Being A Missionary Kid

Chapter 3

Since Aix was so small, I had to go to a private school that was only a few minutes from my house. It was really small, with three classrooms: one for kindergarteners, one for 1st and 2nd graders, and one for 3rd through 5th graders. Me, being in first grade at the time, got put (you guessed it) with the first and second graders, and Will got put with the kindergarteners.

My classroom was small and white. We sat at the kind of desks that, in America, you'd only find at colleges. Our teacher was named Ms. Nicole, and she was nice. She seemed to care about the fifteen or so kids that she looked after. I showed up in that room on my first day, and all I knew in French were colors, numbers, and whatever else I learned from Little Beethoven. The teacher introduced me, said that I came from America, and sat me down at my little desk. The other kids stared at me. It was hard not to. I mean, I am the new kid from another country and all.

The school year didn't get much better from there. The kids would make fun of me in French, knowing that I couldn't understand them. Every day, the teachers would send us outside to the small grass area of their property. While the other kids ran around playing, I would usually sit by myself by a big, grassy ditch and play with a stick or a rock. Some of the older kids spoke English since they really hammered it into them when they were little, and they would invite me to play "cache-cache" with them in the few trees that they had, but that was really it.

There was this one girl named Victoria. She would tease me senselessly about things that didn't seem to matter, like when I said something incorrectly. One day, out of the blue, she moved away and I thought I was left in peace. The only problem was that her friend, Joel, decided to take up her role of making fun of me, and he only got worse. Sometimes, he would hit me, and sometimes the abuse was all verbal. I never liked either of them.

It took me a few months of crossword puzzles and looking out the window for the language to actually click. Any language learner can tell you that there's always a click moment when all the random things you hear will finally start to make some sense. Now, I could understand what the other kids were talking about. I could understand what my teacher was teaching. Everything finally fit into place.

Even though I could understand, that didn't stop the hurting. A lot of kids still ignored me, and Joel still made fun of me incessantly. The bullying never really stopped until my family picked up and moved again to Paris, only nine months after arriving. No one seemed to miss me, except one older girl who waved at me as I drove away, sorry to see me go.