College Admissions Essay - A Willingness to Overcome Differences

College Admissions Essay - A Willingness to Overcome DifferencesI chip in a fledgling companionship with Amalia, a Spanish speaking woman. Amalia is not fluent with english, and my Spanish is wobbly and crude. So we get together whenever contingent to practice each others native tongue, half an arcminute of Spanish, half an hour of English.When we first started meeting, I saw a forbidding wall of run-in that I thought had to come down if a bond of confederateship was to grow. The run-in that bring me such exhilaration and such rousing exchanges of ideas in English turned ornery and cantankerous in Spanish. Talking to Amalia, I was c arful to bring up topics that I thought my Spanish could accost without too many searches through the dictionary Amalia and I kept mingled with us like a life vest we had to share. Despite that, I often found myself staring at a wall of words, forsake in a maze, with the right words eluding me, defying me, mocking me from where they hid. The wor ds turned me into a blushing, stammering nitwit. I used exaggerated hand gestures and seventh cranial nerve expressions. I got gender and number wrong much of the time, unaccustomed as I was to having to think about that in English.I was embarrassed by my strong American accent and by the mistakes I made. When I well-tried to tell Amalia that I had eaten fried eggs that morning, she had to gently tell me that I was referring to male anatomy. I referred to elderly people in a degrade way. When I thought I was calling a male friend embarrassed, I was saying that he was pregnant.Such is the wily temper of words. Still, I decided to earn my livelihood with words because Im enamored of them, in awe of them. Im usually a humble person near the foundation of the food chain, but words wield... ...a and I even though objects, ideas, and feelings are expressed with different words in our respective tongues. I intimate that words arent just counterbalanceational, though they are that t oo, but that they can overly be catalysts. They can influence human interaction, even when the thing they represent is not clear or, more to the point, at precisely that time.With Amalia and I, the words driven us toward each other. The bond grew out of a mutual closing to knock down the language barrier, not from its having been diminished. Our act of tackling words signaled to each of us that the other was a person who wished barriers between people to be gone, not reinforced.We grew close because of the language barrier, not in spite of it. The construction of words was the bond. Id mistaken its true form. It wasnt a wall it was a bridge. And right away weve met in the middle.