About: Nika

Name:Nika
2007-11-30 16:01:33
http://blog.myspace.com/thingsbeingvarious
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I was born in the US, but lived in Germany from age three to seventeen. My parents were civilians working for the US government, so I grew up on two different army bases in southern Bavaria, but was not an army brat. I attended DoDD schools until high school, when I was sent to Munich International School. My family repatriated right after I graduated high school nine and a half years ago, and I haven't been home since.

Posts by Nika:

Learn, Learn to Lead

Twelve years ago in May, my friend Dawn and I were selected to represent our Middle School at the annual Junior Leadership Seminar in Koblenz, Germany.

This was not as prestigious as it may sound. Each Department of Defense Dependent School in the region was supposed to send two representatives, one from the seventh grade and one from the eighth. Our school in Garmisch had two seventh graders and four eighth graders that year, all of us sharing a classroom together. I went because none of the other eighth graders especially wanted to go, and Dawn went because the other seventh grader wasn’t allowed to go. Being selected may have been an honor for kids from bigger schools like Augsburg or Berlin, but it didn’t mean much to us.

Prestige aside, Dawn and I left for Koblenz with reasonably good intent. We were misfits, but so were the other four kids in our class. We were awkward, but we had each other. Dawn also had her giant Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and a big rubber lizard named Mr. Elizabeth, and I had the start of a new science fiction novel in a college-rule notebook with an ancient ballpoint pen. We would represent our school honestly, or not at all.

I remember little of the conference itself. I still have my old activity guide, with none of the worksheets filled in and my school’s name misspelled on the cover. We were split into groups, we discussed cooperation and consensus, and it was all very boring. By our second day there, Dawn had made a big impression with her Encyclopedia and Mr. Elizabeth. Her innate weirdness eclipsed any interest anyone had in how to set an agenda or how to encourage productivity. Her roommates had decided that Dawn was a witch, and when Dawn asked if I wanted to be a vampire, I said yes.

There were at least a hundred bored, restless middle schoolers at the Leadership conference that year. We all went to our group meetings and sat through the seminars, but the second the lectures were over, Dawn and I were surrounded. We were the closest thing to entertainment the conference had to offer. The other kids wanted badly to believe us, and it didn’t matter that I was sitting in the sunshine as I described being a vampire, or that for all our supposed supernatural power, Dawn and I were memorizing the Four S’s of Success along with everyone else. On our third day we all took a field trip down the Rhein, but rather than looking out at the crumbling castles on the hills or the outcropping of rocks in the river where the Lorelei lured sailors to their deaths, the future leaders of America were huddled around us. Did Dawn fly on a broomstick? Could I handle a cross? Were we telling the truth? Really?

One kid tried to stab me in the heart with a toothpick. I couldn’t see the toothpick in his hand, and thought at first he was reaching for my breast. We all laughed about it later.

By the fourth day, Dawn and I were done with being popular. The kids were still swarming us, but we were ready to be left alone. We started being noncommittal - not admitting that we were just kids, but not playing along, either. We wanted the joke to die on its own. At least two other people wanted the joke over, too, but they wanted it executed. One was a popular girl from a bigger school - her first day at the conference had been promising, with lots of attention from cute boys and admiring girls. By the third day, at the height of the witch/vampire craze, no one really noticed her. She watched us with open hostility. When she walked into the courtyard in her pretty new dress and found the boy she was after asking me about holy water, she flipped. She reported us to the second person who hated our joke - a school official named Grantham, one of the organizers of the event.

On the fourth night of the conference, Grantham pulled the two of us from our group meetings and told us he knew about our conspiracy, he knew we’d been planning it since we left Garmisch, and he knew who we really represented. He said if we didn’t confess and admit to him and the other students that we weren’t witches and vampires, he would call our parents and have them drive to Koblenz that night to pick us up. Dawn commented that her parents probably wouldn’t make an eight-hour drive in the middle of the night, and Grantham started yelling. Our “coven”, evidently, wouldn’t protect us from being expelled.

(That a grown man was so threatened by two conspicuously nerdy thirteen-year-old girls suggests to me that he maybe shouldn’t be working in a school, and that he turned a harmless joke into a production of The Crucible suggests deeper mental illness, don’t you think?)

Dawn retreated into silence when Grantham started babbling about covens. At this point I was in tears - I was thirteen, it was just a joke, and this crazy old dude was scaring me. I didn’t want anyone calling my parents, I didn’t want to be in trouble at school, I just wanted this guy to quit foaming at the mouth and leave me alone. I caved. I apologized and promised to tell the other kids it wasn’t true. Grantham didn’t believe that it wasn’t a conspiracy and didn’t believe that there wasn’t a coven, but the two other adults (who had sat silently through his tirade) accepted my apology and let us go.

We moved quietly through the fifth day, avoiding social contact. The popular girl was jubilant. Dawn and I sat together through the closing ceremonies, refusing to sing along with the Leadership song (Learn…Learn to Lead! We Are Proud! We Are Free!), eyeing Grantham with hatred. When the bus came the next morning, Dawn got on holding Mr. Elizabeth, and I followed, carrying my bag and her Encyclopedia. It was the closest either of us came to popularity, and it was enough. Our middle school coven welcomed us home.

