Meet Andres Huertas: Soccer opened the door for this Great Barrington police officer

Berkshire Eagle: Accents in the Berkshires

GREAT BARRINGTON — Andres Huertas didn’t speak any English when his parents moved from Bogota, Colombia, to the Berkshires. It took a drawing of a soccer ball for him to realize that he might be able to communicate in his new country after all. Another 10-year old boy at Undermountain School in Sheffield drew that picture and showed it to Andres as an invitation. “I kind of understood what he was signaling,” Huertas recalls 17 years later, after his midnight shift as a police officer in Great Barrington. “That was one of my happiest memories as a child, because I was able to play soccer again. That’s how we were communicating, through pictures.” Read the rest at http://tinyurl.com/accentspodcast