My Biography

Karel F. Suarez
Composition # 2 Draft #3
November 04, 2009.

My Biography

My name is Karel Fabiola Suarez De Ugarte. I am the only daughter of Sylvia Margarita Alcira De Ugarte Lazcano. I was born in Cochabamba Bolivia on May 24, 1982. Cochabamba is the heart of Bolivia. It is Bolivia's third largest city. It is located in a valley surrounded by the Andes mountain range. The climate is considered the most comfortable in all of Bolivia, with warm and sunny days and cool nights. Cochabamba has many places to get to know. One of these places is the “El Cristo de la Concordia” statue. It is the world's tallest statue of Christ. It surpasses the more famous statue in Rio de Janeiro by a few meters. The statue towers over Cochabamba, with its outstretched arms in a welcoming embrace and is located at the top of the huge San Pedro hill, which overlooks Cochabamba about 265 meters above the city.

The name of the neighborhood where I grew up is called Cala – Cala. Cala – Cala is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Cochabamba. It is a residential area. The avenues have gardens running through the middle of them acting as islands separating one direction of traffic from the other. Each garden has palm trees and flowers. Each avenue is connected to another avenue by plazas. The majority of the plazas have fountains that have their own unique design. They are surrounded by trees and flowers that make my neighborhood a beautiful place. The streets are never crowded and life is peaceful because you do not hear a lot of noise from cars or people. The houses are big and beautiful; each house has a different shape and color depending on the owners taste, this makes the neighborhood less monotonous. Generally all houses have a front garden and backyard that is surrounded by high walls, which give you privacy. There are private guards on some streets that protect the homes from thieves because they are always on the lookout to see who they will rob next.

My family lived in that neighborhood all their lives. My family is big. My grandparents had five children, one son and four daughters. My mom is the second of the daughters. I am the first granddaughter and the oldest niece. I have eleven cousins. Despite the fact that everyone works in my family, we see each other a lot during the week. We have the tradition of eating lunch together and spending Sundays together; this tradition keeps us together. The same tradition is kept on birthdays, holidays such as Christmas, New years, Mother’s day, or Father’s day. We always celebrate holidays together. For example, in birthdays, the celebration starts from the morning. Everyone meets at my grandparents’ home to eat breakfast together, and for lunch my grandmother prepares the favorite dish of the birthday person and makes the cake. We spend the whole afternoon together talking, listening to music, or watching movies.

I went to a private school named Maryknoll. It is a Catholic school near my house. The teachers were extremely strict. They did not allow the students to talk in class. If we broke the rules we would get punished. They would punished us by making us sweep the school floors. They would also make us leave the class and stand in the middle of school for one hour until the next class started, so that everyone in the school saw that we misbehaved. Despite the rigid rules, I liked my school because the teachers taught me values and good study habits. But when I was in tenth grade, I decided to change to Issac Attie school because Maryknoll did not have a senior trip. The tradition of schools in my country is to make a graduation trip in the last year of school so that everyone will have something to remember with other classmates. At this school, I attended eleven and twelve grade. For my senior trip I went to Mexico. I had the opportunity to visit the Federal District, Acapulco, Taxco, and Cuernavaca. It was an unforgettable trip because it was the first time I saw the ocean and I had a lot of fun with my classmates playing with waves on the beach. I enjoyed the view of the pyramids of Mexico, of the exotic food, the hotel in Acapulco, and of my trips to Cuernava.

When I finished high school, I started to study medicine in San Simon University (the public university in Cochabamba.) San Simon is known in all of South America because it has the best medical school. For this reason I had classmates from other countries near Bolivia. I had the opportunity to travel with my friends from Peru to Cusco, a beautiful city with a lot of history. I studied at San Simon for four years. After wards I went to a private university named Universidad Central, and I studied Physical Therapy and Kinesiology for five years. In 2006 I finished my studies and started to work.

In my free time I worked as volunteer in Viedma Hospital (the public hospital in Cochabamba) with an organization called “Movimiento Sonrisa” which has a figurative meaning; working for a smile. We had many volunteers working in each section in the hospital. I was in charge of the burned children section, and I had five people working with me. Everyday we went to the hospital to help the children to eat, to play with them, and to teach them to read and write because many of them had to be in the hospital many years and they could not go to school.

We also worked by organizing events to raise money to pay for hospital bills, medicine, and medical exams for patients in the hospital who could not pay. In 2002 I traveled to Ornskoldsvik, Sweden with my organization as an exchange student. This was posible thanks to people who found out about our organization and funded us. We were invited by the government to stay for three months. During our stay we were able to meet with many people and organizations to tell them what we did as volunteers. By doing this we were able to get grants to construct a shelter for family members of the patient. Seventy percent of the children in the hospital came from distant villages and that is why it was difficult for their parents to visit them every day. Many parents decided to abandon them and many decided to stay with them at the hospital during their entire stay there. The parents generally slept outside in the gardens because they did not have money to pay for a hotel. The “Movimiento Sonrisa” shelter’s objective is to give parents a comfortable and safe place where they could stay while their children were in the hospital.

In 2003 I met my husband. He is from the United States of America. I met him when he was in vacation in Cochabamba. At the end of the year we traveled together to Asuncion, Paraguay and Brazil to see the Iguazu waterfalls. We were engaged for four years. During that time we traveled to many places within my country because he was interested to travel around Bolivia. In August 2007 I got married. In 2008 my husband had to go back to the U.S. to finish school; this is why I came to the U.S. I arrived in March 2009 and started to study English in LaGuardia Community College and in June, I entered the CLIP program where I am currently studying because I want to improve my English in order to validate the physical therapy and kinesiology title I already have.