Baby Steps

The past few years I have been lucky enough to spend part of my summer with three wonderful families at a beach house in North Carolina. This past June, there were fourteen of us enjoying a perfect summer vacation, including three-year-old Emma. Emma spent her vacation running around the house and through the sand, experiencing sand creatures, iPads, and foods for the first time, as well as asking questions and learning the names and functions of a variety of things. I remember having a conversation that week that went something like this:

"How nice would it be to be Emma's age again - everything is new and exciting; you'd learn something completely new everyday!"
"You're right - but think of how exhausting that would be."

Being an exchange student is essentially the same as being a toddler again: everything is new and exciting, you're given special attention, and yet not knowing everything (or sometimes it feels like not knowing anything) becomes an incredibly draining task at times.

The past few weeks have been full of mini-victories: remembering to turn on the water heater in the shower on a cold day, ordering my snack at school in Portuguese for the first time, carrying on a conversation with a Rotarian the entire ride home from a meeting, realizing that Brazilians never use "necesitar" and starting to us "precisar" instead, feeling comfortable enough to rummage through my family's pantry to find a snack (and discovering absolutely delicious granola bars).

I'm also given a lot of special treatment being the "American" here: everyone always asks me if I want to try their food (yes), I get to leave school early on Tuesdays while the rest of my class takes their weekly exams, I've been offered opportunities to travel to parts of Brazil that many Brazilians have never seen, and there is this one ten-year-old kid who yells "Good morning, beautiful!" to me everyday on my way into school.

While I can sense my Portuguese improving and I am feeling more and more at home here, there are still exhausting times, such as trying to follow a conversation between my friends during break at school (imagine seven teenage girls talking excitedly... now imagine it in a language you're just starting to understand). Even the few times where I've (thought I) completely understood snackbreak conversations, I hardly chime in as it's still a process for Portuguese to come out (every sentence needs special attention - make number and gender agree, conjugate the verb for "he/she/it" .. okay, I've got it - oh, we're on a new topic already).

But, of course, struggling to comprehend these new things is much better than not trying to understand them at all. I'm just running through the sand for the first time, experimenting with the waves washing over my feet. Every now and then there's a crab pinch or a sunburn, but that's just part of the learning experience. (I might have taken that analogy too far, but go with it).

I've also been blessed with an incredibly caring host family that constantly engages me in conversation and forces me to explain things in Portuguese for them. They're patient with my learning, kindly correct my many mistakes, and keep pushing me more and more to step out into the scary world of being Brazilian. (They constantly tell me I can't be afraid to speak Portuguese - if I'm afraid, I'm never going to speak it and thus will never learn. Clearly some wise words).


This weekend I finally got to spend time with other kids who are sharing these same experiences of learning and frustration. All of the Rotary kids in my district had a three day retreat/orientation at a cute little lodge with cabins just outside of the town where I live. It was so nice to finally get to meet the other exchangers, as there are no other exchange students living in my city - plus they're tons of fun!

There will be 32 students in my district (a few are arriving this week still): 15 from Mexico, 6 from the United States, 6 from Germany, 3 from Australia, 1 from Denmark, and 1 from Finland.

 

Everything here is going well, and I hope those of you in the US are enjoying your last few weeks of summer!

Beijos,
Kate