Entry 20 - The Stories that Bind Us

Part 1:

In the article “The Stories that Bind Us,” the author, Bruce Feiler, details carried out by two psychologists, who found after their experiment that knowing your family’s story gives children better self confidence and the ability to get through tragedy more quickly. I personally can agree with this premise because I remember how knowing about the struggles that my older family members overcame helped me get over my own struggles, and also because knowing my family’s narrative made me feel like a piece of a very huge puzzle, which helped me feel like I had value as a person during times when I felt worthless. For example, sophomore year at iPoly was a pretty tough time for me due to the immense workloads that I would have, but knowing about how my great grandparents used to live as field workers, I knew that the work I was doing was far better than doing that and that one day it would, like my great grandparents’ work, pay off and it eventually did in the form of a GPA that  was nearly a 4.0. Another example would be how in middle school I was pushed into feeling worthless so many times that the sentiment carried on with me into my freshman year of high school where I started to connect with my old family members a lot more and I eventually ended up finding that I’m a piece of a puzzle known as my family’s history and that I wasn’t in the struggle alone and in a way that helped me emotionally with my inner struggles. Overall, I do agree with the views presented in “The Stories that Bind Us” article because knowing my family’s history has helped me get through both external and internal hurdles.

Part 2:

1. What was going on in your family, and your community at the time of your birth?
2. What characteristics do you remember most about your grandparents?
3. How would you describe your parents?
4. What are some of the best and worst things about them?
5. What was the most important historical event you participated in?
6. What has been the most important learning experience in your life?
7. What did it teach you?
8. What did you do for a living?
9. What were my siblings like?
10. Where did you grow up?

During my interview with my great grandpa, Tiburcio Reyes, I learned some pretty interesting things about him that I really didn’t know. One example came from his response to question four, which also connected to question one, where he told me that at the time of his birth the place he was born in - Santa Elena, El Salvador - was in extreme poverty and he distinctly recalled that when he got just 6 or 7 years older that he knew that people didn’t have much to eat. He later went on to tell me that during this same period the farm that my great great grandfather owned was being ravaged by swarms of locusts so large that they’d cast a shadow over him. My great grandfather also recalled that this infestation of locusts wasn’t just happening in the town he lived in, because there were many accounts of it happening in various parts of El Salvador. But to get over this  tragedy he remembered that his dad and older brothers Jose, Luis, and Cesario would get huge piles of dirt and lay thick layer of it over the locusts while they were eating the plants. Eventually, he told me that there were so many dead things in the soil that it was super fertile and when the swarms did stop coming they had a huge harvest of corn with cobs so large he couldn’t believe it. From this story I derived that my great great grandfather was a very sly man and that with persistence he eventually got a great result, but he also had his faults. My great grandfather followed up the story by saying that his dad would also womanize constantly and that eventually he and his other twelve brothers were eventually left fatherless when his dad died. Now during still continuing food shortage, losing his dad meant that my grandpa’s home was lost since his mom didn’t have rights to the land. Overall, my great grandpa had it really rough and his home life wasn’t very fun either as he’d get his salary taken away by his older brothers and he’d get beaten by them and in one account he got beaten by his mom.

From these accounts and a few more off topic ones that I had with my great grandfather, I learned that the worst of times tend to bring out both the worst and the best of people. Following this realization, my grandpa answered question six by telling me about the time when he only barely immigrated here to the US where he had to work at a cemetery to help support my great grandma, my grandma, and mom. He told me that he made a friend at the cemetery and he thought he was a pretty swell guy, but one day when he was on top of a platform, which was being held up by a counter balance that was controlled by some sort of machine, so that he could fix some light in the ceiling. All of the sudden, he remembers catching a glimpse of his so called “friend” touching the button on the machine that released the counterweight and before he knew it my great grandpa was holding on for dear life onto the lighting fixture that he was fixing and when his manager eventually got him down, he told his manager about what happened and got the man fired. At the end of this conversation, my great grandpa looked directly at me and told me, “be very careful about who you call a friend,” and this also taught me that people can be deceitful, but my grandpa also added that there are great people on this Earth and that he has had quite a few, an example being the guy who taught him the ropes of the cemetery. My great grandpa has had so many experiences from almost dying just to get a very plump guava from a tree, to locust induced famine, and to attempted murder from someone he called a friend and this conversation has taught me that the worst of times brings out both the good and the bad in people, that I should be very weary as to who I make friends with, and that one has to take responsibility for his/her actions.