Adolescence - by Hénock Gugsa

Adolescence

 – by Hénock Gugsa –

Discoveries continued, but at a much faster pace.

I was doing well in school, I joined my school’s boy scouts club for a couple of years. This was character-building time. My new-found love was reading, I loved hanging out in libraries. Another obsession was going to the movies every weekend. In fact, my dad used to say that I was using his money to enrich the white man (the ferenjii) both there and in foreign lands. He was right about that; but I was also benefiting from the fact that my language skills were growing at a rapid pace.

These were the "teen years" ... adolescence had arrived ... new problems began to appear and they seemed super impossible to tackle!  To name a few --- shyness, social awkwardness, and complete ignorance of the new social role.  My friends and I were all in the same boat, we were what you would call today: nerds !  Some of the disadvantages were outside our control.  For instance, the school we went to was not co-ed ... and that led to complete ignorance of the opposite sex.  But then again, even the whole society was segregationist when it came to genders.  There was always a kind of ingrained male chauvinism (machismo) which meant that hardly any friendship existed between boys and girls.

Yet, however frustrating life seemed at times, I was simultaneously realizing that time was flying by at a faster pace than ever before.  Books opened my eyes a lot, I learned more from them than any living person in my sphere.  I was now sensing that more adventures and enjoyment of life were just over the looming horizon ... a new beginning, perhaps.

By the time I was eighteen, I was fluent in English and had a good working start in French. And to cap everything, I had the great fortune and privilege of coming to the United States for my last year of high school. I had at last come to the States, as an exchange student, at the tender age of seventeen; and it was my first big adventure in life!

[In my next installment in this series, I hope to be tackling my "adulthood" years.]