Rosilene’s Story: Exploring a New Culture, Discovering Community, Part 1

Rosilene moved from Montgomery County to the City of Frederick in 2023. She and her family made the move because it was more affordable, she says with a slightly apologetic smile, aware of the stereotypes in Frederick about folks who move here from Montgomery.

But Rosilene and her family’s journey to Frederick actually started from much further away: it was in 2017 that they left their home in Jacarei, a city of about 250,000 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her husband, who is an aerospace engineer, had been offered a job with a company based in Northern Virginia. Professional opportunities for her husband were limited in Brazil. “The field in my country is small,” Rosilene explains.

Up until then, Rosilene had spent her entire life in Jacarei and the surrounding area. She’d worked ten years as an elementary teacher, met her husband and had her two kids. Growing up, she lived in crowded Jacarei but would frequently go on vacation to a nearby town, where her parents had a second home.

She speaks fondly of this village in the countryside; it’s one of the areas she misses the most. At one point, she says, people planted a lot of Eucalyptus trees there.

“Every weekend we went to this place,” Rosilene says. “You can see cows, chickens, it’s a village surrounded by farms. They produce milk, grains on the farms. During the day you can go to the creek and play in the street.” Her parents have a home in the village, and Rosilene plans to take her family there the next time they make it back to Brazil.

She’s not sure when that will be, though. The last time they went to Brazil was in 2018, before the pandemic struck. Then they had to wait through a protracted visa process. Now she and her family all have green cards, but money is tight since they just bought a house.

In the meantime, they’ve settled into life in America. Her daughter was four and her son two when they left Brazil. Now they are 12 and 10, and neither speaks Portuguese, although they both understand it.

Rosilene continues to speak Portuguese with them, but they respond in English. “We have crazy conversations sometimes,” Rosilene says. “Sometimes my daughter speaks fast, hold on, what that word means. I don’t know bad words or slang and my daughter sometimes she explain.”

To keep up with her kids – and her husband, who is fluent thanks to spending part of his childhood in Canada – Rosilene decided to take English classes.

It wasn’t that she didn’t know any English; she’d taken English classes in high school. “But you don’t learn anything. If you want to learn English, it’s expensive, and I gave up.”

She arrived here pronouncing the words she did know a little differently. For example, she explained, she’d pronounce “hot dog” as “hotee dogee” since Brazilians put an extra vowel at the end of words. “It’s like how people here don’t pronounce cucina properly, and a lot of food in Spanish.”

So she took English as a second language courses at Montgomery Community College. When her family moved to Frederick, it didn’t take her too long to find the Literacy Council.

Check back to hear more about what Rosilene discovered through her involvement with the Literacy Council.