Help me please!

Ok, I know I probably shouldn't be asking for help with this on my blog of all places, but I am anyway. I have been struggling with this essay for way too long. It's like wrestling a bull. And the problem is I wrote most of it before I had my point! Now I have my point and I've been halfheartedly trying to weave it into the telling.

Any comments about it that you have please tell me. All criticism is very welcome! The more specific your comments the better. I need help! My topic is travel. My point is me finding a home. This essay is not finished. The end at the moment is hanging. It is a school assignment so I'm not asking you to do it for me. I'm just asking for suggestions because I'm at my wits end with this. I need help getting into it..aka I'm lazy xS. It's not good I know. *sigh* but here it is anyway...

Please mention things that don't sound right, flow right, are not grammatically correct. Any and all comments are welcome. You can get mad at me for even doing this if you'd like haha :P =S.

Born Traveler or Wandering Traveler (not totally edited)

My mom tried to get a doctor, she really did, but everyone was too scared to see her. They weren’t scared of her, they just didn’t want to be liable if anything had gone wrong; they weren’t her doctors. She always got the same answer,

“You need to see a specialist, ma’am.”

So she went to find a specialist and finally one gynecologist agreed to see her, but only the week after my parents were scheduled to leave. My parents decided to risk it and take the trip back to Colombia anyway.

The reason my mom needed to see the doctor is this. She was 41 years old and pregnant. Her three last pregnancies had had complications and problems. She was bleeding a bit and had a well grounded fear that something might be wrong. My dad took extra good care of her throughout the trip, making sure there was a wheelchair to take her from the plane at the layover. We even spent the duration of the layover in a Red Cross room so my mom could lay down.

Once she arrived in Colombia, she went to see her doctor and found out that everything was ok with me. Yes, I was the baby my mom was pregnant with. And that, was my first experience with travel.

Hi, my name is Amy, I'm fifteen years old and I have been in a search of home all my life. Ever since I was six we have traveled from country to country. We haven’t ever stayed long enough for me to even ask myself the question, “Is this home?”

There are other reasons I haven’t felt like holding any country in my heart as home or as somewhere to be patriotic to. I am a bit of a cynic when it comes to patriotism. Those who hold to their country and flag with intense desperation can’t understand where I’m coming from. I see the country and all it’s flaws and can’t bring myself to be proud of it. I hold strong to the thought that I am a citizen of heaven. There, there is no pain or struggle, flaws and hypocrisy.

I’m not asking for a perfect place. I just don’t want a place that claims perfection as they walk away from the only source of it. You can’t cure a disease until you know that you have the symptoms. But perhaps you’d have more of an idea why I can’t seem to decide where my loyalties lie by telling you my choices.

Where should I begin? Well, I guess, the best way explain this to you is by showing you my closest linage . My dad was born in England and immigrated to Canada when he was three. The day after his twenty-fourth birthday he married my mom who was born and raised an all American girl. They moved to Colombia where my three older brothers and I were born. This heritage entitles me to four passports. No, you didn’t read it wrong, I am the citizen of four countries.

Now can you understand my difficulty? I am the rightful citizen of these four countries. Which one should I claim? Or can I claim a little of all of them? If you think you have a simple answer to all these questions then you’re still thinking from the mind of an American. Let me try and show you what it’s like having the mind of a TCK, EnglAmeriCanObian, traveling teenager.

How patriotic can a person be when they are accused of practically living on an airplane? Even so, most people that fly a lot have one country as a base that they go back to more often than anywhere else.

For a long while, we didn’t. We’d travel to one place and stay there for several months until we would uproot and move again. I can’t say I’ve quite been accused of living on an airplane but do have a good amount of knowledge about the cheaper half of airlines.

But you don’t want to know the statistics because they’re plain boring. Let me instead tell you the reason that travel has never become mundane to me. You have to fly. Flying requires going thousands of feet off the ground and remaining suspended at that height for hours on end. Yes, I know I’m repeating the obvious, but this is the problem. I am terrified of heights. Last time I checked, heights start at a lot less than a thousand feet.

