HAVERHILL, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — An industrious UMass Lowell college student is working on developing an app to help immigrant families better understand important documents.
To help put himself through college, 20-year-old Adolfo Gonzalez Mateo runs a house painting business. He also wrote a memoir entitled Built in Silence, and now he's working on building an app that helps immigrants understand everything from complex legal documents to notes sent home from their child's school.
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Mateo immigrated to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic when he was just four years old. He was raised by a single mom in Haverhill. As a child, he had to help his mother understand sometimes complex documents.
"I had to be the translator for her. It wasn't perfect at times since the complexity of documents was really hard for me," Mateo explained.
He hopes that when his app is finished, it will interpret, simplify, and translate documents to the user's language to make their lives a little easier.
"I wish my family had something like this that I could use, you know, in the past. It would have made my life so much easier for me and my family."
WBZ NewsRadio's Shari Small (@ShariSmallNews) reports.