November 30, 2007 | Filed Under Stories | 7 Comments 

Hello, I’m Nika

Hi, I’m Nika. I just found my way here from Facebook.

I’ve never known how to introduce myself. My family is from the US. In the spring of 1984, when I was three years old, my father got a job at the Foreign Language Training Center in Munich, Germany. My parents were civilians, but the job was with the government, so we moved onto the army base. I spent our first year in Munich living in a children’s hospital, receiving treatment for acute myelogenous leukemia. During that time my older sister went to a local German school, but her German wasn’t strong enough yet and my parents couldn’t be around enough to help her, so when she failed she was sent to the DoDD school on the base. When I recovered and started kindergarten, I went straight to the DoDD school. I never attended a school where English wasn’t the primary language, and as a result my German was never as strong as it could have been.

We were on an army base, but we weren’t army. I made friends with other kids on the base, and every two years they’d leave. Sometimes we tried to stay in touch, but it never really worked out. My family spent more time off base than our neighbors, going to restaurants and cultural events. Most families on the base rarely experienced much of Germany - they were encouraged not to mix with the local nationals, in order to avoid conflict and embarrassment.

I knew that I was an American, but it didn’t mean much to me. I only visited the States every other year or so, and when I did I was always shocked by all the billboards and the way every town seemed to look the same. I remember I loved watching American commercials (Armed Forces Network television leaves a lot to be desired) and walking through grocery stores, looking at all the varieties of products on the shelves. That was America to me - colorful products and splashy advertising. That’s still America to me.

At the end of my sixth grade year, in the summer of 1992, the Munich base shut down. The Cold War was over, and my father’s job teaching Russian to the American soldiers was getting a lot less relevant. My family moved an hour south to the much smaller but still active base in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. My father still did some teaching and administrating, but he also began interpreting. The George C. Marshall Center was opening in Garmisch, and diplomats from former Eastern Bloc countries were arriving on a regular basis to attend seminars on democracy and the free market. I went to the American school on the base for the seventh and eighth grades, after which there was no American school for me. The base was too small for a high school, and there were too few students to fill one. The International school in Innsbruck, Austria had been the default for teenagers on the base, but it went bankrupt, so the six or seven of us on the base who were high school age were sent to Munich International School.

My father retired from government service in 1998, the same time I graduated from high school. I graduated, he retired, and we repatriated. My sister was already attending the University of Texas at Austin - we’d lived in Texas just before moving in 1984, so we were technically Texas residents. I went to UT because it was the path of least resistance, and my parents moved an hour away from Austin to be close to us.

I had a hard time repatriating. My parents always thought of themselves as American, and didn’t imagine how I could feel different. My sister is six years older than I am, and always thought of America as home. To me, America was the foreign country. The culture shock was profound. I realized fast that pop culture was the lingua franca, so I studied up. I didn’t want to be like everyone else, but I didn’t want to stick out, either. I wanted to be able to pass.

I learned what a horrible question “Where are you from?” is. I learned that most people don’t really want to know. They want to establish commonality, and if your answer is complicated you’re only establishing difference. Besides, it’s rude to give a long answer to a polite question. Apparently.

I was lucky. I’ve had experiences my friends here can barely imagine. I have good stories. My high school had a Fruehlingsfest on school grounds every spring, and it generally happened around the time the American kids would take their SATs. The drinking age in Germany is sixteen, so a lot of us took our SATs, and then went out on the lawn and drank a beer with our friends. For Senior Skip Day, we went to Oktoberfest. The kids I went to college with didn’t usually want to hear about Germany, but they always liked those two stories.

I have predictable social problems. In the last few years I’ve become adept at making casual friendships at work, but I have a very hard time making friends outside of work. I don’t get close to people easily. I don’t like opening up, I don’t like being vulnerable, and ultimately I don’t expect people to stick around.

I got married four years ago, and that’s made things easier for me. My husband has never left the North American continent, but he grew up on the margins of society and understands feeling different and having a broader perspective. Despite the huge geographical difference in our backgrounds, we have a lot in common. He stabilizes me, and makes it easier for me to just be myself and not worry so much about fitting in, belonging, or passing.

I didn’t know what a TCK was until we moved to Chicago two and a half years ago. I took the move hard, and spent several months deeply depressed. I came across the David Pollack book kind of randomly, and suddenly everything clicked. I realized I wasn’t upset about moving to Chicago - I was upset about moving to America. When I was eighteen, I didn’t have a choice. I left my home, my childhood, and my whole life as I knew it in Munich. Living in Austin wasn’t my fault - it didn’t reflect on me. It wasn’t my decision. But moving to Chicago was. When we left Austin for Chicago, I was accepting living in America. I was making it my choice. That killed me. Seven years after leaving home, I grieved for all I’d lost. I’m still working on accepting it.

I haven’t been home since I left nine and a half years ago. I miss it every day.

November 30, 2007 | Filed Under Introduction, Stories | 18 Comments