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As I glanced out of the window at 30,000 feet I saw the clouds above the Atlantic ocean. This happened to be a normal occurrence for me and my family, as we never really stayed in one place long. My mother was an airfield manager in the air force and my father was a professional photographer and stay-at-home dad, so traveling for work was inevitable. This consistent traveling had its pros, and cons such as experiencing many new people and landscapes, but on the flip side it was often difficult to make lasting friendships with people. My journey began on December 28th 1998 in Valdosta, Georgia, where I was born. I lived in Georgia for a year before I moved to Germany where I first experienced school, and some of my earliest memories. I was enrolled into an international preschool near my mother’s work at the air force base. One of my earliest memories of being at school was actually after the 9/11 terrorist attack. We were asked to be taken out of school after the attack; I didn’t exactly understand what had happened but I knew that it was pretty serious if we were being taken out of school. At this point in my life friendship was little more than play-dates, and recess at school. After living in Germany for a few years we moved to Guam which was quite a change after living in a relatively cold climate.
Guam was great, and probably my favorite place I lived. Guam was the first place that I had made any real friends at school, and in the neighborhood. However, quite often the case was you would make a friend, or a group of friends but that could only last as long as their parents were stationed to that base. Because the actual size of the island, and the close knit community of people living on base that helped me to become friends with neighbors that I could actually bond with. I fondly remember our friends, and family going to the beach every Sunday and have a barbecue there, this is were a lot of my neighborhood friendships became cemented. But, after two years of living in Guam my mother was reassigned to England, so that meant packing up our life, moving countries again, and starting over.
My mother was stationed at was Lakenheath, England; which is about an hour away from Cambridge, and about two hours away from London. We ended up living in a house off-base in a town called Mildenhall. But living off base meant that I had to take the bus to the base, then to my school every morning. This would take about an hour in total since I was near the last stop, but a lot of good friendships came out of that ride everyday. It was generally easy to make friends with other military kids because they were going through the same thing I was so everybody already had quite a bit in common with each other. We would connect on the things I expect that “normal” American school children would connect on such as video games, and cartoons; but we also connected on a deeper level such as parents being deployed at the same time, and having to change schools because of our parents work. England was good for the most part but once again I had to move, however this time it was for a different reason.
My parents decide to separate while we were living in England; my mother had to deploy to Iraq, so my father decided that we would move to the High Desert in Southern California since we had family there. We first lived with my grandpa for about a month until we bought our house in January of that year. Of course this was a challenge to everybody in the family, but to me it was somewhat relieving knowing that I would finally live somewhere for a long period of time; somewhere I could call home. I didn’t really know what to expect when I went to school since this was the first time I had attended a public American school. The kids there were nice enough but I really didn’t have anybody to connect with, so I didn’t make any lasting friendships until high school. In high school I finally found a group of people that I could connect with. Not through my previous experiences, but my current experiences. My high school was relatively small, and I was in a program called CAMP(Computer And Media Pathway) which helped like minded people to take classes that focused on using computers to create, through programing and film. When I wasn’t in the CAMP classes I would usually see the same people in my AP classes. Since I keep seeing the same people all day long we all ended up becoming friends, and we could relate to each other very easily since we were all going through the same courses, and had similar interests.
Eventually, my mother came back from being deployed, and was then stationed in Oklahoma for a couple years. Then she also moved to Southern California, Menifee to be exact which was about an hour and half away from where I lived in the High Desert. She ended up retiring from the Air Force after 20 years, and worked privately at the nearby March Air Reserve base as the airfield manager. I would visit my mother three weekends a month, which meant for the most part I could expect about an hour and a half car ride after school on Fridays , and another hour and a half car ride back on Sunday nights. Up until January of this year was the “norm” for me until my mother, and stepfather decided to work overseas in Afghanistan as private contractors at an Italian NATO base teaching the local Afghani people about how to run their airport.
I found that my weekends at my mothers house, and my time spent in the High Desert reflect my social life as a child raised by a military family. I did not have any friends at my mother’s house because I knew that I would be leaving to go back home in a short period of time. So would the friendships I would have made in that time last? I did not think so. This has been a problem that I have struggled with for as long as I can remember, but I feel that as I get older the idea of friendship changes. It’s not someone who you play with or hang out with, but rather someone who “gets you” and accepts who you are.
Coming to UC Santa Cruz I was actually more scared than ever of moving because I had actually made lasting friendships, and in my past experiences I never really was able make those friendship last. But I actually still feel very connected to my friends from high school still, since we are all going through the same thing but in different places. To my surprise most of us still communicate with each other on a daily basis, which maybe thanks to improvements in technology but I digress. I will leave you with this, an old Quaker saying that I discovered recently but I have been following for a while now that helped me to make good friends. “I shall pass this way but once; any good therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again”