Meet David: A Young Venezuelan Refugee Building Computers and a Brighter Future in New Hampshire
Mirasol arrived in New Hampshire with her family last January, just days before the U.S. refugee program was suspended. Joanna, one of her case specialists at IINE, remembers asking Mirasol what made her want to come here during such a politically fraught time.
“We did it for David,” Mirasol said.
David, her son, was fourteen when they arrived. In a meeting with the family last fall, Joanna asked him, “So, are you getting ready for high school?” He responded that he had spent the summer building a computer in his bedroom. She was a little bit stunned.
A Passion for Computers
Computers have always been David’s passion. He speaks excellent English, often translating for his parents, and says that while English was a required course in elementary school, what really motivated him to study the language was how useful he found it to be when working with computers.
Growing up in Colombia, where his family first lived after being forced to flee Venezuela, David didn’t have a computer at home. This was hard because a computer would have meant connection to the wider world—including baseball. David had played first base in Venezuela, but found that his favorite sport was not as popular in Bogotá.
David particularly wished he had access to a computer when 2020 rolled around.
“COVID-19 put me into a situation in which I was alone in my bedroom without doing anything and with only a cell phone, mostly just to call my parents,” he says. But as much as he would have loved to play games and watch sports on those long days alone, he feared a computer would be too extravagant a purchase, so he never asked for one.
“Natural For Me”
David’s first impression of Manchester, New Hampshire was the cold.
“It was a shock! I never saw snow before that, so it was funny—the first five days I was so impatient to grab the snow that I would literally grab it without any protections and come back to the house with frozen hands!”
Another pleasant surprise was the welcome he received from his new community: “There are many friendly people here.”
David was also grateful to have the support of IINE. “From the start, from the transport from the airport to here, and then the appointments for each document that we need, it was very helpful.”
IINE helped David’s parents find work. His father got his U.S. driver’s license, and the family was able to get a car. That meant David could get to Best Buy and pore over consumer electronics.
His family now had a laptop, but it was an older model, and David quickly discovered that it would not accommodate too many upgrades. He knew he still couldn’t afford a top-of-line computer, but after watching hours of YouTube videos, he thought of a different solution: perhaps he could make one himself.
“I started learning about the market, Nvidia, Intel, the different sizes of monitors, how the technology works, the transistor, the vehicle, the parts that make the motherboard consumption bigger or lower. I saw so many videos about building PCs that when I did it for the first time, it was natural for me.”
He was proud of his success and documented the process on video. It was a thrill every time he was able to run a new application or play a new computer game. He wasn’t the only one who was proud.
“My parents didn’t have the knowledge of how advanced I am in the matter, so, it was impressive to them to build a computer from zero.”
“He’s Really Smart”
Joanna says that when David told her that he’d built a personal computer in his bedroom, she “asked him if his school had a robotics club or anything like that. He said he didn’t know. Then I remembered that Tram’s daughter goes to a public charter school that has a 3D printer. When I told her about him, she was like, We’ve got to get David into this school!”
Tram is the Senior Program Manager of IINE Language Services and works with Joanna at IINE’s offices in Manchester. It was easy for her to relate to David. Tram’s parents were refugees from Vietnam, and she attended public school in Manchester when she was David’s age.
“Joanna came to me and said, Hey, this kid’s building a computer, and I said, Wow, that’s pretty amazing. Is this legit? He’s really building a computer—or is this kid like taking apart a toaster oven? But she said, He’s actually really building a computer. He’s really smart. He’s won awards. I have the certificates.”
Tram was excited.
“My children go to the Spark Academy for Science and Design, and the school has relationships with advanced manufacturers in our area,” Tram explains. “We have a lot of tech-related industries, but New Hampshire also has a rapidly aging workforce that’s going to see a lot of retirements in the next few years. So, the school is trying to quickly prepare people for those careers.”
Tram knew enrolling at Spark Academy could be a life-changing opportunity for David.
“During freshman year, students can learn Computer Aided Design. They have a 3D printer, a robotic dog, and they’re in the VEX robotics program. It’s actually part of Manchester Community College, and in your third and fourth years, you can take enough credits to graduate with an associate’s degree. That meant we could really help David find a career that could be life-sustaining.”
Tram asked Joanna if she could meet with David to get a sense of his English proficiency. When she did, she was thoroughly impressed. Her next step was to reach out to the school’s headmaster.
A Foot in the Door
The news wasn’t good: enrollment for the year was closed. But Tram was undeterred. To get David in the door, she asked if her daughter could give him a tour. When the headmaster agreed, Tram met with David’s parents to explain the situation and asked if she could try to arrange a meeting for them with the headmaster on the day David took the tour.
“The idea was just for them to be able to ask questions. To learn how they could best prepare David to enroll in the future,” she says.
Everyone agreed to meet. Before they did, Tram asked for her own one-on-one with the headmaster.
“He kind of knew what I do already. But I sat down and I gave him IINE’s mission statement, told him what the world looks like that our clients live in, and suggested that if we could just give one student a shot, and if he was successful, imagine what that could do for our whole community.”
Then it was David’s turn.
“I showed him the videos [of building the computer] and I showed him my grades, because they were good. A’s in all [classes].”
David says the headmaster asked how hard he’d had to work to get those grades, and he had to admit that the success had come easily to him.
“He said, Now you know, here I would make you suffer to get them.”
This only made David more excited. “I love a challenge,” he says with a smile.
A High-Tech Future
David says that when his mom learned he would be attending Spark, she became “so excited about that she started crying in the room. That was beautiful for me.”
As he begins to explore, he has lots of ideas for where the future might take him.
“I don’t have a very specific goal—maybe aerospace engineering, or maybe computer engineering, because one of my dreams is to work for Advanced Micro Devices—one of the biggest companies that makes PC parts like the microprocessors and graphics cards.”
There is one goal that he’s clear on.
“To make my parents happy. Because they’ve helped me out so much in every way. One of my goals is to make them proud of me.”
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