Reflection, introspection and growth accompany this birthday celebration

Published 9:00 pm Friday, June 1, 2001

Mari Hayman

I guess I could start with last weekend, which, among other things, was my 19th birthday. I had approached the whole thing rather ambivalently; after all, it was the first one I would be spending away from home and there wasn’t going to be any of the accustomed fanfare I had gotten used to with my American family and friends. Besides, there’s nothing special about turning 19 — or so I thought.

At this moment I have only one month left of my life as an exchange student in Uruguay, and there are a lot of things I could write about that are worthy of this column. Several ex-exchange students have already warned me that when I get back, my friends and family are going to want to duct-tape my mouth shut to keep me from rambling on about Uruguay. Hah, I’d like to see them try!

Well, turns out I was wrong about the birthday. My classmates, in a gesture of friendship seldom offered to exchange students in American high schools, took it upon themselves to plan a "surprise" party in the basement of our school, where one of my friends brought his punk-rock band, "Feos de Cara," to play a few of my favorite songs (they even sang in English). And my closest group of female friends spent all afternoon slaving to decorate the cantina, bake a cake and all the party food, and collect the signatures of the entire class on an enormous Uruguayan flag, which they presented to me when I was led down the stairs to the darkened basement where my classmates waited. Obviously, it was a moving experience (and probably the birthday I will remember best), and I know it’s going to be hard for me to leave this energetic, open-hearted group of people behind when I have to go back to the States.

What really strikes me is that it cost me a lot to get to this point. Last November, just two months after my arrival in Uruguay, I went through graduation with a different group of students, and I had nowhere near the chemistry that I do with this class. This was certainly due to my inabilities: to speak the language, to observe the modes of conduct, to relate to a culture that was absolutely foreign to me. I am guilty, like many exchange students, of not doing everything I could have done to adapt from the start. Sure, we had to wear uniforms, but I usually got away with simply parading through the halls in a white button-down shirt and jeans. Sure, there were tests, but nobody really expected me to take them, and I didn’t.

It turns out that integration isn’t an effortless process (hard to remember when you’ve lived in the same place for 17 years), and respect is something that has to be earned. Now I wear the uniform every day (and revel in the fact that I can wake up and be out the door in 15 minutes). And I take the tests (and revel in the fact that my teachers now recognize that I’m not an illiterate deaf-mute). I was legally adult when I came to Uruguay at 18, but I had a lot of growing up to do … and now, at 19, I would be gravely mistaken to think I am a finished product.

It’s come to my attention, and the attention of more than a few of my friends back home, that life after high school isn’t as easy as I thought it would be, no matter how successful you are. Nothing could have prepared me for my life here in Uruguay: for the first time in my life, I was left to my own devices, utterly alone, disoriented and faced with the enormous task of re-constructing everything I knew from scratch.

I think the most important realization I’ve made in the last month has been the ways I’ve been forced to grow up and confront my personal defects in a world where I face the consequences of my behavior alone. The members of my host family, who had to bear the brunt of my blunders all year long and my attitude of desperation and resentment when things didn’t go my way, are the people who most deserve my gratitude. I made mistakes I was truly held accountable for, and we all have scars to show for it. But I learned more from those mistakes than from anything else in my life — the pain of having things taken away, the pain of doing things wrong, the pain of losing and the pain — finally — of failure.

I would probably be better suited with a novel than a monthly column in a newspaper to cover all the errors I’ve made in the past year, and what I’ve learned from them. All I know is that a year of my life has gone by almost without my realizing it, and although there’s still a long ways to go, I’ve come this far.