Thanks to AquaEclipse for reviewing.

Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia.

ScotBel: Worth It Sometimes

Alistair looked up when Bella entered the kitchen, looking a little haggard. He knew that the stress of her job was getting to her.

Anyone who thought that teaching was an easy career obviously had no idea what they were talking about.

And the worst part was, Bella wasn't even technically a teacher. She was a glorified tutor. The school had received a number of students from the Congo who could barely speak English. It became her job to teach them and help them adjust, since she could speak both English and French. However, since she didn't have the documentation necessary to be left alone with a class (even if only a few children), she had to have a small section in another classroom in order to teach them.

The class she was in was the only class with a small enough number of students: the specialty class. Students with learning difficulties, and with it, behavioural difficulties. They were the ones that the other teachers didn't want. One needed to have a lot of patience and training to deal with them. And unfortunately, it was training that Bella hadn't received. Even though she wasn't directly working with them, she still had to help the other teacher with maintaining discipline, and heaven help her when the other teacher had to leave the classroom for some reason.

Bella had come home in tears on more than one occasion. She said that they treated her like toilet paper – they wiped themselves off on her. They had little respect for her. And Alistair didn't know how he could help her.

He only pushed a mug of coffee towards her, and she took it gratefully.

…

When Alistair returned home from his own job, he saw that Bella was in much higher spirits than usual. He wrapped her in a hug and kissed her.

"Good day?" he asked.

"I guess so," she said. "I told you about Alex, right? The little one?"

"Yeah."

"Well, you know how he has trouble speaking, and it's hard to get him to say more than one word at a time? Well, today he actually tried to chat with me. It was mostly babbling, but attempts at multiple sentences were made. And he decided today that he wanted to sit with me. He was almost possessive of that seat."

Alistair smiled, before kissing her on the head. He could tell that something as small as this really made her day.

"Sometimes it's almost worth it," Bella said softly.

"Sometimes," Alistair agreed.

So, this is basically my current situation. My old primary school received a few Congolese students, but they need both English and Afrikaans at the school. I was approached to teach them Afrikaans and help them with their English – basically get them up to standard. And because you need a SACE in South Africa in order to be left alone with kids, and because I don't have it, I had to be sorted into a class with a teacher who does have it. And since the South African Education Department thinks that it's perfectly fine to have a class with 30-40 students, the only class they could put me in was the LSEN class – the learners with special education needs – and the one with less than 20 kids. Some of them are fine, but others are just… One of them actually said once when the other teacher wasn't there that they could party, as though I wasn't in the class. This was after at least half an hour of me trying to get them to stop fighting and playing and to get back to their seats. And yes, they call me 'teacher' and everything (South Africans, and Afrikaners especially, are pretty obsessed with calling people by their titles – kids and teenagers especially would rather call an adult by their title than use the formal you, and even colleagues use the title when they're not sure whether to use jy or u). Occasionally they would be sweet, like the youngest in the class deciding that she wanted to sit next to me. There was also one time when I was scolding the others for their bad behaviour, and while I was scolding she came up to me and hugged me. It surprised me, but I hugged her back without breaking eye-contact. She also has speech difficulties, so it made me feel good when she tried to chat with me.