There have been many different ways I have used to try getting rid of my ‘flight fear’ but none of them have worked permanently. One of my methods was to forget I was even on a plane. Here’s an example of a trip we made Bali.

I kept myself in denial all the way from the taxi to the airport through until the boarding call. Then, once I was seated on the plane I took a deep breath and kept whispering to myself, “Your still on the ground. Nothing’s going to happen. See, we’re not even moving. Just relax.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

DING! The seatbelt sign came on and people finished settling down. Then came the taxi and the wait. I still tried to suppress my nervous jittering. The engines roared to life and I clutched the vibrating armrests until my knuckles turned white. Mom leans over and took my hand saying,

“It’s ok, we’re just going to take off now. Don’t worry.”

Don’t worry? I guess that’s exactly what I had been doing, though subconsciously. No, that didn’t work. I tried getting my mind off the land that dropped out from under the seemingly thin metal floor of the plane another way. I read from a book and listened to music on my Ipod. Then I tried talking with my mom but suddenly a gut wrenching terror ripped the words and all thought from my mind as the plane free fell. Mom saw me go white and took my hand again. It lasted only seconds and I could breath again. Turbulence. That was one way I tried.

My favorite way of getting rid of my ‘flight fear’, though, was the time I tried using my imagination. I had been reading a couple fantasy books that had to do with dragons, so the next time I went on a trip I had a brilliant idea. I pretend I was the rider of a dragon being sent off on a quest. As we headed along the boarding ramp my thoughts were focused on the pretend dragon I was going to be riding. No fear this time, I was a brave warrior heading off on a dangerous mission.

As the plane taxied, waited, and took off I watched through the window. As the earth shrank beneath me I imagined soaring on the back of a beautiful dragon. We climbed through layer after layer of billowing cloud castles to great heights. I was totally caught up in the romance of it all. With wind rushing past, we flew through the clouds colored by a golden sunrise.
This wonderful tactic worked on two flights. During the take off of the third, I really got to thinking about it. Then I had a most undeluded{arg there's no such word but there should be!} epiphany. In a plane your protected by walls and you’re wearing a seatbelt. On a dragon you would be out in the open. The dragon would be more likely to do flips and somersaults and drop without a moments notice. A plane is far more predictable. My protective bubble burst at the thought I had evaded until now. Riding a dragon would be a lot scarier than flying in a plane!
Of course, I can’t say that flying and the actual mode of transport is everything. Who would travel just for the sake of traveling? No, you travel to get somewhere. Therefore the best part of traveling should be the destinations. Here is one of the places I had the privilege to live in

INDONESIA

When I was seven and my brother fourteen, we moved from the US to Indonesia, historically know as the spice islands. It was a very new and strange experience and the beginning of what I would come to call my ‘norm’. Travel became routine, hellos became easier and goodbyes more frequent. You had to be quick adaptable, and easy to please when it came to making friends. It was the only way to survive the possibility of loneliness.

I think it was harder for Joshua, my brother, because he was just beginning to figure things out and start making friends. Then we were thrown into a completely alien situation and he had to start all over. For me it was all excitement and thank goodness I’m an extrovert! Now, let me show you our introduction to Indonesia.

But to show you a bit of what the essential Indonesia was like, let me tell you my first experience there. We were picked up at the airport in Jakarta by our friend’s driver. His name was Bangbang and he didn’t speak a word of English. The way we knew we had found the right person was by a sign he had with our names on it.

Our first order of business was to find a translation dictionary. The streets of Indonesia are filled with people selling all manner of things, and as we left the airport my dad was able buy a dictionary from one.

The first word we learned in Bahasa Indonesia, was the word for spider, which is laba-laba because there were huge scary spiders up in the telephone wires. Not long after, we learned a phrase we would not soon forget. When we asked how much longer until we got there his answer was, “Tiga jam, tiga jam” We flipped through the dictionary frantically trying to find out
what that meant.

