Maria Ocampo overcame heartache to work toward her goals

Maria Ocampo wants to show her family she’s got what it takes to get into the U.S. Army.

She wants to show the world she’s got what it takes to overcome tragedy.

But first, she’ll show teachers and students at Preble High School she can learn to speak English with the best of them.

Ocampo, 16, has been in Green Bay since January. She’s in the English as a Second Language program at Preble. She learned the basics of English at her private school in Colombia.

“But we never practiced because our language is Spanish,” Ocampo said.

Practice became imperative when she and her three siblings came to the United States with their mother. Ocampo’s father died when she was a toddler. Her mother remarried, and Ocampo had a father again – until he died shortly before they came to America.

The family came to Green Bay to live with Ocampo’s uncle, Miller Tavera, and grandmother, Maria Tavera.

Then, the unthinkable happened: Ocampo’s mother died.

“My mom was excellent,” Maria said. “She was excellent friend and beautiful woman.”

Besides her uncle and grandmother, Ocampo’s family here includes her older brother, Oscar, a senior at Preble, and two younger siblings who attend Danz Elementary School, Juan, 9, and Paula, 7.

She also has about 50 extended family members here, if you include second and third cousins.

Teachers call Ocampo strong and brave. “She’s always smiling, always happy, always sweet,” said Barbara Kluth, an ESL teacher and head of the ESL department at Preble.

Ocampo doesn’t like to talk much about the past. She’s eager to move on and to take her future by storm. “I want to go to college,” she said, adding she’d like to be a veterinarian or go into the Army.

“But my family says that I’m too lazy for that,” she said with a laugh. Besides soccer, some of her favorite activities are eating, sleeping and watching TV.

“I know that I’m too lazy, and I need something to wake up me,” she said.

She thinks the Army might be the perfect “wake-up.” “I want to show them that I can,” she said.

Ocampo’s love of animals goes back to Colombia. The family lived in the capital, Bogota, but had a farm two or three hours into the country. There, Ocampo helped care for horses, cows, chickens, dogs and her mom’s monkeys.

“I liked animals, all kind of animals, all my life,” she said.

She’s found life in the United States is more organized than life in Colombia. Sometimes, she misses how things used to be.

“The culture is different” in Colombia, she said. “We like to do different things. We like to go dancing, go out with friends…. Here, every day is the same: Go to school, come home.”

But she has no complaints about how people treated her when she came to Preble. “Everybody was nice to me,” she said.

She’s made many friends and she thinks her English is good enough for people to understand her.

“They answer me. They talk to me,” Ocampo said.

But Ocampo doubts they understand the enormous effort she makes to form each sentence, to turn her thoughts into her new language.

The effort is one she wants to make, though.

“If I want a good job, I need to know English,” Ocampo said.



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