“Destiny is destiny” – Remembering Ecuador years later
By
Blood trickled down her nose as the nun’s open hand came down across her face. Her best friend, Marta, fell to the floor beside her, begging the nuns for forgiveness. “It was all Lola’s fault,” Marta sputtered.
Lola Velasco, now in her early 60s, remembers this moment in vivid detail. Her jaw literally dropped as her best friend accused her before the infuriated nuns.
“It was the first time I ever got into any kind of trouble,” she recalled. But the nuns didn’t care then how obedient the young girl was. Velasco, 14 at the time, had broken the rules – and punishment was coming.
Earlier that day, Velasco and 17-year-old Marta escaped the confines of their boarding school in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, to venture into the city, expecting to return unnoticed that afternoon.
Click here for AUDIO: She recounts getting caught
But the nuns never faltered in their strict supervision. The girls were snatched upon their return, and duly punished – slapped in the face and banished temporarily from their classmates.
“Everything in Ecuador was politics,” Velasco remembered. Marta’s father, a military man and mayor of a small city on the coast of Ecuador, had donated land to the boarding school. The nuns knew Marta was lying, but wouldn’t dare touch a benefactor’s daughter.
Decades later, as Velasco looks back on that day in Ecuador, she knows Marta didn’t intend to hurt her. The girl’s father was a horrific man, Velasco recalled, and he might have killed his daughter had he known she’d misbehaved. So Velasco took the punishment instead.
The days at the Catholic school in Quito were difficult, Velasco remembered. Called an internado in Spanish, the all-girl boarding school was run “like jail,” she said.
The nuns were very strict, waking her and the other schoolgirls early each morning and offering scant food at mealtimes. Each night, they would wait for the nearby church bell’s twelve chimes – indicating midnight – before crawling quietly from their beds to steal food from the kitchen – eggs and watermelon, whatever they could find to satisfy their hunger.
In an effort to make light of their travails, the girls would create games to remain optimistic. The challenge: which girl could remain in the shower the longest? The catch: in a city nearly 10,000 miles above sea level, the shower was outside.
Difficult though they were, the years Velasco lived in Ecuador were “the most interesting years one could ever live,” she said. Highly in love with life, Velasco was infatuated with her home country. She remembers the house she lived in as a child – a gathering place for her and her family where she spent much of her childhood. Being around her family in a setting that was familiar to her was what comforted her most. When it came time for Velasco to move to the United States, “it was the saddest thing you could ever imagine,” she said.
Dreading an emotional vacuum
The daughter of parents who had both been married before, Velasco was the only child of their marriage, though she had several step-siblings. When her mother decided to move to the United States, Velasco was left behind to finish her schooling before joining the rest of her family.
The arrangement was anything but satisfying for a girl who saw the United States as an emotional vacuum. When her older step-sisters – who had gone to the States earlier to begin their higher education – would return to Ecuador, they weren’t happy, she remembered.
“Every time they returned… they seemed sad,” she said. “They seemed older. They matured more quickly in the States.” Velasco feared her migration would have the same effect.
When her mother finally came to take her away from Ecuador, only one year after she began her stay at the internado, the departure was far too abrupt. Her books, her gym suit, her friends – all of the things she treasured most deeply were vanishing too quickly.
Click here for AUDIO: She recalls how wrenching it was
Without goodbye, she was swept away to Chicago, never to see her friends again – not even Marta. To this day, Velasco recalled sadly, she has never seen her best friend, Marta, and has yet to find a replacement.
It was a totally different life in the United States, she said. Unfamiliar with English, Velasco was lost in a world of confusion and sadness. “I don’t know if I ever adjusted,” she remembered. “It was devastating for me…. Every afternoon, I cried and cried, hoping that my mother would see me and send me back home.”
Click here for AUDIO: She recalls how hard it was to adjust
Though she saw no point in her presence in the U.S., her mother was insistent upon keeping her there.
The language barrier was most difficult, Velasco admitted.
Click here for AUDIO: She recalls what it was like to understand nothing around her
Relegated to low-level language classes at the first American school she attended, the young girl was distraught at the thought of surrendering the classes she loved most – math and science – in order to take English lessons. Partnered with a Mexican girl who spoke a similarly limited amount of English, Velasco pushed through, but not without difficulty.
Finding herself
“College is where I found myself,” Velasco recalled fondly. The freedom to choose which subjects she would pursue liberated a woman otherwise constricted by a language and cultural barrier. In college, Velasco said, she met her soon-to-be husband, an immigrant from Argentina who faced many of the same struggles she was fighting to overcome. Educated and eventually married, Velasco was finally creating a comfort zone in a country she never thought she could happily occupy.
Almost 40 years after her migration, Velasco, now with three older children, teaches foreign language to high school students in Palos Heights, one of Chicago’s southwest suburbs. It is a life she never quite anticipated as a promising young college student seeking medical school. But life took her in a direction she didn’t quite expect. When she fell short of medical school after college, she pursued a master’s in linguistics.
Last summer, Velasco traveled to her former school in Quito to walk the very halls she once walked through, hoping to find the books she’d left so many years ago – perhaps finding them still open, untouched, awaiting her return.
Click here for AUDIO: Why she went back
She thought briefly of Marta, of tracking down her best friend from so many years ago, but was too frightened by what she might find – or not find.
Immigration, Velasco said, has largely defined the person she’s become. Caught in some awkward cultural purgatory, Velasco said she is detached from Ecuador, but still not quite assimilated to America – even today.
Pondering the direction life had taken her, Velasco said she’s not unhappy, though she’s not the scientist she’d hoped she would be. Never knowing how life would have played out had she remained in Ecuador like she wanted, Velasco is “always wondering,” she said, “what it would have been like had I done what I wanted to do from the beginning of my life” – to stay in Ecuador and study science.
Click here for AUDIO: It was all good
“At this point… I’m looking back and saying, ‘My Lord, what a different toll my life took from what I intended,’” she said. “You plan something and it goes in a completely different direction.”
Throughout her life, Velasco wondered why her family’s migration only affected her. Her brothers and sisters seemed content with the cultural shift, leaving their younger sister confounded. “I thought it was only me, Lola,” she said.
But immigration woes, Velasco realized, were not exclusive to one lost Ecuadorian-American. She knows her story is not unique. These troubles, she realized, are universal. “Destiny is destiny,” she said, “I think that’s part of life.”
The subject requested to not have her real name used for publication. The name “Lola” derives from the word “sorrows.”
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