Kerri (Marshall) Petersen:  

Life I have been married for almost 7 years and together for over 11. We have 1 son who was born on the 4th of July, 2004, Dylan. He is our world. I work in San Rafael as VP of Marketing & Creative Services for The Marx Group. TMG is a marketing firm serving primarily the automotive aftermarket. I love my job, love my husband, love my son and love my life! I am a consultant for Tupperware on the side. Also, I am a Creative Memories consultant (scrapbooking). School I was a foreign exchange student to Honduras during my junior and senior year at Casa Roble. I stayed with a host family for 8 weeks during the summer homestay program. I became fluent in Spanish. I had taken some Spanish my freshman and sophomore year but this was a whole year later, so all I remembered was some vocabulary and how to conjugate verbs. So I had my Spanish dictionary in hand and looked up every word. There was no English in Honduras and this was 1989. People thought since I was white, I was with the government. Graffiti everywhere said "Fuera contras y gringos." Well I was a gringa, so I was discriminated against for the color of my skin. People pointed and yelled "Gringa, gringa" and I ran for my life. That was after 2 weeks of being in the country. So 6 more weeks and life got better. I assimmilated and loved every moment of my time there. I had a great family and met with other exchange students so at some points we could speak English. The following year I joined Spanish Club and told my story in Spanish. I went back to Honduras on my own during the summer of 1991. I visited my family again. This time there was running water. When I was there, there was no running water. We showered out of 5 gallon painters buckets and used margarine tubs to scoop the water and pour it over us. My host parents had a car this time, they did not when I was there. We rode the bus and took a taxi everywhere. My host parents now owned a little grocery store. One time, in 1989, we were all supposed to go out dancing to the club outside of town. Well there were a lot of discussions about not having any gas. I volunteered to pay for gas. They said, no you don't understand, there's no gas in the country. It's not being delivered to our gas stations until Tuesday and it was only Saturday. So we didn't go out. No one had any gas, not even taxi cabs. Then when I went to college, I took even more Spanish classes and learned a bunch more. When I graduated from Sonoma State, I was living with 3 latina chicks whose families were from Mexico. We took a 3 week trek to Mexico. The language is different in that there are different dialects. When I spoke the Spanish I learned from Honduras, Mexicans in California asked me where I was from. I said California. What they meant was they could tell my accent was from somewhere else. I eq...Expand for more