My NSA Story: Four Semesters, Four Countries, One School
By Brooklyn C.
Asia by Pawel Gaul from Getty Images Signature Created in Canva
I’m often asked the question, “Where are you from?”
Well, the short answer is this: I was born in Texas. My mom is from Tennessee and my dad is from Mississippi. Not so crazy, right? Plot twist. My citizenship is American, although I would not say I am fully from there. I haven’t been back to Texas since I moved away when I was three. When I went back to the States, people asked, “Are you happy to be home?” The honest response was that I didn’t call the United States home. In fact, the first country in my NSA story is India, where I spent my childhood from ages three to fifteen.
I attended an Indian school till the end of eighth grade, then switched to NSA for high school. My first full year at NSA was stressful for its own reasons, but primarily because of the transition to an online way of learning. Six months later, December 4th, 2023, school became challenging for different reasons. A cyclone hit my city and our house was flooded with over four feet of water inside the house. I’ll spare you the details, but the general gist is that my family and I felt like we were sailing in rocky waters. We moved into a new house on May 5, 2025, five months later. The rain clouds of our lives looked like they were clearing up.
It took me a month longer to finish school than I had wanted because of all the moving around. I finished my second year at NSA a few weeks after we shifted into our new place. I began my junior year at NSA with a heavier workload than I’d had in the past. Three months after we moved in, we found out we had to move again for my dad’s job. A second Christmas of moving boxes. We lived in that house for seven months total. There were highs and many lows, but the next country was entering the story.
My family and I stayed in Nepal from January till June of 2025, the second semester of my Junior year. There were times when school felt impossible, but the routine of keeping up with my assignments gave me a challenge to keep myself distracted from the constant moving around. I had seven classes that year including some college-level courses, so my hands were more than full. Following Nepal, we went to the United States, where I spent July till December of 2025, the first semester of my senior year. By this point, it had been a year and a half of spending nights in guest houses, hotels, church floors, Airbnbs, and house after house after house.
The fourth and final country for my NSA story is the UAE. We moved here in January of this year (2026), and I’ll live here with my family until I head to college in the fall. I’ll graduate a month after I turn seventeen and attend college in Virginia with the hope of pursuing a bachelor's degree in studio art with a minor in cultural studies.
Although my life has been a bit crazy over the past two years, I love looking back at all that I got to do, see, and learn about by studying all over the world. If I learned anything, it’s this: I am a mix of multiple places and cultures, each one playing a part in forming me into who I am today. The key is not that I have found a place to call home, but that I know my home is in heaven with Christ. I can experience that right now by studying His word and spending time with Christian community. It is the people and a life centered on Christ that bring me home.
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Brooklyn C. is in twelfth grade and has been with NSA for four years. She spends her free time painting and drawing, in hopes of pursuing a career in children's book illustration. She also enjoys running, going on walks, listening to music, studying, watching movies, reading and travelling.