After the first two weeks of sixth grade, a girl decided to have a pool party for the entire class. Of course, I didn't want to go. Kids twisting my nipples and grabbing my fat rolls wasn't my idea of a party. However my mother forced me to go. I remember she said, "but son, you're going to make a lot of friends." Yeah right! More like, I was going to be the sacrificial cow the minute I took off my shirt. So during the party, I was the fat kid who didn't take off his shirt while swimming. As if that wasn't funny enough, there were these four boys who needed to get more laughs out of me. Between the four of them, they ripped off my shirt and had everyone laugh at me.

However, that wasn't my most humiliating experience. The worst feeling in my life came while I had a crush on Vivian, the prettiest girl in the sixth grade. She was real nice to me, and made me feel very special when she said, "Danny, can you help me with my math homework?" I made sure that she got all her math homework from me!

Anyway, one day I had to be excused from math class for an emergency; I couldn't hold my dump in class for another minute. In the stall, I prayed that nobody would know it was me, who ruined the breathing air for everybody else who walked into the bathroom. But just as I was walking out of the stall, I heard from outside the hallway,

"Damn! Can you smell that shit!" By the time I reached the door of the bathroom, two eighth graders were there, pointing their fingers at me, and laughing at me as hard as they could. I felt so bad that I wanted to cry. After math class ended, the two guys who saw me come out of the bathroom, told the four kids who tore off my shirt at the pool party.

Once again, these kids began to tease me, yelling, "Danny shit allover the place!" Then

Vivian walked by, just as one of them yelled out, "It stinks! Danny farted!" As soon as she heard this, she gave me a strange look, pinched her nose, and walked by faster. With the look she gave me, I felt as if she had grabbed my little heart, stabbed it with a knife thousand times, slammed it to the floor, and stomped allover it. I wanted to die that day.

Sure life was tough, but it didn't get any easier after I lost the weight. I had to move again to another school to complete the eighth grade. This time, I no longer was the 'fat' kid of the class; I was the 'Mexican' kid. I'm actually Dominican, and it turned out that the public school I attended in North Carolina didn't have much diversity. It was as if the only Latin people these kids had ever seen were Mexican immigrants. Everyday I was the punch line of somebody else's joke, which ended with me either farting, because I 'loved' Taco Bell so much, or how I didn't have a green card, because I jumped the border to get into the United States.

As an eighth grader my best friend was a short, skinny kid from Argentina. One day, on my way to the bathroom, I saw my friend being pushed up against the lockers by this big black kid. The black kid was making fun of his English accent, calling him a dirty Mexican, and stuffing him into a locker. I couldn't sit back and watch. I played over in my mind what I should do. While I was thinking, I remembered something my mother once said, "Son, never let anyone get away with hitting you. You hit them back."

After a couple seconds, I ran up to the bully and pushed him as far as I could. Apparently, I didn't send him too far. He moved back a couple of steps and came back to punch me in the stomach. I never got the chance to hit him back. Afterwards, a minute too late as always, a teacher came. He came upon a small Argentinean boy, stuck in a locker and yelling for help. And a Dominican boy, curled on the floor holding his stomach and gasping for air.

A year later, I entered high school in the Dominican Republic and things were

different; I fit in. By tenth grade, my weight and ethnic problems were solved. I was an athlete and was actively involved in school. I participated on the varsity basketball and baseball teams, and was involved in the athletic council, art club, computer club, and was a writer for the school newspaper.

However, that didn't mean that I forgot what I went through. My experiences sensitized me to people who were still struggling to fit in, and served me as an outlet to reach out to people who weren't being accepted because of their differences.

In tenth grade, my journalism class thought students would be interested in reading a human-interest story about a fellow student, Jonathan Hernandez. Everyone knew he was different. His bones were bent inward, as if he had some kind of variation of rickets. Every year, he had to miss about three months of school, to have surgery in Miami. Each surgery would leave scars that ran down each of his arms and legs. After about ten years of surgery, his limbs were covered in scars. As if that wasn't enough pain to carry, when Jonathan was eleven, his father died of prostate cancer.

Since I knew Jonathan better than anybody else in class, I decided that I would tackle the story. At the time, I think Jonathan considered me more as an acquaintance, than as a friend. Even so, when I asked him if I could interview him and write a human- interest story about his struggles, he accepted.

I held the interview with him after school in the cafeteria. Into the interview, I found out that Jonathan's bone problem was actually something he was born with. His bones grew too fast for his body and he needed the surgeries to control the growth rate of his bones. He described to me how it felt to walk into a supermarket wearing a t-shirt and shorts, and said; "I don't care if people stare at my scars when I walk into the supermarket. I laugh at some of the faces people make. It's as if they are amazed that I can walk!"

We also talked about his father's death. When his father died, Jonathan's world was tom apart. He felt that he didn't have any control over his life and that God didn't exist. As a way to vent his anger and clear his thoughts he would write poetry .He also told me how he tried to commit suicide twice, once by overdosing on Tylenol, and a second time by attempting to slit his wrists. I remember he said, "One night, I was so sad and angry at myself, that I wanted to kill myself. I even grabbed a knife from the kitchen and tried to slit my wrists. But I couldn't even do that, because the blade was dull. I think that was a sign that God didn't want me to die."

After he said that, it got quiet between us. Maybe he felt that he had shared too much with me. So I decided to tell him about some of my most horrible experiences in Nicaragua and North Carolina. I told him about the time when I was fat and how all the kids used to tease me. He thought it was real funny that I stunk up the bathroom, and when I told my mother about how terrible I felt, she said, "Son, its ok. Where else were you supposed to go?" I also told him about my experience in North Carolina, when I got punched in the stomach, trying to keep my friend from getting stuffed into a locker.

Together we both laughed about our experiences. From that point on, we both knew there are people who can relate to, and laugh with, about some of the most painful, humiliating, and degrading experiences in our lives. I knew some of the things he told me that day were only for me, and he wouldn't want me to put them into the newspaper.

He didn't even have to tell me. But what I remember most from entire conversation was when he said, "Everybody looks at me and feels sorry for me. Because of the way I look, and because my father died, people can't look at me straight in the eye without saying, 'I'm sorry.' That is why I like talking to you Danny. You always talk to me, and say hi to me, as if I was no different than anybody else."

That day, I received the pay-off of what respecting other people can bring. After all the times I was teased for being different, I became more sensitive to other people's struggles and saw how important respect can be. Just because I wasn't struggling with fitting in anymore, didn't mean that I was going to act indifferently, or arrogantly towards somebody who was facing the hardships of being different. Respecting other people also runs much deeper than its label as a "Golden Rule," or a Christian principle.

Remembering who I was, and what I had experienced, allowed me to relate to other people's struggles, and expanded my horizons, gave me new perspectives, and exposed me to different people.