The Foreign Service Journal, December 2004

D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 81 S CHOOLS S UPPLEMENT from all over the world. “I always felt more at home in that type of society than in American society. When I was a child, when we returned from Africa, every time I would see an African or African-American, I would get so excited to see someone from home,” she said. “After a while I real- ized that African-Americans were not Africans, but that was confusing at first. I still, to this day, feel very drawn to Africans and African-Americans.” Coming “Home” I have talked to several “kids” whose parents moved them “back” to their home country. For some, it was the first time they had lived in their native country, and the culture shock was extreme. Some chose to not socialize with the other kids. According to one woman, “When I had to return to North Carolina for my senior year, I cried every day for the first half of the school year because I missed [the high school in New Delhi] so much. It made a huge impact on me, and I’ll never forget the time in New Delhi. I think it was the happiest I’ve ever been.” Ingrid, an FS child, who lived in Singapore, South Africa, New Zea- land, Thailand, Venezuela, Sweden and the U.S., understands her parents’ decision to move her back to the States for high school in Newport, R.I. The worst part of her experience was that at the public school in Newport, “people thought I was weird because I’d just come from a small internation- al school in Thailand. The other stu- dents were always asking me questions like, ‘Do you speak Chinese?’” As Ingrid explained: “I guess my parents thought it was important for me to come back so I felt I could fit in here as well as abroad. At that point, I was almost 14 and had spent only about four years in the U.S. I think they also felt most of the schools in the U.S. would do a better job preparing me for college than some of the inter- national schools would. I wasn’t really angry with them. I think, even then, I understood their reasons for wanting me to go to high school here. Mostly, Continued from page 79 Continued on page 89 Most of the international kids I talk to, now in their 20s, 30s and 40s, still don’t know what they want to do when they “grow up.”