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Coming to America: The Reality Outside Hollywood
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June 29, 2010, at 07:00 AM
Michelle Bernal
Dale Heise
A Venezuelan woman finds the love of her life and follows her dream to become an artist in Nebraska.
Michelle Bernal spent her first eight months in the United States trying to leave.
She'd followed the love of her life, an American she met online while studying to be an English translator, from Caracas, Venezuela to Millard, Nebraska. Her only images of America had come from TV or movies full of Hollywood-style violence and excess.
“I was coming from a place where people learn to use guns from the time you're a teenager, where everyone has bars on their doors and windows and where when you park a car, you know you have maybe a 50 percent, maybe a 70 percent chance it will be stolen before you can get back to it,” she said. Widespread poverty combined with no drinking-age regulations and readily available drugs made the streets of Venezuela's capital city a dangerous place.
“Think New York without that much security or air conditioning,” she said. To live someplace where people occasionally left a door unlocked was an utterly foreign idea to her.
Once plagued by fears and uncertainties, she slowly started to acclimate to her new surroundings. She found employment and began making friends. Now an American citizen married to Chris, her Nebraska love, Bernal is mom to two boys and a girl, all of whom are home-schooled.
She has no plans to return to Venezuela, despite her family's requests. “I would be terrified to go back,” she said. “The violence is worse than I remember. I like living here. I like the way I feel here. It's an amazing place to be.”
Bernal is currently studying art at Bellevue University, following a passion that was denied her as a university student in Venezuela. She also designs websites and has kicked off an online artists forum - ArtOnline101.org - to encourage communication between area artists.
Nagging fears born a hemisphere away remain. Slowly, she is learning to trust other people. Slowly, she is becoming OK with having no bars on the windows. She stops to listen to strange noises. She asks her husband to check in frequently.
Still, the fear isn't enough to stop her from reaching out to others - she and her family run a non-profit dedicated to serving a weekly continental breakfast to the homeless at 14th and Farnam streets in downtown Omaha. Donations of money and clothing to Blue Dream Ministries , she says, means the lives of others need not be so enveloped in the sort of fear that she has experienced.
“The U.S. is completely different from what they show on TV and in the movies,” she said. “People think Americans are selfish, but they are really not. Most of them really want to give.”