Tiga ___________the number three
Jam ___________hour

So it would take us three hours to get to our friends house. We settled down for a long ride. I was very young and sleepy then so I didn’t really notice what was going on, but I soon found out that we were in a traffic jam. It was stop and go traffic all the way through the capital city of Jakarta.

Three hours passed and my parents again asked how long it would be until we got there. His answer,

“Tiga jam, tiga jam,”

Had we moved at all? We were still three hours away from a good soft bed and familiar faces of people who spoke English. Finally, we made it out of the city and were barreling down a lonely road with barely any traffic. Greenery stretched out on either side of us. Distant rolling hills were covered in groves of palm trees, and terraced rice patties. Apparently, he was trying to make up for lost time by speeding down the bumpy road.

Another three hours passed and my parents asked once more how long before we reached the house.

With a smile and an eager nod he answered, “Satu jam lagi.”

Satu ___________one
lagi ___________more

With a sigh of relief for hearing him say something less than three hours we tried to get comfortable. Dusk was only a few hours away and I struggled to get some sleep wedged between two boxes of our luggage. After the little bit of time my mom spent in the front my dad stayed there instead.

Suddenly a strange noise came from under the van and it started to sway a bit. Bangbang pulled off the road and he, my dad, and brother got out. A long silence ensued and I sat up to see what was going on. We had blown a tire and it would need to be replaced.

Two hours passed before we were finally able to continue our journey. In the light of a setting sun we trundled along once again. By now I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. I must have finally fallen asleep because when I awoke it was dark outside and we were stopped in front of a house.

Sleepy eyed and weary I stumbled out of the van after my brother. It was a beautiful blue night and warm light spilled from the windows of the house but I didn’t care. All that mattered at that moment was that somewhere in that house was a bed that I could at last go to sleep on.

Our ‘three hour’ trip took a total of nine hours. By the time we arrived our friends were frantic. We made our greetings wearily and explained the delay before dropping into the beds they had ready for our arrival. All other information could wait for a new morning.

The time in Indonesia was eventful and I learned a lot. But we left before even the idea of a ‘home’ was fully formed, much less established. We had spent most of the time staying in our friends house in a very temporary way. Finally we were able to rent a house across the street, but it was for less than a year.

After Indonesia we moved to Singapore, but also stayed there for less than a year. After visiting around in Thailand and Malaysia, we decided to settle here, in Malaysia. Still, I struggled to define home.

Though I never called it home, there was a part of my heart that was held by the US. I would look forward to a certain holiday, homy, familiar feeling that I would always get when I went there. At the same time I never could connect or understand a lot about that country. If you asked me where home was I would hesitate and search for the truth. The only answer I was ever able to come up with was,

“I guess it’s wherever my parents are. So if they’re here this is like home, and if they’re elsewhere then that’s my home.”

This unsatisfactory answer drove me to figure out what the meaning of home was. Was it a place as described in The Long Voyage by Malcolm Cowley? Was it really wherever my parents were or did it have something deeper too it than that. In the end I could only decide this. A home is a very important place where you yearn to return whenever you leave. It’s a place that you feel is part of you. I don’t think you can truly have a home in a country that you haven’t dipped into the culture and taken some of it to be your own.

There’s also the idea of temporary homes, but are they really home? You can live in a community of Americans who are living in Malaysia and call that home. But I think to call the country home you have to at least take one piece of the culture and claim it as your own. Then you can say, “Malaysia is my home.”

I only came to this conclusion at the end of last year. That was when I finally realized those words. I finally took them to be mine. Now Malaysia is my home. It’s the first real home I’ve ever had and now it holds a very special place in my heart.

I will leave Malaysia eventually. I’ll travel much more in the future, and settle in other countries. I will even find new homes and a sense of belonging. Eventually I will grow out of this current life and perhaps not find the same friends I know now.

But there is one thing that will never change. Malaysia will always be the first place I belonged. The first place I loved. The first place returned to and now finally the first place I called home.


[This is currently the end of my essay. I know that most of you who are reading this will understand the BI but the people who will be receiving this essay will not.]

Your's (The Lord's) )Truly!(.
Amy