I have mixed feelings about school performances.  When my eldest daughter was in nursery, she reluctantly performed in concerts for the parents.  On one occasion, she actually paused singing and dancing in the middle of a performance and asked, “Mama, when we finish, can I sleep?”  She had had a good night’s sleep the night before, but the stress of the moment got to her, and sleep seemed to be the only solution she could think of at the time.  Of course, she continued the performance, and, later in life, she came to love the spotlight and the stage and won many talent contests as a young singer.

When I was three years old, my parents moved from New Orleans, Louisiana, my birthplace, to Bahrain.  We lived in a compound community with other expat families, and we knew everyone in our community – the other parents and children, the compound shop keeper, the security guards at the gate, the cleaners, the workers at the cinema, and the nurse at the small clinic near the front entrance – literally, everyone.  We grew up knowing we belonged to our community, and the members of our community knew they were partly responsible for the care of all of the children in the compound because we moved freely from house to house and from our houses to the compound facilities.  One day, when all of the children were playing hide-and-seek, one of my sister’s friends got lost.  Within five to ten minutes, all of the adults available in the compound were searching for the girl, and she was found within another twenty minutes.  It turns out, she had snuck into the air conditioned compound cinema to watch part of a film that was playing because she got bored and hot playing outdoors.  The attendant alerted her parents, and she was quickly ‘rescued’ from the cinema.

When I was a child, except for the mandatory school hours indoors, I spent most of my time outdoors.  We used to live right near the beach, and the sandy shore and sea were my playgrounds.  I used to do cartwheels in the sand, collect shells, and poke a long stick at anything strange and wonderful, living or non-living, that I discovered in the sand or in the shallow pools of water that collected between the rocks.  I also had quite a collection of hermit crabs I dug out of the sand.  One day, I even collected a mostly dead snake in a jar, filled it with sea water, and brought it home as a treasure for my mom.  She was not as fascinated as I was with my latest discovery.