17March2008
Posted by nate under: edumacation.
Semester one, Riverside CA. Cool fashion trends included, but sadly were not limited to, spiked hair, suspenders worn in a low-functioning manner, and Reebok hi-tops left untied. Enter out of cultural touch missionary kid.
I’m a form follows function kind of person so a lot of fashion is lost on me. It’s why I have to go out and buy a shirt and tie anytime there’s a wedding. Ties don’t make sense to me. (Which is why I always get to weddings early so that I can find someone who knows how to tie it for me.) As soon as the wedding’s over it’s off to Goodwill. Luckily I haven’t had to be visible in a wedding for quite some time €“ and last one I was in didn’t require ties. I was in the wedding party with jeans and teva’s. Thank you Erin and Jason.
Anyways €“ I was this way in fifth grade as well. I had been in the states for a month or so and had discovered macgyver and cherry coke and was a pretty happy kid. But at the same time I wanted desperately to fit in. So I got a haircut. But I thought the spike thing was kind of froofy looking and so when we got to fantastic sam’s or whatever it was I chickened out. I wasn’t convinced that a strange lady with sharp objects giving me a goofy froofy haircut was a good idea. The next day I went to a barber shop and got a flat top. It’s like a spike but tough. And the guy who gave it to me was a barber not a stylist. It’s how I roll.
Then I bought pants with suspenders. I like them. They were the button on kind not the clip on kind. They made me feel like a mountain man. All I needed was a red union suit and I would’ve been right out of a Louis L’amour book. (Which was a bit of a goal for me at the time, I was way into the Sacket series. And again I remind you, Missionary Kid.) The only thing I couldn’t understand about suspenders as cool as these was why anyone would let them hang down. So I wore them up on my shoulders and allowed them to fulfill their suspending destiny.
I didn’t dig Reeboks. They were heavy and created a false expectation that I would be good at sports. Not a road I was ready to go down. (Then or now.) The skater’s wore vans and those were cool. But kind of flashy. Some kids were wearing chuck taylors €“ generally in bright colors like turquoise with yellow on the inside. Then they’d lace them halfway up and let the tongue hang out so you could see they were yellow on the inside. I went with black. Dress ‘em down on the playground, dress ‘em up for church. A wonderfully utilitarian shoe. In fact 20 some years later and I wore a pair to church last Sunday. A timeless classic.
So I was ready for my first day of school back in the US of A. Somewhere there’s a picture of me standing outside our apartment. Black converse high tops, laced all the way up. Gray pants with suspenders. The pants aren’t tight rolled, the suspenders are over my shoulders. And where any other cool kid at the time would’ve been sporting hair spiked with LA Style Mousse; there I was with a flat top held high with butch wax. And I won’t even try to explain the construction worker-esque black lunch box I was carrying when every other boy my age was carrying around a GI Joe lunch box.
Goodbye Don Johnson. Hello Beave. Welcome to America.
4 Months later I was back in Monrovia Liberia teaching the other missionary kids how to tight roll their guess jeans, encouraging them to wear pink shirts, and giving tips on proper mousse application. What are we the Borg? Assimilate!
17March2008
Posted by nate under: edumacation.
In fourth grade I continued home schooling in Medina, Liberia. I was born in Medina, OH so there’s kind of a cool full circle thing going on there. Although since then my circle has spiraled out of control so it’s not as pacifying now as it was then. But at the time being able to tell people that I was born in Medina and currently lived in Medina brought a bit of normalcy to my life. I miss it.
Back in the day there weren’t a lot of home schooling options for missionary kids as far as curriculum was concerned. We went with Abeka out of Pensacola FL. I think its target market was (is?) children of parents who fear things like evolution and sex education, and firmly believe girls should wear dresses and boys should tuck in their shirts. Not really our style, but they were willing to work with missionaries back in an age that didn’t have e-mail or fax machines and depended on an international postal system that could easily take a month to deliver your test scores. And there were huge dinosaurs! We called them Kaypros. It was a magical time to be sure.
Sometimes we learned odd things. Like how to keep bowling scores. Apparently in 1986 there were a lot of bowling allies filled with girls in homemade dresses and boys with handsomely tucked in shirts. We also learned poems. I appreciate that now, and desperately wish €œIf€ by Rudyard Kipling would’ve stuck with me. €œIf you can keep your head while those about you are losing their’s and blaming it on others…€ Who can I blame for not being able to remember these things?
Fourth grade was also the year of American History which seemed oddly foreign to me then and remains a bit of a mystery even now. To her credit my Mom, in an attempt to keep it local, went out and bought Liberian history books as well which I applaud her for now. If I was home schooling my girls, blessed blessings that they are, I’m quite sure the last thing I’d add to my plate would be another subject. No thanks. I’d keep it to the basics and let them google their way through the rest of life’s questions while I hung out in the teacher’s lounge, which would really be our living room. And I’d also start wearing a hair net when I served them lunch. There are many reasons for me not to explore the home schooling option. And for this we can all be thankful.
17March2008
Posted by nate under: edumacation.
I began third grade at ELWA. ELWA was a sort of large mission compound which I believe was run by SIM (Sudan Interior Missions) It was on the coast in Monrovia, Liberia. We were between villages at the time and living in a third floor apartment near The Institute for Liberian Languages where my parents worked, also in Monrovia. Maybe compound isn’t the right word. That sounds a little too David Koresh. How about campus? We’ll go with that. On the ELWA campus there was a hospital, radio station, church, publisher and K-8 school as well as 50-100 houses where all the doctors and missionary families lived. Most of the kids were ex-pats. The majority of them being missionary kids and a few embassy kids, and a number of Lebanese kids whose fathers were well to do business men.
It was a warm climate school so instead of hallways you had awnings and sort of sidewalks. Think 90210 or Malcolm in the Middle. You were always in close proximity to the great outdoors. In fact some days if the wind was right you could here a bit of the ocean and nearly every day you could smell it. Not many kids can claim this as part of their educational history. Having this sensory memory is very comforting when you live in MN. In fact just last night my wife and I were watching Blue Crush (which we end up renting every winter and finally bought €“ bringing our total movie collection up to 6) and as the opening credits rolled and the surf pounded I could taste the salty air in the back of my mouth and feel it caught up in my nostrils. Thanks ELWA.
Anyways, you might think the most memorable moment of my one semester at ELWA would’ve been having a line in the all school production of Psalty’s Christmas Calamity. But you’d be wrong. You might think the move halfway through the year to Medina and going back to home schooling would’ve somehow been the ultimate third grade memory. Wrong again. No, what I remember best was sitting at my desk working on multiplication problems; between problems staring out the window across the grass at the fifth and sixth grade class rooms. The layout of the school was sort of U shaped around this grassy area. And because we didn’t have air conditioning our rooms were lined with levered windows. So essentially if you stood in the middle of the grassy area and spun around you could see the entire school. And they could see you. And they could see me, as I jumped up from my multiplication work, sprinted out the door and puked halfway across the grass.