When I was in high school this guy from Saudi Arabia named Ahmed passed through San Antonio because his dad was doing some military thing here, and so for a few days he had to go to my school for some reason. (??? Actually the more I think about this story the weirder it seems, but it happened).
One of our teachers picked two groups of us to hang out with Ahmed after school for an hour, alternating groups every other day. The idea was to show him American culture… I think. (Again, in my head this seems like it was a million years ago and the reality of it has worn off).
So on the first day, I showed Ahmed a bunch of videos on the internet and he was really fascinated by a video of a cockroach controlling a robot, because he wanted to go into engineering I guess, and he made me email him the link. Then he showed us pictures of all the cars (by which I mean Hummers) he had back home.
On one of my group’s days I was super prepped to take him off campus to go eat at the Beijing chinese restaurant by our school but when I got to the room (that they kept him in? I was 16 I didn’t ask too many questions) he told us that the previous group had shown him Forest Gump but they didn’t get to finish it so he had to see the second half of it. And I got sooooo pissed off that they made him watch this movie and now my group had to abandon our plans so that he could watch the rest of it. So I stormed off and I don’t remember going back.
The next day we went down to his room to teach him more of our American ways and there was nobody there. We hung out in the room for a while until finally one of the counselors came by and we asked him where Ahmed was.
The counselor told us that his father was done with his work and that Ahmed was gone. And I was particularly sad for some reason.
