Natalia Orosco selecting material at the Adult Reading Center

For almost 20 years after Natalia Orosco arrived in Houston from Mexico, she had to ask people to accompany her to the doctor, to the grocery store and to her children’s school when she had to meet with their teachers. She needed help because she couldn’t speak or understand English.

When Ms. Orosco went to a public health clinic to have her children immunized, she saw an Adult Reading Center poster that asked in Spanish, "Do you want to learn English?" By then she was tired of her dependency and her inability to communicate, and she signed up the next day. She remembers saying to herself, "I don’t want to have someone by my side all of the time. I have to do this for myself and for my children."

When the classes became too challenging and she wanted to quit, the staff at the Adult Reading Center encouraged her to continue. "Every time I said, ‘I can’t do this, I don’t understand,’ they would say, ‘Yes you can. You can do it.’ They wouldn’t let me give up," Ms. Orosco recalls.

A book about Helen Keller also inspired her. "Here was a child who could not see and could not hear and she learned. I have my eyes and my ears, and I knew I could succeed, too."

Ms. Orosco also completed citizenship training at the Adult Reading Center and became a United States citizen in 1997. Her daughter attends Alvin Community College, and her son is in the eighth grade. When her son recently asked her a question about the Constitution for a school project he was working on, she was pleased to be able to give him the correct answer.

Besides helping her children, Ms. Orosco now volunteers as a tutor at the center and translates reports from missionaries who work around the world for her church. When she told her husband she was going to spend two days each week volunteering at the center, he asked, "How much are they going to pay you?" She reminded him, "I didn’t pay them anything when I attended school there for three years." They both agreed it was time to give back to the organization and community that had done so much for them.

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