Just because I'm older than you doesn't mean I know how to handle life any better than you do.

It was a small Girls Club meeting today. It was Beninese Labor Day, which meant classes were cancelled, which meant most of my girls were more concerned with eating fried foods than what was going on at school.

After quickly discussing t-shirts and a potential fundraiser, we were finished.

“Will you buy us some beignets?” Florentine asked as I was getting ready to leave. Florentine is one of my 5eme students. She is smart, confident, strong-willed and independent. In short, she is who I wished I had been when I was 16.

I did a quick calculation. There were seven of them. Buying them all beignets would cost me 200 CFA (about 40 cents). I nodded, and we headed toward the Mama who sells beignets in the afternoon.

In my daily life, I miss a lot of things. Not just because of the cultural differences, but because the majority of the interactions happening around me are in a language I don’t understand.

On the way to beignets, I had one of these major miscommunications that ended in me thinking my girls were laughing at something that happened to me. I left them to their beignets and biked home. (Which in retrospect seems like a huge overreaction, especially when I learned my girls had been laughing at a situation that didn’t involve me that I didn’t pick up on because it was in local language. You know what they say about the vision of hindsight.)

About a hour later, I had a knock at my door. It was Florentine.

“Madam,” she said. “What happened? Why did you leave us like that?”

It was then that I realized my 16-year-old student is, in some ways, more mature than I am.