bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1996) — Winter 1996 // Hiver 1996, pp. 29–31
Life in the Foreign Service has its ups and downs, and who is better qualified to talk about these trials than the children of Foreign Service officers?
In preparing this feature article, in which Jake Hirsch-Allen and Mariana Henry (both aged 13) talk about their life on postings with their parents and the strains of returning to Ottawa, longtime bout contributor Liza Linklater met and spoke not only with Jake and Mariana but with older children.
All responded to her questions with great honesty and frankness, and a number of the older children (now adults) discussed the particular problems posed by sudden immersion as 16 or 17 year olds (after some years at school in tranquil Ottawa) into the sometimes more sophisticated, usually more cosmopolitan settings of first and third world capitals, where schoolmates may be drawn from the international teenage jet set and where the strongest of family units may be put under strain. For reasons which parents of adolescent children may understand and for privacy considerations, an editorial decision was made not to run this commentary but we do invite bout readers, especially those who have served on postings with their children or who were themselves children of the Foreign Service, to comment on the challenges of raising — or being – children in the Foreign Service.
Mariana Henry
Right now I’m 13 and in grade 8. I’ve been on three posts. I was born near San Francisco and we lived there until I was four. Then we moved to Ottawa for two years and I went to kindergarten. When I was 6 we moved to Russia and I entered grade one. I lived there for three years until we moved to Turkey for three more years. We’ve been back in Canada for one year. I have an older brother who was born in Ottawa.
Russia was not very nice. It was muddy and dirty. The winters were really bad, because when it snowed it turned into slush right away. The people were pretty rude because it was so crowded. The drivers were really bad and nobody felt safe letting their kids go out on the streets. I didn’t really like living there. It was icky.
When we arrived I was introduced to an Australian girl who lived in my apartment building and we became best friends and classmates. The one thing that I liked there was the school. It was fun because for the whole three years I had the same friends.
I was happy to leave Russia, but sad about leaving my friends. My Australian friend wrote to say she was moving to China, which was exactly when I was moving back to Canada, so we haven’t been in touch since.
When the plane landed in Turkey, we had to go down the stairs onto the tarmac. It was dry and hot and everything was brown. I didn’t love it there, but I liked it a lot better than Russia. Everything except the driving was better than Russia. They drove so fast and went through red lights. When the people weren’t driving they were very polite.
It was harder to make friends at that school. At first I thought I didn’t fit in but I really did. It only took a few weeks to make friends and eventually I had five close friends.
I travelled a lot with my family. Every spring break we took a week off and went to a different part of Turkey. They have all of these ancient ruins and that stuff really fascinates me.
We didn’t get MTV, but we had British TV and every Friday night it had a music show. We got CNN, NBC news, and a lot of German TV. My brother and I would watch a lot of cartoons in German even though we didn’t understand it because they had the best cartoons and kids’ shows. It was even harder to leave friends : when we left Turkey because they were the closest friends I’d ever had. Now I’m not upset about it, but I still miss them. I write to them.
But I was happy to come back here. I missed Canada, and it was like my favourite place in the whole world. Home means here, this house and this country. If I stay in another country for a long time I may start to feel like it’s home, but this house is my real home.
I was sort of nervous the first day of school : here, but I figured I’d been to so many new schools that I shouldn’t worry about not • knowing anybody. I can make new friends. At lunch I made my first friend, and I started hanging out with her and one other person and then we got into this bigger group. Now my closest friends and I are in a group of 8 or 9. I have a lot more freedom and there is the opportunity to do more things here. My parents have to know where I’m going, but I can go off on my own here. I’m having more fights with my parents here in Ottawa because I’m freer. My parents are putting limits on my freedom; Iknow it’s for my own good, but still. I always want to do more things. I want to stay out late but I’m not allowed to and I get really mad. I’ve always done well in school. This year I got my lowest grades on my report card but I did better in the second term. I was adjusting to the new environment, and school is always easier in the second year. Most kids here want to hear about my experiences. In French class we talk a lot about the news and I can always tell them about my trips and things I’ve seen. I don’t feel special because of these experiences, because some of my friends are from other countries and they have interesting things to tell too. I figure that I’m just a person who has been a lot of places and I’m not special because of that. I was always brought up to think that everybody is equal; seeing other parts of the world has made me believe that even more. I think that everybody is completely equal and everybody is special in their own way.
