Oscar in China on LSC ’07
Oscar Portillo, a 2007 LSI Fellow and member of the LearnServe China ’07 Trip was recently named a Gates Millenium Scholar. Congratulations Oscar!
Being a fellow enriched me culturally and intellectually. I had big misconceptions about the world. I realized that even though culture, language, and location might divide people, poverty and sickness do not discriminate because of geographic realms or cultural heritage. But besides learning this, the Fellows experience served as a bridge for me to American culture. As a person who just moved to the United States from a small town in EL Salvador and did not speak English as well as I might have wished, the LSI Fellows program helped me to see a bigger picture of the North American culture and perspective. My high school is composed by more than 2/3 minority students and the Wheaton area is a very diverse community; these two factors created a cultural bubble—another parallel dimension if you will. As part of Fellows meetings, I was exposed to people to whom I would have been never been exposed to by just hanging around in my neighborhood. And by going to China I was not only granted the opportunity of fulfilling my childhood dream, I also got a clearer idea of what I want to do with my life.