“I have these lucid dreams where I can’t move a thing/thinking of you in my bed,” we all blasted out the lyrics to the popular song by Juice Wrld while Ms. Hagen cruised the bus down highway I-5 South. Since the beginning of fifth grade, everyone at Lakeside Middle School anticipates the week-long Global Service Learning trip at the start of eighth grade. This year it was my turn to go, and I was assigned to the small town of Vernonia, Oregon. Yes, this is the Vernonia that you Twilight fans know as the location where Bella and Edward shared their first kisses. But I wasn’t there to fall in love with a werewolf, I was there to spend a week of rainy cold nights sleeping in a tent in the middle of a deserted park. That’s right. In a small town with actual housing, I was spending my nights in a tent at a park that we would soon learn is the stoners lounge for Vernonia teens with twelve other classmates.

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Now let me just tell you that I am the type of person that takes daily showers for at least 30 minutes. I am the type of person that aches for my cup of chocolate milk every morning made with the same Trader Joe’s Mighty Moo’s Chocolate Syrup. I am the type of person one might call a “cold sleeper”, and I only fall asleep while cuddling the pillow adjacent to mine. So this camping trip? It was certainly not my thing. But this was not just one of those vacations that my school sporadically decided its students needed to take, drive down in a stinky yellow bus for four hours just to sleep in tents in the center of Anderson’s Park. Along with diversity in its student body, my school highly values service and giving back to the community. So, this trip was a service trip, and our mission for going to Vernonia was to experience living with locals for a week and witness life in the small town.

Day one and I was already done with having green tea instead of my chocolate milk, taking five minutes timed showers in the sketchy public bathrooms that stank heavily of weed, and sleeping on my rock hard sleeping pad (I thought that it was self-inflatable, but it turned out that REI just used that as a marketing trick). But, all of this seemed bearable knowing that the service agenda for today morning was to volunteer at the Vernonia School.

Of course, it was another rainy day, and the afternoon entailed helping remove invasive species at the nearby national park, so I dressed accordingly. My black REI brand rain pants under which I wore a pair of black Ivivva leggings; on top a maroon long sleeve t-shirt and last year’s MLK Day tournament volleyball sweatshirt. For shoes, I slipped on my pair of unattractive purple Solomon hiking boots. I know, I know, what a fashion icon.

A short 5-minute bus ride and we were at the school. That’s the nice thing about small towns, ditch the forty minute plus traffic car rides every morning. We walked into a large and what seemed surprisingly modern building. It stuck out from the rest of the town. All the miniature and old buildings you would expect in a small town and then bam! the multi-floored building with large glass windows and words across dark brown wood reading “Vernonia Schools”.

A kind lady, dressed in a flashy pink blouse and black skirt, signed us in and split us up into groups of four. I, along with my other classmates was going to Ms. Ellington’s class of kindergarteners to help with free playtime.

Exhilarated, we walked the wide hallways of the school, finally reaching the one with vibrant eagles on its door and a large sign reading “Ms. Ellington’s Eagles”. William walked inside first, always being the out-going one in the group, and the rest of us followed. The pupils of the kindergartners scanned us from top to bottom, staring in astonishment. I swear to god I felt like I was in a fashion show, the audience judging everything about me.

The four of us, the oddballs it seemed, stood awkwardly in the corner until Ms. Ellington was done giving her spiel about the dos and don’ts of playtime. I bet none of the kids were listening anyway because they were all too busy gouging their eyes out, looking at their middle school guests. Their tiny eyes finally fixated off us when Ms. Ellington announced that the kids could go play. I glanced over at each other and chose to help the kids at the puzzle station. I grabbed one of the small chairs, each a different bright color, sat down, and introduced ourselves to the group of puzzlers. It didn’t take long for the group of kids to get comfortable with us oddballs. They started sharing stories about fighting with their older sibling, or how they like fishes, or how their mom packed them pasta for lunch today. This is when a question, unlike the usual “can you help me?” or “what’s your name again?”, came up.

“Why do you have such dark skin?” one of the girls asked, putting her hand up to my cheek.

“Yeah, what are you?” said another one of the boys, scrunching up his face with bewilderment. The questions genuinely left me dumbfounded. I didn’t understand how to answer their question, or even what they meant. In my years of volunteering to help younger kids, never had I been asked questions like this.

That's when I scanned the classroom, seeing that every single kid was white and here I was, an Indian girl being asked what I am. I, and my other classmates, heard comments like this throughout the day. In fact, not only from the kindergarteners but as we were walking back to the buses, a middle school boy in the hallway pointed to my friend and screamed, “Hey! Asian kid! Go do my homework!”

These upsetting and hurtful comments made all of us outsiders think about our role in the world outside our school, in places like Vernonia. We were portrayed very differently than we had expected. In a school with thousands of students, in a city only 175 miles away from mine, there was no diversity. Younger kids didn’t even know that people of color existed. Among many valuable things, I learned during this trip that in the town of Vernonia, people grow up, oblivious to the fact that there is a whole world out there with people who are different from their society, people like me. This experience has shaped how I think of myself and has made me more self-aware about my race when meeting new people. That day, for the first time in my life, I was an alien to the world surrounding me.