Memoir

I was seven years old when I moved back to Abu Dhabi. We moved in August and in September I would be starting grade one from the beginning when I had already been in grade one for six months. In South Africa, the school years run from January to December, and since I didn’t complete grade one fully, I had to go back to square one. At the time, it didn’t bother me very much since I didn’t quite understand why school would start in the middle of the year, I thought I was just continuing from where I left off.

This was my first time in an English school and I was over the moon to start. I knew very little English but enough to help myself, I knew how to ask if I could use the bathroom, to say how old I am and what my name was. On the first day of school, I met my teacher and made friends with a girl who had the same birthday as me. Everyone seemed so nice and I loved it. No one asked me a lot of questions so I didn’t have to speak a lot which I was happy about.

Later on, in the week we had our first music lesson. The music class was a huge room, with no tables or chairs but one huge blue carpet. It smelt like wood mainly because most of the instruments were made out of wood. There were two big whiteboards in the room and colourful music posters everywhere. The teacher told us to sit in a circle on the carpet, the carpet wasn’t as soft as you would think. He came and sat in between two students and told us that we will go around the circle and introduce ourselves. I was a little nervous since I knew very ‘basic’ or ‘broken’ English. People were stating their names, age and where they were from. For some people, he asked how they spell their names. When he got to me, he asked me what my name was and I replied with, “Natasha”. Then he asked, “Please spell your name for me.”. I started spelling my name and with every letter, I could see he was writing it down, “N-A-T-A-S-” and then I froze, I didn’t know how to pronounce the letter “H” in English. I immediately started saying the alphabet quietly to myself in Afrikaans while counting the letters on my fingers, “H” was the eighth letter, so I proceeded to do the same in English and before I could get to “H”, he asked me if the next letter was an “H”, with some relief I answered yes. At the same time, I felt embarrassed that I didn’t know something as simple as the alphabet, and some of the kids seemed to think the same thing.

I went home that day and told my mom to teach me the alphabet, she told me she could try but my dad would be able to help me better. My dad tested me the entire night and the by the day I knew how to say the alphabet in English.

The rest of the year went somewhat the same, where I would occasionally misspell simple words and teachers would have to correct me but by the time I got to grade two, my English had improved immensely. Around December time of grade two, I won an award for the best story writing. This gave me the biggest confidence boost and I got to read out my story at an assembly.