A curly blond haired girl stares up inquisitively, puzzled and perplexed attempting to decipher the odd sounds mouthed from her family members' lips. "Je t'aime, ma chérie!" "Que linda! Es una muñeca." "How cute, she's adorable." Confusion sets in: she only understands fragments of this conversation. As a three-year-old girl moving from France to Miami, I only spoke and understood French. My inability to communicate landed me in the principal's office the first week of school. My infraction?...

7:00 p.m. The time has come for my daily ritual. I close the door and prepare the space: music to set the ambiance, a book to read and a movie to watch. First cold then lukewarm, the water comes cascading out. I incrementally add hot water to reach the perfect temperature and sprinkle my concoction of bath salts and perfumes. Slowly, one foot at a time I lower myself into the water. Enveloped in a cloud of steam and heat,...

8:00 minutes. A timer goes off. Action! A hand frantically types at 70 words per minute. An overview for the second constructive speech appears on the page. Hyper-focused, a bespectacled girl grabs her red inky pen and jots down answers to her opponent's speech. 5:00 minutes, focus, focus. Only one minute left to make sure she has the right evidence to support her arguments. 4:00 minutes. "Cut prep!" She stands up and makes sure the judge is ready. Words pour out of her mouth...

Black dots dressed in laces and bars twirl on the page in front of me. Alternating forte and pianissimo longitudinal wave notes hum through the air. While my petite fingers dance along the black and white keys, my eyes begin to slowly close and I become enveloped in the music that surrounds me. As a child, I considered piano a burden - an activity that my mother imposed upon me and obligated me to practice every day, often leading to...

I remember caressing Lili's rough, coarse, and wrinkly skin. The one-year-old elephant I was feeding in the bush of the Okavango Delta, Botswana and the lone rhinoceros we endlessly searched faced an uncertain future that potentially included death by poaching. The importance of saving the elephants goes beyond its cuteness depicted in my favorite Babaar books and Dumbo classics. This majestic animal, the largest living land mammal, has roamed the Earth for millions of years, well before humans appeared. Apart...