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Gulliver Prep senior Thomas Suarez is Gulliver’s Silver Knight nominee for World Languages. Suarez grew up in Nicaragua speaking Spanish and English. Since seventh grade, he’s been taking Chinese at school. This year he is taking Advanced Placement Chinese.
He is fluent enough in Chinese that he did very well in a statewide Chinese competition hosted by Chinese teachers.
“I got awards in the two highest categories, Superior and Outstanding,” he says. “I received a Superior in listening, an Outstanding in speaking and an Excellent in reading.”
He recently participated in the same competition.
He enjoys learning Chinese because it’s so different than anything else he is learning.
“I found Chinese culture was interesting,” he says.
Suarez says there was a strong Chinese population in Nicaragua. They had big celebrations at school and he always thought the celebrations were cool. Whenever they would have such celebrations, he wanted to be a part of them.
At Gulliver, he’s in the Chinese Club and the Chinese Honor Society.
Community service is a huge part of the Silver Knight process. Suarez’s project helped children in his hometown.
“In front of my house where I lived in Nicaragua, there was a church, San Martin de Porres,” he says. “Chess was big in Nicaragua. After school we’d play chess (there). Eventually so many kids would play chess, that we would have to wait for board.”
The school connected to the church created a chess club that became very popular.
“It was a big opportunity for these kids to play chess,” he says. “They represented the Nicaraguan National Team.”
When he heard they were having financial difficulty, he wanted to help. He saved up by doing odd jobs for his aunt like dog walking.
“I was hearing about it for a while,” he says. “”Here I’m living with my aunt. My mom and dad live in Nicaragua. At my school we did not have a chess club. My sisters are four years younger than me and they are better than me. They practice with my dad every day.”
Through his dad’s account with the National Chess Federation, he was able to get a large discount for his bulk purchase of chess equipment.
He purchased 100 chess sets, 100 clocks and two presentation boards.
At school, Suarez is a member of the Computer Science Club and Zeta Omicron, the Computer Science Honor Society.
He’s gone to Homestead to teach computer science at an immigrant learning center for Breakthrough Miami. They were teaching the language Python.
“At that point, I only knew C++ and Java,” he says. “I didn’t know we were teaching Python until we were on the way there, so I was Googling Python on the bus there. I felt I learned just as much as the kids that day.”
He’s a founder of Serving Vulnerable Communities in Colombia (SVVC).
“I started it with two of my friends who were from Colombia,” he says.
They make education videos for a middle school/high school in Colombia. The theme of some videos was soccer in honor of the World Cup.
SVVC members raised money to send the kids in Colombia to see a movie and go out for a meal.
“We bought them tickets to a movie theater, and we arranged for a bus to take them,” he says.
Suarez is still deciding on a college. He’s been accepted to the Miami-Dade Honors College, Michigan Tech, Penn State, and Trinity College Dublin to study computer science. He’s considering attending Miami-Dade and then transferring to another university for the final two years.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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