The biggest change to take place during the month of August was how much closer I became with my friends. The relationships went from being friendly to actually missing spending time with one another. I will be entirely honest when I say that staying away from my life at home was really hard at first. Things happen, and I'm not there to help. It's not a good feeling to feel like you are missing out on your life. I'm not too sure if it wasn't in August or September that this event took place, but I heard about something that was happening at home regarding my really close friends, and it made me really really upset. I was about to call my best friend Sam at home to talk to her about it when I realized that I really just wanted to talk to Josefina.
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| Valentina Ortega y Jorge |
It wasn't until after I got off the phone with her that I remembered that she doesn't speak English. I had just had a whole rant with her about my problems and it hadn't registered to me that I was blabbing in Spanish and she was responding to me in Spanish! Now I can say without a doubt that the Spanish I was using was definitely not even close to being completely correct, but it was the beginning of me moving into the stage of speaking without thinking.
Friendships come when people are comfortable with each other, which is why my friendships were blossoming. I had officially made it through a week of school and met all of my teachers. One of the MANY differences between Chilean schools and most schools in the USA is that when a teacher is sick, they do not find a substitute. Instead, the children keep themselves in their respective classrooms and listen to music or play games or talk!
Someone managed to get ahold of the recorders from the music room. Who knows why, but all of the guys in my class know how to play the titanic song on the recorder. They officially ruined that song:)
Speaking of music, I had my first music class with the funniest music teacher ever! Profe Mauri is absolutely hilarious and makes my mondays bearable!
Right away he asked me if I wanted to learn an instrument or if I would rather just learn the lyrics to the songs. One thing that should be set straight right now is that I like to work hard. I believe that hard work has its payoffs and I will always try to put in my best work to everything I do. Therefore, when I was given the opportunity to learn something new, I gladly took the opportunity. He taught me how to play the bass guitar, and told me he was impressed with how fast I caught on :)
Another important fact about me, I am a Christian, and my religion is incredibly important to me. Thus, being unable to attend church for a long time was making me feel a bit disconnected. So I began to watch the recorded sermons which were posted on my churches website in the United States! It seemed to be the solution I needed to keep myself rooted when I needed a bit of faith.
Speaking of the religious aspect of my trip, I finally learned a few of the prayers that my family sings before dinner each night. They go something like this-
Gracias Señor por este alimento,
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| My parents and Uncle Richie baptizing me before I left |
Como en el desierto
Amen
Dijimos gracias padre
por todo tu amor
por pan, ropa, y casa,
y por tu protección
amen
It is a really fun experience for me to be able to sing along with them each night as we eat dinner, or once, together!
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| This is my Nanny "Señora Sunny" (sue-knee)- she makes the best bread in the world. I love her very very much |
All of the rotarians are very impressed with my Spanish and tell me that it has already grown a lot in less than a month!
The hard thing about progressing is that you rarely see yourself doing it. It is sometimes best to have a conversation or two every few month with a few select people who see you growing from afar and are there to re ensure you!
One of my favorite things about being in a new country is trying new food. As I have been looking through my old journal entries to write about what I did in those times, I ran across this quote: "they brought me a 'dessert' thing after dinner which consisted of some weird grain things, a lot of juice, and a peach- but the peaches are OLD and falling apart and... EW! Apparently it's really popular here! Raw fish+lemon, rotten peaches... these people eat some gosh darn funky stuff!"
And indeed, they are funky, but looking back at this now I'm laughing really hard because the "rotten peach" thing became something I would eat and enjoy on a daily basis in September!
Most of the food here is absolutely DELICIOUS, I will get more into that in the September posts...
My favorite thing to have as a treat is Leche con plátanos. It is literally just milk and bananas and a little bit of sugar blended together, but man it is RICO!!
Also, suprisingly, I have never tasted better sushi in my life.
I first tasted the sushi here when I went out with my friends after Jeans Day. Jeans day is a special day where the school allows the students to ditch their uniforms and come to school in regular clothing. In order to do so, each child pays less than a dollar to wear regular clothing to school. THEY PAY TO WEAR REGULAR CLOTHING! I think it's honestly pretty funny how excited they get!
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| Me and Vale goofing off! |
We watched a movie and goofed off together while eating the greatest sushi ever made. That is a fact, not an opinion.
Vale is the friend who has thus far been closest to me. She is super positive all of the time, and incredibly patient with me. She is definitely the kind of friend that I can whole heartedly say I was lucky to find.
In this time period, I still wasn't aloud to use the bus alone, so walking .2 miles was a big deal for my freedom.
Freedom is one of the things that I would love to say is easy to find when you are on your own, but I can easily say that it is incredibly frustrating to be "on your own, but still in a different family's household. I am a daughter to two sets of parents, and that means my daughterly responsibilities of rule following are rotted from two completely different cultures.
This month I wrote my first rant in my diary where I was incredibly frustrated with some of the things I had made clear were important to me that seemed to be pushed aside continuously. It felt that day as though I was taking a trip for independence, yet I was being babysat the whole time.
I have noticed that this tends to be a common theme for me. I have the greatest time ever while enjoying my new life in this country, then I will have a random day that is really hard. Then the next day I'm back to living life! It's quite the pattern.
One of the things that I was frustrated about was that I was not able to be practicing taekwondo because we had yet to find a studio and I had to have the sport approved through rotary. So finally, I talked with my host parents with a sit down conversation to find a place for me to try, and alas I got to go to my first taekwondo class in Chile!!!!
It was awesome to see the differences between the ways that they practice the sport I love. It felt so nice to get back into the pattern of working out. Sadly, rotary said that I had to do some paperwork and have my parents approve the sport before I could continue to practice. So, that was that for my taekwondo practicing days.
Sadly, near the end of the month, I got sick with a cold and instead of going to school, I sat in bed all day drinking tea.
Being sick on an exchange is very counter productive because you don't have many people to be practicing the language with when everyone else is at school or work, and there are not many new cultural experiences you can have from your bed.
When I finally returned to school, I had a very memorable conversation with my girls in class about animal sounds. The language barrier not only affects people I guess, because a Spanish dog vs English ones are saying different things!!!
Looking back at this video, I think it is really funny that I could barely get across the point of what I wanted to say. Pollo vs gallo was a comparison I didn't even know existed.
I was added to an instagram page from my school that (I didn't know at the time) was an anonymous account which made "matches" of people in the school!
Right away, my picture popped up matched with another kid in my class- it's just a joke, but I thought it was really cool that people were already accepting me into a part of their school after no more than 2 weeks!
Until next time!
Sarah Rachel
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