Moments in my Literacy Life
Kline, Sonia

>>SONIA: In European history, I loved history, I was asked to write an essay and the essay was titled "Will Germany Ever Be United?" I remember working through the essay and I remember writing the essay and doing the research and being really, really interested in it. In 1989, which was my last year of high school, the Berlin Wall came down and all of us in the history class got to watch all the live footage on television. So I left England about thirteen years ago and moved to Hungary and lived in Budapest for four years which was this amazing experience. Suddenly I found I was away from my family and a lot of my friends, so technology became very integral in linking me with my family because my parents, who were both very techno savvy, loved to watch my daughter Emma and they follow her on Facebook and even my ninety-five year old grandmother watches my daughter through technology. So it's been this amazing way to connect with my family and then also with friends as well because working internationally I found that I've met lots of different people and those people tend to move to other places too. So Facebook is really, really important to me in keeping in contact with people all over the world. We were early adopters of technology back in the late 70's and early 80's. We had one of the first home computers and I remember using a tape recorder to put on files and writing in basic and using "go to." I was also the first girl in my high school to take a class in technology. Back to my family, my father went crazy for technology and he's still a complete gadget person and it drives my mother crazy. I resist technology but always get caught up in it. So I love it and hate which is probably what my mother would say too.