When my father set out to write a few tales to answer some questions his children had about his life, he realized there was much more to tell and decided to put the stories together in a book. The process of compiling all these stories about his journey from Granada, Nicaragua to Washington, DC became a journey in itself. Months of research, reaching out to unknown family members, and navigating the publishing world was all new to him, just as moving to the United States had been when he was nineteen years old. The stories not only answer the questions he was trying to answer, but gives his children a view into his life before they were born. As he would say, life is story. Carolina M. Calonje