Rhea's head broke someone's hand!

This year has been an interesting year for Rhea as far as friendships go.  She's always had an easy time of making friends with her yellow, friendly personality.  But here at ISL, we're finding that it's hard to break into circles of friendships that are already established.  We thought it would be better  here in Latvia since we started school on time (in Angola we came 2 months after school started), but alas, Rhea has had a year of "personal growth" as our other kids have had in 4th grade as well.

The first 3 weeks or so of school were going well.  Rhea had met another 4th grade girl from the embassy and they hit it off right away.  There were 2 other girls at school that they played with as well.  But another new girl was trying to break into the different social circles, and instead of just joining in and being happy, she became jealous of Rhea's friendship with Celeste, the first friend she made.  Sadly she started pulling the other girls away from Rhea.  It led them to exclude her, make fun of her, talk about her (in front of her even), run away from her on the playground, not let her sit next to them at lunch, etc., basically bullying her.  What was harder was that they were 4 girls, and there were only 3 other girls in the one 4th grade class.  So after a few months of Rhea trying different things to reach out to these girls (we had daily conversations, strategies, prayers and of course tears!), we counseled her to move on to the other few girls in her class.  So she did.  And after being "let in" to their circle of friendship, all seemed to be going well with Gundega and Sandra.  Until Christmas break.  Gundega started to show signs of jealousy.  Luckily they had a few weeks off for the holidays, but even after they got back, the issues started right back up.  Gundega hated when Rhea played with Sandra because Gundega and Sandra had been friends the previous year and she was feeling threatened, even if they were all playing together.  Emotional and physical bullying ensued on the part of Gundega toward Rhea, and one of the physical assaults ended with Gundega breaking her wrist after hitting Rhea in the head!  Rhea was quiet about her pain, so no teachers knew until Gundega asked to go to the nurse because her hand hurt.  The nurse asked how she hurt her hand, and she explained that she had hit someone.  And sure enough, the next day, Gundega returned to school with a cast on her arm.  Rhea has inherited the P family head of steel!  After the incident, there were moments of hot and cold between the girls, but on this particular day when I was subbing at the school, they were having a "good day" so I was able to get a picture of them together and capture Gundega's cast.  ;) 

As happens at this age, the good day came to an end, and after Gundega got her cast off, there were two other physical assaults of head butting and throwing a ball at the back of Rhea's head in P.E., so Bri and I finally requested a meeting with the principal.  Gundega had never been called in to talk to the principal, even after the teacher reported that she hit Rhea, so we were curious as to how he was going to handle future issues, because they didn't seem to be coming to an end.  Suspension of course is the next course of action if it happens again, and his "plan" is to keep the girls separated.  We'll see how long that lasts.  ;)