Despedida de los Intercambios (Goodbye Exchange Student Get-Together)

Last weekend all the exchange students in my district reunited for the last time in Los Angeles. While most of us are leaving in the middle of June/early July, our friend Taylor McCurdy is leaving on May 8th. He lives in Connecticut and starts a job as a backpacking instructor in Montana on June 1st, so he is going back earlier to spend time with his family and friends.We all arrived on Friday night and had once (pronounced "own-say") at a Rotarian's house. They had the most delicious nut pastries---it was like candied nut pastry wow it was fabulous.

The next day we got up really early and left Los Angeles at 8 AM to go to Lota, a town 2 hours away. There, we toured an old coal mine, "El Chiflón del Diablo", that stretches underneath the ocean. The mine went out of commission in the late seventies, but old miners give tours still.

We rode a rusty cage-like elevator down into the mine and walked the passageways. It was really interesting to see how the miners worked and just how dangerous it was.

<--Emil getting into the cage elevator and a tour guide.









We put on the actual equipment they used to use in the mine--the hard hats and the headlamps imported from Germany in the 1950s. They also had really cool telephones in the mines that were installed in the 1930s that still worked and were the only way to communicate with the outside world from inside the mine.

<--Taylor, Kasey, me, Nizhoni, Emil, Margaux, and Johanna with our authentic mining gear.





After we toured the mine, we went to a beautiful park called Parque de Isidora. An English couple moved to the city and the wife (whose name was Isidora) loved plants so much that she built a beautiful garden/park overlooking the ocean. They had converted their old house into a museum where we could see the old tools they used in the mines in the early 1900s and some other period artifacts.

<-- Listening to our tour guide was dressed in authentic dress.










<--View of the ocean from the park

That night we all ate dinner together at a barbecue restaurant. They brought out bowls piled high with meat and boiled potatoes in the center of the table and we served ourselves all the meat we wanted. After we finished eating dinner, the Rotarians gave us a decorative copper plate with our name and home Rotary district on it and a huge Chilean flag.

<--The whole table! Exchange students and Rotarians <-- Left side, front to back: Margaux (CT), Nizhoni (CA), Tyler (AZ), Emil (Denmark) Right side, front to back: Emily (NY), Kasey (AZ), Taylor (CT), Lee (ME)

As is custom in Chile, we all got up and said a few sentences about our exchange and what we have learned and experienced. My friend Tyler stood up and gave a very moving speech about how love is universal and distances don't matter. At the end, half the people in the room were tearing up.

Later that night we all got together in Emily's house as one last hurrah. Taylor took out his guitar and we sang along and talked for hours. Lee and I had to leave early (at 4 AM) because we were staying in a house far away and needed to call to get picked up but the rest of them stayed up until 8 AM talking and eating.

Rotarian in the Making

After I got back from Argentina, I was all set to go back to school regularly and go back to the routine of seeing Rotarians once a month at meetings. However, a few days later, my host dad Cristian asked me, "Jennie, are you busy this weekend? Because some gringos from Ohio with the Rotary Group Study Exchange (GSE) are coming to Chillán for a week and the four Rotary clubs in Chillán are going to be taking turns hosting their daily activities. My Rotary club is in charge of them over the weekend and we are going to take them to a rodeo and Las Termas de Chillán. Would you be interested in coming with us and translate? None of them speak Spanish." And of course I said "yes" because I hadn't been to Las Termas before to go in the natural thermal pools--I had only gone when I went hiking to the Laguna Huemul and I still hadn't seen a lot of the cool things there. Plus, since my own dad is going to go to Russia on a Group Study Exchange with Rotary, I thought it would be cool to see what the program was like.


<--These are the famous natural thermal pools of Las Termas, a tourist spot owned by my city, Chillán with the mountains in the background. After swimming we had a delicious lunch at a nearby restaurant--it was amazing.




That was how it began. Then my host mom, Cristina, asked me to go to the bus station on Wednesday night to meet the GSE people so that I could translate and explain to them which Rotarian's house they were going to and what time they had to be ready in the morning, etc. She said, "It will take less than an hour". Well, the Rotarian that gave me a ride to the bus station thought it would be a fantastic idea to take me back to his house with the gringo he was hosting for dinner so that I could keep translating. He then invited me to pack a suitcase and stay in his house for the rest of the week while the GSE group was there and when I politely said that it would be better for me to stay in my own house, he insisted that I at least come in the morning to his house before the scheduled daily activities to eat breakfast with them. As I might have mentioned before, Chileans are very welcoming and warm people.

The GSE team was comprised of 4 people, one Rotarian in his fifties named Chris and three "young professionals": Kieran Hurley (lawyer), Joshua Roark (professor), and Sonja Johnson (teacher). They were all nice, and we got along really well. It was so cool to see them go through the same phases of adjustment that we as exchange students went through when you still haven't gotten used to the culture and are discovering new things every day. They had a hard time understanding that "gordo" (fat/fat person) is used as a term of endearment. Many couples call each other "gordo/a" affectionately.

<--The GSE team in the local newspaper building seated at their newscaster desk. From left to right: Sonja, Chris, Josh, and Kieran. Sonja definitely noticed the lack of diversity in Chile. In Chile there are hardly any foreign-looking people; they all basically look the same.




So Sonja got some pretty hard stares walking the streets of Chillán. I was personally ecstatic to see a black person for a week after going eight and a half months seeing only one ethicity: Chilean.

