Fire Road by Kim Phuc Phan Thi & Ashley Wiersma

Author:Kim Phuc Phan Thi & Ashley Wiersma [Thi, Kim Phuc Phan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RELIGION / Christian Life / Inspirational, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2017-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

My Spanish professor was the one who saw plainly that the challenging living conditions on campus were less then helpful for me, given my health issues. With thousands of students residing in one tight block of dormitories, the setting was always bustling, chaotic, loud. And so when a student moved out of the West Havana home, freeing up a slot in one of the bedrooms, I was encouraged to take the spot. I would have constant access to water, I could use the shower whenever my itchy skin needed it, and I would enjoy a break from the noise of dorm life.

Adjacent to the apartment was a small dorm that held perhaps one hundred students, and university officials told me to feel free to join those residents for meals anytime I wished. On my first day in that comedor, I met another language-school student, Yami Diaz, a native Cuban studying German in hopes of landing a job in Germany someday. Yami and I were fast friends, a welcome shift from the isolation I had felt for so long, and soon enough, she was inviting me to accompany her home on the weekends to enjoy time with her ma and dad.

After a few weeks of visits, Yami’s parents said I was welcome to call them Mami and Papi—Mom and Dad. It had been months since I had received a letter from my own parents, so Nuria and Manuel Diaz’s gesture carried great significance for me. Soon after, when I received my father’s update from Vietnam, I could feel the distance between us. I had hurt my parents so deeply by leaving my family’s religion that I feared in coming days this Cuban couple might be the only mother and father I would be able to claim as my own.

Mami and Papi were, practically speaking, Jesus with skin to me. I still am unsure of where they stand spiritually. But in terms of accepting me for who I was and promoting my growth and development toward becoming all I was meant to be, they loved me about as well as a person could be loved. All those evenings spent with the entire family gathered together, as Papi gently rubbed cream into my scars. All those lengthy discussions with Mami regarding boys and marriage. All those rides to and from school with Yami, basking together in the joys of young womanhood. The Diaz family did not just accept me—they embraced me. They enveloped me with care. And because they valued me so highly, I was compelled to start valuing myself.

I would part ways with Yami following our year in language school, but her family’s imprint on my life and heart I carry with me to this day. In fact, it was their influence back in the late 1980s that singlehandedly carved out in me a greater capacity for chasing my dreams. Certainly, I had determined by this point that a career in medicine would be too rigorous an educational path to take—it was for this reason that I had landed on English as my chosen degree.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.