Last week an intelligent nine-year-old boy, ever so full of beans, asked me: 'Dimitri, what nationality are you?'
Joel is a student at the run-down inner-city primary school where I work as a volunteer teacher-aid.
'Nothing complicated,' I answered, grinning. 'My dad's Greek and my mum's Australian.'
'What kind of Aussie is your mum?' asked Joel.
'She's Scottish/Irish/Cornish, with some English thrown in.' I was impressed — if Generation Y has such inquisitive minds our world's future is looking awfully bright.
'My dad's half Greek, half English and my mum's half Argentinian, half German,' he announced proudly.
'Wow,' I replied, 'what a mixture! Makes mine look awfully simple.' We high-fived and returned to class.
Joel's a typical example of the pupils at the school, who come, on average, from three or four different nationalities. My own mixed heritage appears ever so simple compared to theirs yet I've been letting it confuse, depress, and stress me for decades.
Every time I enter the grade 3/4 classroom I am, in my mind, returned to the late '70s, when I was a pupil at a suburban Anglican primary school for two-and-a-half years.
In a predominantly Anglo-Saxon/Celtic school I was a mixed bag of Celtic and Greek.
Sure there were Polish, German, Indonesian, Chinese and Indian kids at school, but they were not products of a mixed marriage. I was a rarity.
Still, we all seemed to get on famously. Racism was not an issue, segregation was an unknown concept, and now I see similarities between that school and the primary school at which I do volunteer work today. In both cases 'acceptance' seems to be the key word.
Acceptance — now there's a word that took years to strike a chord with me, to become integrated into my vocabulary and psyche.
Whenever my Greek father picked me up from school, I'd be struck by sheer panic. What do I do now? I thought. Should I hide from him, or should I run over and tell him to meet me in the car? I'm ashamed of his appearance and accent. Doesn't he know that? I've told him so.
Yes, my father was a thorn in the flesh back then. Part of me was terrified that my mates would fall about laughing the moment he opened his mouth. Now I think someone once giggled at my father's strong foreign accent. But only once! That occasion, though, was enough for