Even though I was born in Bahrain, I was raised in Yemen. After I graduated from Sana’a University in Yemen, I took a job of a schoolteacher there.  As the first year of every job is the most difficult year for any employee, I too was not excluded from this experience. ALthough for ME, it repeated two times in two different countries.    
              I became teacher Sarah just to make my father-in-law happy and proud as he always hoped of having a teacher in the family. He was an old knowledgeable man who insisted on learning and is rarely seen without holding a book or a newspaper in his hand. When I became a teacher, my father-in-law was the first to support me. I chose to be an English teacher because he encouraged me by saying: “Learning a new language will provide you with more resources to learn from.” The first year of my teaching was such a horrible experience, because after graduation the reality of life was totally different. I realised that learning how to teach is easier than actual teaching because taking actions is more challenging than memorising how to take an action. The main problem I faced was in classroom management and controlling a big number of students besides all the emotional upheaval towards this career due to my own misconception that teaching was about being aware of the information and the content to be delivered when it was way more than that! I looked at teaching as a job I was paid for and no more. I cried a lot and sometimes thought about quitting the job which I did not seem to know anything about. One day my father in law brought me a book on some self-improvement tips and a bit of psychology. After reading this book, I became more aware of myself and started to think about solving rather than sticking to the problems. Gradually, I started to build a good relationship with each student. I realised that if students love their teacher, they will listen to her, and this seemed to work for me. Consequently, day after day I could manage the class better till, I could control the students’ behavior easier. 
              After all those struggles, I finally settled, but this was not to last for long.  My husband got a good job in Bahrain and we had to come to Bahrain and live here. That was a big frustration to me because I started remembering the days I had struggled to settle in my job, and when I finally started loving it, I had to move! I decided to continue teaching in Bahrain. I knew that I would struggle at start as before, but I had to challenge myself. First year of teaching in Bahrain was worse than I expected. People were very kind, but I was a stranger. Everything was strange for me too. The accent was different, the culture, the appearance, and I was different too. As a person who took time to adapt to teaching in her country, how would I now adapt to another country? Despite these difficulties I wanted to teach, so I started. At the beginning, my students were not able to understand my accent, therefore, they did not take the lesson seriously. While some would not pay attention in the class, others chose to play when I was talking and some simply ignored me. I still recall those sarcastic smiles in the class. Soon I acknowledged that I was the cause for all those problems. Perhaps I did not take myself seriously and wished that I never had to leave my previous school.  
              One spring morning, it was my birthday, and since it was a weekday, I had to come to school. As I entered the class, I got shocked with my students’ preparation for my birthday. They started singing no sooner I stepped into the class. On the teachers table sat a beautiful cake colorfully topped with cherries and berries, and besides the cake were some gifts and a card that read: “We love you teacher.” This was not only an unforgettable moment in my life, but also a turning point. Being appreciated by ones whom we think never cared about us was a very humbling experience. From that day, I started to believe more in myself and be grateful for this sense of belonging. I made efforts to learn the Bahraini accent a little bit to make my teaching more fun and understandable. I started to build a good relationship with the students and gave them the chance to talk to me about their issues and I talked to them about Yemen. I started to talk to my colleagues and learn from their experiences too. I started to read educational books and experiment with technology in teaching. I realised I became a better person and a better teacher. When students come to hug me before leaving the school, I feel proud of myself, and very grateful for being a teacher because without those challenges I would not have become the person who I am today.  
 
By Amna Ahmed Ghuloom Ali is a student at Bahrain Teachers College,  
Year 3, Cycle 2, English Language Specialist