Enrique Callejas-Santos stands in front of Edinburgh Community High School.
ANDY BELL-BALTACI | DAILY JOURNAL
When his father took him and his brother from their hometown in central Mexico to Edinburgh for a job opportunity, his life changed forever.
Enrique Callejas-Santos will walk across the stage at Edinburgh Community High School’s graduation ceremony Saturday. But when he moved to Edinburgh with his father in December of 2019, he had no friends at the school and virtually no fluency in English, Callejas-Santos said.
“Language was really hard. When I got here, I didn’t know how to communicate or talk to people. Classes were really hard,” he said. “I was an outsider because of language. It’s not like ‘oh hey, there’s a new guy, let’s talk to him.’ Sometimes they would talk to me for a little, but it was hard. It was hard to express my feelings or talk to teachers, because I didn’t understand things and I didn’t get it.”
Just a couple of months after he started classes for the spring semester of freshman year, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person schooling.
“That really messed me up because school helped me a lot with learning English. Once I stopped going to school I didn’t have a chance to talk to people or hear or listen to English,” he said.
Edinburgh schools don’t have English Language Learner classes, so Callejas-Santos watched YouTube videos to help with sentence structure, he said.
“I would take the sentences and write them all in a notebook of sentences and I had to read them and read them and read them until I learned them. I used to struggle with pronunciation and grammar, but I think I’ve been doing a great job in three years and I’m proud of it,” he said.
While Callejas-Santos was able to get some of the basics down, it was his involvement with sports that propelled him to not only have more conversations with people, and make friends, he said. That journey started with him joining the football team during his sophomore year.
“Edinburgh doesn’t have a soccer team so I joined the football team as a kicker. It was amazing, I think all the people yelling my name was amazing. I made a 45-yard field goal and everyone was saying ‘congratulations.’ It was really cool,” Callejas-Santos said. “I joined the track team my junior year and I was also a peer mentor, so I helped kids. It was fun. They were learning how to read and make sentences and things like that were really helping me too.”
Despite his success, he still struggled with homesickness, as most of his family was still in the city of Martínez de la Torre in the Mexican state of Veracruz, he said.
“I felt that I wasn’t going to make it and I wanted to go back to Mexico so bad. I felt this wasn’t for me. It was just really hard,” Callejas-Santos said. “I miss all my family in Mexico. My sister is in Mexico with my mom. I talk to them all the time but I cried when I left my mom. I was really sad, but I know they’re proud of me because of what I’ve become.”
Originally interested in pursuing a career in business, Callejas-Santos took nursing classes at C4 Columbus Area Career Connection, and through those classes, he discovered a passion. He will study nursing at IUPUC this fall, he said.
“I love that class and really enjoyed that class,” he said. “I was thinking about being a healthcare administrator, because that’s a business thing to do, but I got into nursing, learning how to take vitals and how the body works. I got really into it. I would love to become a nurse practitioner, that’s one of my goals.”
