A bilingual social worker

    I wasn't always bilingual, and I haven't been a social worker for very long.  After my youngest child got his driver's license I decided I wanted to finally do something more in my life.  I don't like to be bored and the idea of a soon to be empty nest did not sit well with me.  I had my undergraduate degree in Psychology, but to get an advanced degree in that field was daunting.  I decided on an MSW without fully understanding what it was I was getting into.  The one thing I did know is that it would qualify me for jobs working with people. It turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.  It's actually hard to believe I didn't find this out earlier.
  The bilingual part came late in life as well.  During my first few semesters of graduate school I heard people say over and over, that there was a demand for social workers who speak Spanish. I had a lot of college Spanish and always got As, but that was decades in the past.  I also was very timid about speaking.  I don't like to make mistakes and am shy in most situations.  I still had a lot of Spanish books in the attic and I went and found them.  I had spent 2 weeks in Cuernavaca Mexico in the 1990s at a total immersion language school.  I got online and found that the school that I had attended was no longer in existence, but there several others.  In the summer of 2011 I signed up, got on a plane, and went to Mexico for 3 weeks. I had forgotten most of my Spanish but was placed in a low intermediate class.  Learning it a second time took less time, and I found that I remembered a lot of vocabulary a some of the grammar. Since then I have been studying by reading as much in Spanish as I can, studying online with Skype, and visiting Cuernavaca.  I have tried a couple of online classes and now I study with Maru Cortes of ASLI Spanish Language Institute in Cuernavaca. I also listen to audio books in Spanish which can be found on Audible.  They are a great value, and also convenient.