First day... (Tom Lombardi)

I will always remember the first day I got into IES Bendinat. I had arrived a month before to Mallorca, but I didn't know anyone and couldn't speak Catalan.

It was 10 AM when my parents left me in front of IES Bendinat door. I was nervous, but I had already lived this before. I looked around me and saw hundreds of students laughing and talking to each other. All that crowd was going to the same place, where the ESO classroom list was hanged. I took the same direction, searched my name in the list... but I couldn't find my name!

I kept searching, asking myself if I was blind and, in the end I was the last one outside, still looking at the list, but my name wasn't there.

So I decided to get into the school and ask if they could tell me where my class was. But the secretary told me she didn't know anything about this and that it wasn't her problem. I thought “Wow, nice atmosphere over here”, and decided to sit on a table and wait.

Finally a man got down the stairs and asked me what I was doing there, I answered that I didn't understand what he was saying because I couldn't speak Catalan. Then he told it to me in Spanish, and he said that his name was Manel and that I had to follow him to see if I was registered at this school.

After checking on his computer, he told me that I had to got to 4E's classroom. I looked at him like telling him “Where the hell is this?!”. He directly understand it, and told me “Ok, i'll go with you”.

While we were walking through the long hallway, I was thinking about the similiar situations in my past , always being the “new student”, the one that everyone would look at when he would get through that door. I hated that feeling.

And this was just another time, it happened just as in the past. Manel walked threw the door and told them I was a new student coming from Dominican Republic and that I didn't speak Catalan. All the students were looking at me, I hated that situation, being the center of attention just as when you see an animal at a circus gesticulating in the middle of the ring.

The teacher pointed out a place where I could sit, and gave me a sheet to fill in, to know more or less who I was. As everything was in Catalan, Andres ( who was the first one to talk to me! ) helped me to translate it.

After being an hour in class, I could finally get back home. That was it... the hardest part was accomplished and now on I had just to leave time to make its job. Little by little, people got to know me and I got to know them.

I've now been here for 3 years and school is nearly over... will the story be repeated?

Hope not.