Welcome to Humans of OTHS! This is a new series we created where we will be posting stories of OTHS students so everyone can get to know each other a little more.

“I grew up with my dad in the military and we moved around a lot. I was born in America, but around five years later we moved to Germany, and five years after that, the army told us we had a month to pack all our household goods and send them over to New York. We sent our stuff out in January of 2010 and we were expecting to move within the month, but that didn’t happen. They told us to wait a little longer, which ended up extending to two months in which we had to live out of a suitcase in the freezing cold with nothing more than a mattress on the floor, and a table. We finally moved to New York during May and it was extremely hot, and since we couldn’t get the stuff that we shipped over, we had to buy a bunch of new summer clothes.

When we arrived we still had to live in a janky hotel room for almost three months and the transition was rough. It was really weird moving from a small town in the middle of nowhere in Germany to such a big city like New York. At first I was freaking out because it was really bizarre and people acted so differently. I knew English but I wasn’t very good at it and sometimes I would not even leave my hotel room. After a few months, I got over it and went to an American school which helped a lot with my English. But, out of everything my family went through, I’d like to say that being unable to properly watch the soccer World Cup was the worst of our hardships. The World Cup was on the year we moved and that was a huge deal for my family, so the fact that there was only one channel for all the games was extremely frustrating.”

-Alexandra Richardson, 11th grade