Victoria Garcia has learned a lot since her Aurora Sunrise Rotary Club sponsors made the commitment to bring this foreign exchange student from tumultuous Venezuela back to the Fox Valley following her graduation from West Aurora High School.
Since her return to this community, Garcia has learned to drive a stick shift. She now knows how to drywall. She’s also discovered she can not only succeed academically, but get straight A’s. And she’s come to realize just how much opportunity there is here in America, in particular, the Aurora area, where Garcia has not only found a family of supporters but a pathway to her future.
Fearing for that future because of the civil unrest, increasing poverty and violence that continues to plague Venezuela, once one of the richest countries in South America, Rotarians decided to raise the funds to have Garcia return to Aurora in September of 2017, just days before classes at Waubonsee Community College were to begin.
Last week she graduated with honors from WCC, where she worked in the admissions office, became a student ambassador and was named a “featured student.”
“Watching her walk across that stage was pretty rewarding,” said Charlie Schmalz, who along with wife Mary, opened his home to the young Venezuelan these past two years and have made her “part of our family.”
While Garcia visited her mother, who moved to her childhood home of Peru to escape Venezuela’s chaos, the young woman has not been back to her homeland since she left almost two years ago. And yet her heart continues to yearn for what once was.
“I still have strong feelings for Venezuela. I wish things would straighten out,” she said. “I grew up there. It is my home, my family, my friends … my memories are there.”
Garcia says she watches the headlines from Venezuela far closer than she monitors the news here in this country. And when I asked if she had a desire to go back permanently, she hesitated before responding.
“When I had just arrived here,” she told me, “I said yes. Now I don’t know.”
Garcia knows she’s become more Americanized, admitting she sees “little changes … I don’t do some things culturally like I used to,” such as “holding back” instead of giving hugs to total strangers.
She’s also developing close personal relationships, which include the Schmalzes; Dr. David Siegfried and his wife Linda Weglarz, who sponsored her as a West student; and Rotary Regional Assistant Governor Chris Olson, who like Siegfried once lived in Venezuela.
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Funding for Garcia’s junior year at Aurora University — she plans to major in biology and perhaps go into medicine — has been established. But the goal is to raise enough to cover her senior year, said Siegfried.
It’s certainly been a busy two years for this petite soft-spoken exchange student who has all but been adopted by about seven Rotarian families. In addition to working part-time to help cover expenses, her sponsors say Garcia puts in at least 15 hours a week helping an elderly neighbor and volunteering for such organizations as Habitat for Humanity and the Elburn Lions Club.
And yes, she also learned how to drive a stick shift so she could get to some of her classes at Waubonsee’s Plano campus, even taking the long route to avoid any hills until she got used to the manual transmission.
The dry-walling experience came this past spring when she volunteered for a week with a group of fellow Waubonsee students in Hurricane Harvey-ravaged Houston, helping rebuild homes that contractors had abandoned in the two years since the storm wreaked havoc on that Texas community.
“Victoria got so involved because it’s just who she is,” noted Mary Schmalz. “But she also wants to pay it forward because she appreciates what other people have done for her.”
All of the above, Garcia says, were opportunities for growth she never would have experienced had she stayed with her father and brother on the land they farm in rural Venezuela, or had she gone with her mother to Peru.
“Looking back, these two years have given me so much confidence,” she insisted. “We will see what happens in two years … but I feel like my future has been saved.”