Learner Spotlight: Meet Marina
Welcome to our monthly Learner Spotlight!
We invite you to meet Marina, one of our students who will be featured each month in our new “Learner Spotlight”. Adult learners will represent all of the Literacy Council’s programs, including authors from Reflections: Voices of English Learners, the Literacy Council’s literary magazine featuring student writing, as well as other students.
My name is Marina. I came to the United States six years ago from Uzbekistan. Here I live with my family, my husband and two beautiful daughters. In my country I graduated from the University of Foreign Languages. By profession I am a teacher of French and foreign literature. Currently, my main goal in life is to get a profession that will be associated with children. I really love children, I enjoy helping them, I like to share knowledge, and do good deeds.
To make my dream come true, I need to learn English very well. Therefore, I’ve started to attend ESL lessons at the Literacy Council of Frederick County. Here I found very experienced teachers who are truly dedicated to teaching. In the class students learn to express our opinion on the subject, as well as speak and write competently. Our teachers are happy to share their knowledge. Their lessons are very informative and interesting.
I am very glad that I found this educational center. I’d like to share my new good experiences with my friends about this program. With much respect I’d like to express my gratitude to our teachers for their work and patience!
We hope you enjoy Marina’s story “The National Monument”. View our all of our students’ stories on our new Reflections: Voices of English Learners web page!
“The National Monument”, by Marina
There are many different monuments in the world created not only in honor of man but also in honor of the people, important dates in history, characters of famous literary works and even children’s fairy tales. Preservation of memory is the main task of the monuments. There is no future without the past. It is wonderful when people try to preserve their memory, prolong the fate of a person, event, place as well as capturing it in photographs, monuments, and sculptures.
A lot of emotions rise in me in regards to the monuments of the Great Patriotic War. This is emotional distress for many people in our country. It is hard to find a family which did not lose somebody in this awful war. The tragic war started in 1941 and lasted four years. The war that was between the USSR and Germany, which lost about 25 million citizens from fighting and starvation. Millions of courageous soldiers have died, leaving their wives widowed and their children orphaned.
Every city tried to help as much as possible in this terrible war. Women with children, wounded, old people, children who were left without parents and were taken by trains to my hometown of Tashkent. People showed mercy and good nature, shared shelter, food and clothing with them. Often Uzbek families came to the station and took the children to their families. It is about such families, which subsequently erected a national monument that I want to tell you about. Sha Makhmudov and his wife Barry Akramova lived in Tashkent and worked as blacksmiths. At the beginning of WWII, they adopted 15 orphans who lost their parents.
Read more of Marina’s story on page 32 from our 3rd edition of Reflections.