In That Room, Everyone Had a Story


The room was always full.

Rows of computers stretched from wall to wall, each one humming softly. The screens flickered with exercises, dialogues, and instructions that felt simple on the surface but carried weight for the people sitting there.

Some leaned forward, focused. Others hesitated before typing, translating in their heads before committing to a word. A few would glance around, not for answers, but for reassurance.

At the front, we moved between screens, checking progress, answering questions, helping when we could. But most of what mattered was happening quietly. It was in the pauses. In the effort. In the decision to keep going.

No one was there by accident.

Every person in that room had crossed something to get there. A border. A body of water. A line they could not uncross.

That is origin to this poem I wrote in July 2004.

All are welcome here
By Brian Schwarz

The ones who come from far away
And them, who cross the water near
All are welcome here

Those whose families plucked them to
And them, crossing the river in fear
All are welcome here

On flights of freedom or walks through hell
Or in the beds of trucks, shedding tears
All are welcome here

Though their equality’s feigned or just
Whether the law chides them or cheers
All are welcome here

Looking back, the room itself fades.

What stays are the people.

And the quiet understanding that starting over is never simple, but it is always human.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Living a Magazine Life in a Newspaper World

Image
If you took a snapshot of my life at any given moment, it might read like a chaotic news story. A sudden move. A job left behind. A new direction that doesn’t seem to connect to the last one. From the outside, it can look unstable, even risky. Like something went wrong, like the pieces don’t quite fit. That’s the nature of a newspaper story. It captures a moment. It simplifies it. It packages it quickly so it can be understood right away. And in that format, my life doesn’t always make sense. But a life isn’t meant to be understood in headlines. Some lives are more like magazines. A magazine isn’t about a single moment. It’s about a collection. A theme that unfolds over time. You don’t understand it by looking at one page. You understand it by stepping back and seeing how everything connects, even when the individual pieces seem unrelated. That’s the kind of life I’ve lived. There were times when I moved quickly, when I made decisions that didn’t follow a traditional path. ...
Read more

How I Accidentally Fell Into Brazilian TikTok

Image
I didn’t plan this. At some point, without really thinking about it, I opened TikTok and started speaking in Portuguese. Not perfectly, not like a teacher, but like someone genuinely trying to connect. And something unexpected happened. Brazil answered. What started as a few videos turned into conversations. Then live streams. Then real connections with people across Brazil and Brazilians living all over the world. I wasn’t studying Portuguese in a classroom. I was living it, one interaction at a time. It reminded me of how I learned Spanish years ago, not through rules and textbooks, but through immersion, music, and relationships. Brazilian TikTok became that same kind of environment. Fast, emotional, and real. Music played a big role. Songs like Evidências were no longer just songs. They became shared experiences. When I posted videos with bilingual captions, something clicked. I was not just understanding the language. I was helping connect two worlds. And somewhere alo...
Read more

Stagnant and confused

Two of my best friends from college recently finished graduate school. I had always planned going back to school, and really thought I'd just take a year or two to decide what direction I wanted to take before committing to a program. I still can't commit. I'm having trouble picking a program. It's not that I have a huge variety of interests. In fact, everything I want to study relates to my other interests in some way. But I have yet to find a school with a master's degree flexible enough to take all my interests into account. I'll wake up on Monday with my love languages rising to the top of my list of likes, and I start leaning toward the study of linguistics. Maybe pure research. Maybe bilingualism and language acquisition. Maybe I could solve the problems of illiteracy. Then on Tuesday, I'll wake up considering the plight of people in the underdeveloped world and I start to think about how I can help, beyond helping them all read. I think I...
Read more