finds the schooling more difficult because of the language barrier. While we do have many teachers who speak Spanish and English at Mission, there aren’t some in certain grades or subjects. Even though the language barrier does make it difficult, Math is his favorite subject. Felix also really enjoys playing soccer and is on the school team. 

He’s the middle child, with two brothers and two sisters. One of the things that affected him more after coming from Guatemala was the food. He found it harder to find the same foods that tasted like they did at home. He has gotten more used to “American food” though, so now he doesn’t find it as big of a problem. 

Jorhely came from Honduras on August 12th, 2023. She really misses her family and dog, but is staying with her Aunt and Grandma. She came here for better schooling because gangs in Honduras caused a big problem for her safety. 

She does have contact with her family, calling and texting them sometimes. One of the big things that affected her after coming from Honduras was the food. Food here isn’t made the same way and doesn’t taste the same as it did in Honduras. 

Even though she doesn’t know English fluently, she doesn’t find schoolwork as hard as she thought it’d be. She does find it harder to make new friends, but it doesn’t affect her very much. The amount of fights at school affect her too. While she thinks they can be entertaining, they’re annoying when they intervene with class.