The summer before my freshman year of high school was characterized by your standard set of tween emotions: anxiety, for one. Nervous, slightly excited, but mostly terrified. While my friends were gearing up for high school with each other, comparing class schedules and teachers, my mother was confirming our flights back to the USA. I’d spent the last seven years in Tanzania, East Africa, and my formative education was characterized by international perspectives and a British curriculum—two factors that would make my transition from Tanzanian 8th grade to South Floridian 9th grade that much more difficult. I talked differently, thought differently, and even spelled color as colour so many times in the school year my English teacher gave up. While kids were discussing miles, I was still thinking in kilometers, still searching up Fahrenheit to Celsius when the weatherman reported for the week, eager to translate tomorrow’s forecast.
I spent my first couple of months soaking up information like a sponge: the radio stations you could tune into for the latest pop hits, the roads kids took after class to grab a drink from the plaza next door, realizing how a part of you stays behind when you move. Everyone had a childhood story together, and all I had was a bad taste in my mouth and a feeling that I was in an awful movie; the kind where the character is supposed to have figured it all out by now but seems even worse off than when you found them– the kind of movie you turn off for dragging on too long.
It was comical, in a sense. I’d heard the comparisons already from the friends I’d made in the USA to the film “Mean Girls”, my own story so similar to Cady’s. Maybe I didn’t sabotage the Queen Bee Regina George, or host a rager at my parent’s house and throw the only good friends I’d made under the bus for a chance at acceptance, but a part of me was starting to understand Cady just a little bit more. Like me, her identity was half a globe away, and it wouldn’t be a source of connection with the students we now found ourselves surrounded by. Cady’s behavior stemmed from that lack of self: the urge to fit in so much stronger than the urge to be yourself, especially when who you are is still half-baked, if you haven’t quite figured it out yet.
It’s the kind of thought process a lot of third culture kids experience when they move; like Cady, I didn’t really know who I was outside of where I had been raised. My personality had been molded to fit the context of my tween years growing up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and I found myself stumbling in the American rat race, reeling from concepts like standardized tests, class ranks, and the uniquely and incredibly important American tradition of rugby (except my South Florida friends made sure I called it football.) Much like Cady, the title of “kid from Africa” came with its own line of questioning, which I’d endure with a smile.
“What were the houses like?”
“The water situation? Did you have enough to shower with?”
“How did you get to school? I heard people ride elephants.”
The answers were never quite as Hollywood as my peers might’ve preferred. The houses were the same as the ones here, there was no water situation where I lived, and if there were people riding elephants to school, I missed it.
The real Tanzanian experience, I had wanted to say, is hearing the sound of a hundred birds in the morning. Or how the Sun takes up the whole sky, how the green of the plants is so rich they might as well be jewels. How emerald and jade vines wrap around tree trunks so old they are tombstones for the hands that planted them. Maybe the real Tanzanian experience is a cup of warm chai in the morning, the sugar sand tide pools that would form during low tide, the brittle starfish you could scoop up from the water that would inch up your arms with childish curiosity.
The real Tanzanian experience can’t be explained, truthfully. It’s lived, it’s braided into your hair and iron pressed into your clothing. It’s the way, seven years after the move, I still have a hard time spelling Tallahassee but I write Dar Es Salaam without missing a beat, how its spelling and taste is ingrained in my memory, the salty air and the quiet hum of a thousand little communities bustling side by side, spilling into each other at the seams.
Moving from Tanzania to South Florida was perhaps the most difficult period of my life, and in another way, it was the most beautiful. Like Cady, I’d forgotten how incredibly lucky I was to have been raised in the kind of place that doesn’t sound real when you explain it, how the thing that distanced me the most from the kids at my high school was also something that I should’ve been most proud of. Watching the scene play out in “Mean Girls” where Aaron finds Cady’s Africa paraphernalia in her room, I remember feeling a small sense of guilt. Much like Cady, I’d made the things most important to me the smallest parts of myself in exchange for an easier assimilation; and much like Cady, it had left me high and dry.
It was in those four years of high school that I found the sweet spot: balancing the ghost of your childhood with the present, finding who you are while still figuring out what it means, and making space for who you were, are, and will become as opposed to sizing it down for a more digestible identity. Like Cady, it took some time and effort (albeit less violence) to find my place, too. I’m grateful every day for the journey– even if it was a little different than how the movies said it would be.
