By Mari Hayman
It’s been a month since I’ve returned to the Northern Hemisphere, and I don’t really know if there’s a way I can make the English language suffice to say what it is I feel every morning when I wake up, look dazedly around my bedroom, and realize that I’m not in Uruguay anymore. It’s not that I feel disoriented — this, after all, has been my home for almost my entire life. But I can’t get over the fact that the days I’ve spent with my friends and family back in Marysville, aren’t a dream or a brief bout of deja-vu and that I won’t just roll out of bed, put on my school clothes and tie, and dash down to the bus stop to catch the #116 to El Colegio del Sagrado Corazon in downtown Montevideo.
In a lot of ways, being an exchange student for a year is a lot like being abducted by aliens. Almost without warning, you are unceremoniously uprooted from all that you’ve ever known about yourself and the way you live. You find yourself utterly alone and unsure of the future, living in an environment you are unfamiliar with, unable to communicate in your own language. The people you leave behind will miss you, but usually they are powerless to bring you back, as are you to return to them — and when you finally find yourself back where you started, no matter what you say, no one you know will ever fully understand what you went through. Most of all though, life will have gone on without you, and while it may seem like it’s all as if you’ve never left, there will always be a big part of you that belongs somewhere else.
This is not to say that the year abroad won’t be the best year of your life. Or that you won’t learn more about yourself and the world and living with other people in that one year than in the rest of your paltry 19-year existence combined. It has certainly been the case for me.
I entertained various illusions before I got to Uruguay, the most prevalent image being myself soaking up rays on the beach, surfing all afternoon and staying out all night to make up for four years of high-school repression and self-control. Obviously, after four years of high-school Spanish, I would be fluent within a couple weeks and everything else would just fall into place. Well, I was in for a rude awakening. Sitting in my Uruguayan law class for the first two weeks of my stay, easily the most clueless person in the entire building, I learned after my initial outrage and embarrassment not to have expectations, to embrace humility and just enjoy the utter madness of starting over.
Sitting out on the rambla drinking mate all afternoon with my classmates, or just congregating in a friend’s living room on Friday nights to talk about nothing, I learned that entertainment doesn’t necessarily need to be sought out or bought at a movie theater or dance club, that I needed to keep an open mind to modify my plans and alter my expectations. I also saw first hand how the United States is perceived by the rest of the world, and the work that we must do to regain credibility abroad. Life there has taught me that wealth doesn’t buy happiness, but I shouldn’t take mine for granted. I loved the way crazed Uruguayan soccer fanatics could put aside their differences and cheer on the national team together against Brazil — their patriotism and national unity, at least in the soccer stadium, is something we in the United States could learn from. And I would feel remiss in my duty as a semi-Uruguayan if I left out the fact that the "Cumparsita" (i.e. tango) isn’t from Argentina: it’s from Uruguay! (My host-sister wanted me to be sure to add that bit.)
However, I think the hardest and most important lessons I learned from my family: that success must be judged by what you have sacrificed to get it. No exchange experience is ever going to be what you plan for it to be, and you are bound to make mistakes, but a friend once told me that "not getting what you want is sometimes a marvelous stroke of good luck" and my friends — Uruguayans, Europeans, and Americans — are my proof that true friendship can get you past the greatest obstacles in life. Not a day goes by that I don’t miss them.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that even though I missed my first year of college to do what most people would consider academic and professional suicide (I finally start Freshman year this fall, after a 15-month hiatus), I feel like I have a huge advantage emotionally: in contrast to Uruguay, living in Palo Alto will be like living down the street. I’m ready for anything, even failure. A chapter of my life may have closed forever, and sometimes it hurts knowing that I can never have it back. But like the settler in the Uruguayan fable we were given during our November graduation who "parted suffering as though bleeding, but full of hope for what was to come" I am finally ready to turn the page.
Mari Hayman, a 2000 graduate of Marysville-Pilchuck High School, spent a year as an exchange student in Uruguay before entering college in the fall. She wrote columns about her experiences for The Herald.
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