The Foreign Service Journal, January 2008

I am the 16-year-old daughter in a Foreign Service family. Guate- malan huipiles (traditional hand- woven blouses) adorn our walls, and Zambian baskets sit on our shelves. I can’t remember a time when it was dif- ferent. Yet I didn’t realize how unusu- al my life really was until after I became friends with a girl named Lana. We had relocated to Prague just months before the new millennium, to a house within walking distance of the international school. Lana was in my fourth-grade class. She was Serbian and spoke halting English, but I was more than capable of filling any gaps in the conversation. I was drawn to her calm demeanor, and later delighted by her quick wit. When she invited me to her house, I was happy to accept. The trip proved to be an adventure. Instead of her parents driving us — the only mode of transportation I was familiar with — we headed to the nearest bus stop. After getting off the bus, we dodged cars in a bustling main street, and hiked past apartment build- ings and grocery stores. By the time we reached her front gate, I felt a heady rush of adrenaline at having done something so independent . Lana’s austere house brought me down to earth. I remember thinking, where are all her things? Eventually I made the connection between the starkness of her home’s interior and the news footage I had seen of bomb- ings and rallies in Belgrade. Lana and her parents were refugees: they had what they needed for a decent life, but very little beyond that. I don’t know what Lana thought of me, but she must not have seen the shallow, naïve kid I felt like in that moment, because the afternoon went perfectly. We entertained ourselves in the same way our grandparents did — no television, no video games — and that became the standard for our after- noons. Once, we spent hours writing secret messages with burnt-out match- es, then passing them from her lower balcony to the one above. Another day we built a pillow fort that stretched through three rooms. My friendship with Lana was the ultimate Foreign Service experience. For four years, we explored Prague together. If you cut through just the right patch of trees, you would come out on a rocky cliff overlooking the city. There, while we dangled our legs and basked in the rare sun, I explained the United States to her and she explained Milosevic’s Serbia to me. We rode our scooters to the Hotel Praha pool, the grocery store and the park. Lana told me once about an American bomb that had landed in sight of her house, and I was deeply shocked at being connected to a previ- ously abstract event. I was angry that bombs happened to real people, not just faces on CNN. On Sept. 11, 2001, it was Lana who helped me under- stand the magnitude of what had occurred. We sat outside on the dewy grass and discussed how it felt to be hated. Together we tried to compre- hend why complete strangers would want us dead, all because of what seemed like ancient history. While I had never had to face such animosity before, Lana was familiar with being written off as an “arrogant Serb.” Now I’m back in the U.S., in high school in a comfortable suburb near Washington, D.C., and Lana is back in Belgrade. As an American teenag- er, it’s easy to turn up my iPod and tune out the world. It is easy to over- look the news from Baghdad in favor of celebrity gossip, or a long and often pointless phone conversation with a friend. Lana and I have shared plen- ty of phone conversations since we both moved, but our talks cover the meaning of life and the Kosovo situa- tion as well as my homecoming dress. For the past two years, we’ve been planning a trans-Europe backpacking trip. Though we face the hurdles of school, finances and a couple of thou- sand miles, we are both enchanted by the idea of exploring once more. Rachel Midura is a high school junior in Reston, Va. Born in Guatemala, she has accompanied her parents (FSO Chris Midura is with the State De- partment) to Zambia, El Salvador and the Czech Republic. 84 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 R EFLECTIONS A Cross-Cultural Friendship B Y R ACHEL M IDURA Lana’s austere house brought me down to earth. I remember thinking, where are all her things?