“I’ve Been Called for It”
This blog post is the fourth blog post of the Housing Alexandria Stories campaign, the purpose of which is to celebrate our residents and share their stories in order to create more recognition and appreciation in our community as well as to strengthen Housing Alexandria’s ability to raise money to provide life-changing services to our residents through our resident services programs. This blog post was based on an interview with Emmeline (she/her), a Housing Alexandria resident.
Emmeline (known to her friends as Emme) is a young Housing Alexandria resident who is deeply motivated to make a difference in her community by leveraging her experiences to help others grow educationally, socially, physically, and spiritually.
Emmeline is only 26 years old, but she has already lived a very rich life. Her parents are from El Salvador, and they thought that it was important that Emmeline and her three younger siblings had opportunities to appreciate their family’s culture and language. To facilitate this, they only spoke Spanish at home, knowing that Emmeline and her siblings would learn English at school. They also sent Emmeline to El Salvador for six months every year, where she would stay with extended family and go to school. Since El Salvador’s academic calendar is different than the United States’, this meant that Emmeline was in school year-round. Despite this, Emmeline describes her stays in El Salvador as “like a vacation” because she was excited to see her family and friends . She truly loved being exposed to and spending time in two different cultures and feels that she “got the best of both worlds” by spending significant time in both The United States and El Salvador. More than this, she felt that she was able to get a sense of identity from spending significant time in two different places and two different cultures, especially since being raised bilingual allowed her to develop a sense of belonging both in El Salvador as well as in the United States. This sense of identity has given her strength and confidence throughout her life.
Emmeline credits her parents for the person she has become. Her parents instilled in her a deep value of education, and because of this she was intrinsically motivated to succeed in school. She became a first-generation college student and attended Bridgewater College, where she studied sociology. She recently graduated with a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction at George Mason University, and she is now working as a high school teacher at Justice High School in Falls Church.
Emmeline has always known that she wanted to serve others, and she describes this desire as feeling a spiritual calling. “I feel like I’ve been called for it,” she says. As a child, she loved watching cop shows like “Criminal Minds” with her parents, and she decided when she was a child that she wanted to become a police officer. After graduating with her undergraduate degree, she intended to apply for the police academy, but found out that she would have to wait six months to begin at the academy, and was unsure of how she would support herself for those six months. Her mom had been working for the public school system in Fairfax County for many years, and she suggested that Emmeline try substitute teaching while waiting to start at the police academy. Emmeline soon got a substitute teaching job and started working with the ESL (English as a Second Language) students. She quickly learned that she was good at teaching and that she enjoyed it, and other teachers encouraged her to go into teaching. Because there was a teacher shortage at the time, a program was created to help people transition into the teaching field. Within a week of applying to the program, Emmeline received a job offer and decided to take it. She says that “Everything fell into place” and that “I have been teaching ever since, and I absolutely love it.”
“Having a roof over our heads shouldn’t be something that is up for negotiation”
One of Emmeline’s favorite parts of her job is connecting with her students beyond only their academics. She teaches ESL students, many of whom are originally from other countries. She likes to show her students that she cares about them by asking them about their weekend or about what they miss about their home. She knows from experience that they have difficulty adapting to the new culture and the different ways schooling is done here than where they are from, so she tries to help them adjust in every way possible. For example, she holds coat drives in the winter to make sure that all her students can have at least a jacket to protect them from the cold. Her students also face obstacles participating in sports at school, like Junior Varsity soccer team that she coaches, because of the required physicals, so she helps her students get physicals. She doesn’t only help students, but she also teaches technology classes to the parents of her students during after-school hours to help them build technology skills. Her favorite thing about her job is seeing her students overcome adversity and achieve success.
Beyond her job and academics, Emmeline is deeply involved in other areas of the community as well. She played soccer in college, which led her to coaching. Not only does she coach her school’s JV team, but she also coaches a U19 boys team and a Sunday adult league team. With the scarce free time she has, she is also deeply involved in her spiritual community. She serves at her church, called Eternal Lives Embassy, in their children’s ministry and in the ministry of health, which includes activities like feeding the unhoused on the weekends. All of her siblings are involved in the ministry at her church as well, which has helped her to stay very close to all of them. She has also stayed close with each of her parents individually, despite the fact that they live outside of the city now.
Emmeline only recently moved to Alexandria and became a Housing Alexandria resident. Before moving to Alexandria, she had a long commute to work from Manassas. She applied for housing at a Housing Alexandria property and was put on a waiting list, but a spot soon opened, and she was able to move in. This is her first home that is just hers. Though she is extremely busy with all the jobs and activities she does and is not at home very much, she loves to have a cozy place that feels like home that she can come back to every night.
On why affordable housing is important, Emmeline says that “Having a roof over our heads shouldn’t be something that is up for negotiation,” and she elaborates that it is important to ensure that those that don’t have high incomes can still have roofs over their heads. She also notes that Alexandria is an expensive place to live, and it is difficult to raise a family here without a high income, so we need organizations like Housing Alexandria to support these families and ensure that they can stay in the place that they call home.
