A new friend
The clock strikes 9:00 am as I wake up and brush my teeth. Today is Saturday, so I don’t have to go to school. After having breakfast, I decide to do nothing. Since today is the prefect to rest after the long week, I am tired from homework. I take the chair and the table along with a cup of juice outside to my small garden. The wind blows and the leaves fall as I sit down on the chair in the garden. I start to think back to the first time I came to America.
The first thing I remember is that the sun was shining that warm Monday afternoon when I came to America. It was an hour trip from the Omaha Airport to Lincoln. After I put all my stuff in the closet, I was exhausted and took a 12-hour nap. I ended up missing dinner. Normally, new students have one day off when they come but I was an exception. I had to go to school that first day, because I arrived a week after school started. That morning, I woke up at 6:00 to prepare to go school. I was both nervous and excited. The instant that I walked into the school, I was amazed by how beautiful the school is. It was bigger than my old school and it also has two large gyms and a very huge soccer field behind the school. Next to the school was a magnificent tree line with trees that are 40 to 45 feet tall. I never see many trees the height before and it was a new experience. But behind all of these amazing things, there are a number of adversities that I have had to face since the moment I came to school.
So what is adversity? Adversity is the difficulties you have in your life. One of my bigger obstacles that keep me from having good grades in class was the poor communication I had with other people. The first class I was in was the religion class. When I came in, the teacher lightly showed me to my seat. The smile on my face began to fade as I heard the teacher explain the lesson; For the entire 1 hour 30 minutes, I could not understand anything. Then the same thing happened to me in math, chemistry, and English and throughout the rest of my day. On the way home, I felt like I was going to cry. For the first time in my life I could not understand anything that I had learned that day. I started to worry about the homework; if I didn’t understand anything, how could I do my assignments?
For the next three weeks, I was stressed out from the coursework and the classes in school. My head kept thinking about failing school and it made me tired every time I tried to do my homework. My grades started to go down with no sign of stopping. When I was in Vietnam, whenever I got stuck on something, I could ask my friend anytime and they would show me an example of how to do the homework so I could understand it. But in my new school, I did not have any friends at all. I usually worked alone when the class was working in group. In some situations, where we have to be in a group, I always got stuck with the left over person and we didn’t talk much to each other when we had a group conversation. I would feel lonely for the rest of my day at school. If I had a friend, it would be so much better because I could have someone to talk to. That would make half of my worry go away. Whenever I am sad or happy, I could have someone to share my feelings, to laugh with me. I was always thinking that I could not make it through these next 6 months and I would fail my mom.
The semester continued like this until one day that changed my life forever. That day, I was eating lunch on the last table where no one was seating. Suddenly, a boy came right opposite me and sat down. He held out his hand for me to shake. I looked at him, for a moment and then I shyly took my hand and shook his. The boy smiled and introduced himself. I was surprised because no one had ever actively talked to me. We had a little conversation before the bell rang and we had to get back to class. He said to me that If I have any questions, I could ask him and he stood up, grabbed his tray and said goodbye to me. That night I could not sleep because I was thinking about him; my first friend since I came here.
Since then, anytime I have something that I don’t understand, I always ask him. He then answers my question in a simple way so that I can understand. Thanks to him, my grades started to go up, I started to know who Jesus is and what he had done. I also learned who we really are.
There was a time when I was studying in Geography class when, suddenly, a bunch of boys who often misbehave in class came to me and teased me. I didn’t know what they said but after they said it, they said he won’t understand and just laughed at me because I didn’t understand what they said and they thought that was funny. That hurt my feelings a lot but I couldn’t do anything. All of a sudden, my friend stood straight up from the chair he was sitting in and came to my table.
“That is just not nice, guys,” he said,” go pick on someone your own size!”
As the teacher came in, she asked the class why it was so loud and my friend told her about everything he witnessed in the class. In the end, those boys were being punished and after that none of this happened again. From that moment, I knew that I could count on my friend.
Now I’m more confident and I can understand the lessons in class. I have joined the Lincoln Lutheran Soccer team and I am very proud of my team. I have a lot of friends now but there is only one that is my true friend. Without him, I may have gone back to Vietnam. Overcoming my adversity helped me to be more confident in life, and to go through the difficulties of language and commutation.
Khai Dinh 