Ana Diaz: My Best Friend's Grandmother

Ana Diaz Many times we believed we know everything about a person, until we begin to ask questions which are really deep and personal, then we discover that we only knew the tip of the iceberg. I interview Ana Diaz or as we all know her “Dona Rosa”. Ana is my best friend’s grandmother and a very lovely lady. She was born and raised in San Juan a province in the south of the Dominican Republic. Ana told me many things about her life that I could have never imagined; things about her childhood, teen years, and adulthood that I never tough such a lovely and kind lady had gone through. Ana Diaz was the youngest of four children. She had a twin, but the twin sister died seven days after they were born. Ana was the only child of her father since her mother had 3 children of an earlier marriage. When she was a little girl she had two goats that were her pets; Meme, the male and Rosa the female. She used to love to feed them and watch them jump around until someone poisoned Meme and Rosa die of depression after been left alone. Ana’s favorite candy was fire balls and canquina. Canquina is a sugar candy that after you put it in your mouth, it becomes chewy and sticky. Most of the time she would play alone and made pretend houses, with wooden sticks, and old pieces of cloth that she would found around the house. Ana’s father died when she was seven years old. …show more content…
Since her dad died things started to change around the house and her mother gave her away. She went to live with an old lady called Teresa, who a year later gave her to Altagracia. When she went to live with Altagracia she became her adoptive daughter not a servant. She used to help in the family bodega and help around the house doing the dishes and helping to cook. She never went to school, instead a neighbor used to teach her some math, therefore she doesn’t know how to read or write. The only thing that she learned to write was her first and last name. Ana told me her experiences in the first house she lived and how she was treated badly. When living with Teresa, Ana was treated as a servant. Her duties mostly consist of doing shores around the house, mainly mapping and swiping the floors. Ana had a special corner in the house, where she used to sit and think about her father and into what extend her life had been different if we had been alive. The thought of running away cross through her mind many times due to the level of depression she was suffering although she was a seven years old little girl. Working in the family bodega she met her first love called “Saladin”. Saladin was an engineer and he had a very beneficial socioeconomically position. She had to break the romance with Saladin because at age fourteen her biological mother came back to get her and take her to live with her at the country side. After living with her mother for about a month, her mother arranged a marriage with Gilberto, who then became the father of her three children. They used to live in a little wooden house which floor when it rained got cover in mud and after the rained stopped she would have to clean the house sometimes spending entire days. Her house was small; a dining table, a stove, a refrigerator and a bed. In the bed they all sleep together. Also in their little wooden house there was no bathroom, this meant that when they need to use the bathroom they had to do it behind the bushes. Ana migrated to the United States and started to work at the airport as a cleaning lady. She still has the same exact job after 25 years. Ana described her life as an old adult as the better staged of her life since know she has opportunities that she did not have when she was young and in her home country. Now her favorite hobby is to go shopping and spend time at the mall. She