I was only 11 years old when my family moved to the United States from Ghana [West Africa].
Ghana being a British Commonwealth country I had spoken English all my life with no difficulty. However, moving to America was a challenge as I had trouble getting used to all the slang and such. It made conversations hard at times because I didn’t want to look like an idiot by always asking what this and that meant.
Anyways, after I had been in the US for less than a year, summer came along and I did what most American kids do during that time – I went to a summer camp. With my youth group specifically. An eye-opening experience it was for me in many a ways. Naturally, a war of pranks begun, sometimes it was between cabin members, other times a battle of the sexes. Being new to this whole scene, I didn’t know to what extent some of these pranks could go to, they escalated during the week and actually some pretty bad ones happened but this particular one wasn’t so bad just exaggerated by my naivette … I went to the bathroom to pee and soon realized that my pee wasn’t hitting the porcelain, I stood there in confusion for a while, lifted the toilet seat and to my surprise found a clear plastic placed neatly over it. I run back into the cabin yelling “someone put a rubber on the toilet!” x 3 The youth pastor heard about this and was furious, gathered all his little junior high boys together in one cabin and was angrily questioning them, trying to find out who would do such a despicable thing, I became even more confused at that point not understanding why he would be so seemingly mad about a prank of that degree when worse ones had been going on. Later on, someone came in from the bathroom and said all he found there was a saran wrap with my pee dead center, at this point everyone started laughing. I became even more confused. My youth pastor had to explain to me exactly what “rubber” implied in that context. My confusion turned to embarrasment. Said returnee then shouted through his laughter “hey, at least it wasn’t poop”…

Frank – Ghana