In Turkey my school was an American school and the students were mainly Americans. In Ottawa my school is more multicultural like the Russian school was. I gravitate to kids from other countries. I think people who have seen the world are more interesting than people who have lived in one place their whole lives. Except for my best friend who has lived here her whole life — she’s fun, smart and nice.
Right now if I had to move I’d get really mad because I’m happy here. I want to finish high school here. I don’t want to move again.
But it’s a yes and no sort of thing. I like seeing new things, but I hate leaving my friends.
Jake Hirsch-Allen
Right now I’m 13 and in 8th grade. I was born in Ottawa. I’ve been on two postings. We left on our first posting to Mexico before I was one, and returned two years later. My brother was born in Mexico.
I was five when I started kindergarten. We were in Ottawa for four years before we went away again. I think I was six and a half when we left for India for three years. We’ve been in Ottawa for four years now.
I was half way through first grade when I heard we were going to India. I started doing a project on India. I remember we were in our basement cutting up a huge number of magazines on India. I was quite little and I thought India was full of native Indians and then I got reoriented after I looked through all the articles.
I had quite a few friends in Ottawa but they weren’t good friends. I hadn’t known them for long enough because I’d only been in that school for two years and I’d switched classes a lot. It wasn’t hard leaving and I’d always anticipated it. My brother doesn’t like the idea of moving and leaving his friends.
When we arrived in India, I remember a huge bowl of fruit in the hotel. I tried mangos for the first time in my life, which was pretty neat.
My first impressions involve moving into the house and meeting all the people who worked for us. Our Indonesian cook had a son and a daughter and we became good friends. Later on our cook and the person who looked after us took us around the city, to the market, and to the villages nearby to see the snake charmers and stuff.
Most of my life I’ve been at school or with someone taking care of me, so I didn’t notice them being around much. Atter we returned to Ottawa, I looked back on that as quite a large privilege. They were really nice people and we were lucky to have them.
The school buses were a bit rickety and one thing I really remember was that the gear shift was a screwdriver. Our school was called the International School but it was American. It was a great multicultural school and the kids spoke over a 100 different languages.
Because it was an American school when they were in history class they talked about Columbus and here we talk about Jacques Cartier.
School was definitely more difficult there. I was upgraded here before we left and I was downgraded there because the school year
Daryn Sutherland, Sauc Peter McLachlan, Los.
Internet: was almost a year ahead of us here. By second grade they were doing complicated multiplications. I was astounded. So I went back to first grade for another year. I think I was given the option of being bumped up again but I wanted to stay with my age group.
We travelled through a lot of India. Ladakh and Nepal were also amazing. We hiked in the mountains in Nepal and it was really fun and a bit scary. My parents didn’t realize what it was going to be like. We had a three-foot-wide path to walk on and it was straight down, 11,000 feet on one side, and straight up on the other.
Once we were on a train during a festival of coloured water and a girl threw a bucket of water through the window. We were completely soaked. Luckily it wasn’t coloured. Everything gets stained, even cars. We’d go out with our worst clothes on and take little water guns. It was fun. It took days to get all the stains off our skin.
I remember another festival, Divali, the festival of lights. We’d be on our flat roof watching the fireworks. The people put firecrackers in coke bottles and would shoot them off. It was sometimes scary because there were a lot of accidents, but it was a lot of fun too. Our parents probably kept us inside more than most Indian parents did.
My first school back in Ottawa was a terrible one. The next year I switched to another school and went into Middle French Immersion one year late. You’re supposed to start in fourth grade, but I came in fifth grade. I was a little behind but I caught up.
It was difficult leaving the kids in India, but it would be a lot harder leaving my friends now. I don’t want to leave the house and my friends, and the tennis courts are right across the street. For the first time in my life I actually know a city. But I also want to go and have more experiences. We’ll probably go next summer because I’ll be finishing middle school and my brother will be finishing elementary school so we’d be switching schools anyway.
There are a few places I’d like to either visit or live in. Anywhere that has a lot of forests. I like to be in nature and to get away from the city. I’m not a real city person. You see movies about the ape lady; I’d love to live in the rain forest and do studies like a botanist.
As for moving, the experiences of living abroad are the best part, and the hardest part is the leaving of friends and places. If you’ve been here for three years and it doesn’t look like you’re going to leave, often you want to leave more than if you have to leave the next year after you arrive.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1996) — Winter 1996 // Hiver 1996, pp. 29–31. Read the rest of this issue →
