She works in a sandwich shop. She is Russian. Mid-sixties. She wears a hairnet. Her accent is so thick I can hardly understand her.
“My accent will never go away,” she says. “Thirty-one years I live here, I still have it.”
She raised a family in Columbus, Georgia. She worked small-pay jobs to make ends meet. Her girls graduated college with honors.
This year, her family visited Russia for the first time since she left. She showed them the town she grew up in.
It almost made her teary telling me about it. Almost.
“When I was my girls’ age,” she says. “We only eat lunch every other day. We had poverty, you know?”
No, ma’am. I’ve never known hunger.
A young girl. Long black hair. She's from Mexico City. She’s stateside on a year-long collegiate program, it’s been an adjustment. Hard studying, lots of cellphone photos, sightseeing.
She was supposed to leave for Mexico after this upcoming semester, but she fell in love. He’s an ER nurse. He took her out to a few movies. Now they’re getting married.
“It’s gonna be crazy,”
she says. “I never thought I’d be an American, my mother freaked out. She’s really happy for me.”
Viva love.
He is my waiter. He has granite-black skin. He speaks a sophisticated form of broken English—almost British.
“I am South African,” he says.
I ask why he smiles so much—he looks like he just got his teeth polished.
“My mother teach me to smile when I was a child. She was always smiling wherever she goes.”
His smiling mother was a missionary. She’d grown up wealthy, but exchanged a privileged life for feeding kids, teaching school in third-world villages.
She was killed by a local gang when he was a boy.
“America is my home,” he says. “When I first arrive here, I notice everyone is so nice to me. Even at gas stations, they tell…