However, I could definitely understand why the Chileans were upset that they were allowed to participate in the GSE without knowing a shred of Spanish. If I hadn't been there to translate while they were touring, it would have been a painful experience to try and get the point across.


<--One of the tours we did was of a celulose plant where they process wood to make paper products and wood products. This plant is one of the biggest in Chile and is very environmentally conscious. To prove how "green" they are, they grow wine vines right next to the factory.




To make a long story slightly less long, I was hired by all four Rotary clubs to be the desginated translator for the whole week the GSE team was there. At first the whole thing caught me by surprise and overwhelmed me, but as I got to know the team better and participated in their activities, I really enjoyed it. First of all, I had been here for eight months and hadn't seen hardly ANY of the local touristy things, so I got to do those things with the GSE team.




<-- Me with a statue of Bernardo O'Higgins (Chile's George Washington) in Chillán Viejo's municipal building





I met the mayor of Chillán and Chillán Viejo (Old Chillán), toured the famous Cathedral in Chillán's square, saw the new Claudio Arrau Museum, toured the local newspaper building (and talked on their radio station and was in their newspaper), swam in Las Termas's natural thermal springs, saw Chile's biggest distribution company's storehouse, and toured the biggest celulose/paper plant in the region. Definitely not a bad way to spend a week!

Semana Santa en Argentina (Holy Week in Argentina)

Ever since I had moved into my new house, I had known that my host parents were going to be spending Holy Week on a Rotary trip to Mendoza and Rio Cuarto, Argentina. They were going with 34 other Rotarians to their "brother Rotary club" in Rio Cuarto for a few days and chose Holy Week because it was the only time when they had vacation time to do so.





<--My host parents, Cristian, Cristina and I







The trip began on Tuesday night and on Thursday at lunch, my parents asked me if I would like to come with them. I knew I would be the only teenager going (everyone in Rotary is in their late fifties to mid seventies), but I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to see parts of Argentina that I hadn't been to before.

We set off at 10:30 PM on Tuesday and 36 of us drove the twelve hours to Mendoza in a chartered bus. Once we got there, I was starving but by the time we checked into the hotel and wandered the streets of Mendoza in search of a good restaurant, it was two hours later and I was famished. All I really wanted was some pasta or a good piece of chicken, but I knew that my dad would never forgive me for going to a nice Argentenian restaurant and not ordering their world-renowned beef. In the end, I was very glad I chose the beef loin because it was absolutely delicous!!! The meat was incredibly tender and juicy--and I am not even that big a red meat fan. But what was even more incredible was that my meal cost USD$11, easily one third the price of what the same meal would have cost me in the United States.





<--The group I ate lunch with sitting in Mendoza's plaza






That afternoon was completely devoted to shopping. I swear, I have never seen a more avid group of shoppers in my life. As soon as the shops opened in the afternoon (Argentina closes its stores from 2--5 because they take naps) all thirty-five Rotarians spread throughout Mendoza's center, hunting through leather shops, peering in shoe stores, scrutinizing every store window and mumbling about prices. Needless to say after three and a half hours of walking all over Mendoza I was exhausted and went back to the hotel to rest before dinner.

That night we got back from dinner late, around 1:30 AM. I'm not sure if you all have picked up on this after reading my blog for eight months now, but South Americans' schedule is about two to three hours behind ours, especially when it comes to mealtimes. Breakfast is before school or work, which is usually between 7:30 and 8 on weekdays and around 11 on weekends. Lunch is usually around 2 or 3 and dinner between 8 and 10 PM. So we left the hotel in Mendoza to look for a good restaurant at 10 PM. Now, I thought Chilean restaurants were slow but Argentenians definitely beat them. Our pizzas and sandwiches took around 40 minutes to come and only because the Rotarians began banging their knives and forks on the tables, singing and complaining simultaneously. The one good thing is that the pizzas were excellent since Argentineans are from Italian descent and are well known for their pastas and pizzas.

The next day we headed out early in the morning to drive to Rio Cuarto, a city about 5 hours away from Mendoza. We were welcomed on the side of the road first by a handful of Rotarians and the local firefighter squad.




<--Our welcome crew in Rio Cuarto







My host mom and a bunch of other lively Chilean Rotarians climbed up the firefighter truck and road in the open air in the back the rest of the five kilometers into Rio Cuarto.

After checking into our hotel which was right across from the town square, we had a few hours to rest before our big welcome dinner. The dinner was excellent but the company was even better. The average age for the Rio Cuarto Rotary Club was seventy-six, but the majority were so lively and energetic that they seemed decades younger. An eighty-two year old man lovingly called Bicho ("bug") and the woman at my table, Marta, were particularly vivacious and energetic. Marta's raspy voice carried across the whole table and was telling stories and jokes the entire meal. These events, however, have a very formal protocol that can be very tiring. They said "welcome" and "thank you for having us" fifty times throughout the night and at one-thirty in the morning, I was very happy to board our bus again and head back to the hotel.

The next two days in Rio Cuarto were very much like the first one--we had lunches and dinners with the Rotary Club there and the free time that was left was mostly dedicated to shopping. There was a special ceremony on Friday morning when the Argentenians dedicated a section of a park to the city of Chillan, Chile in which--and I kid you not--FOUR elderly people fainted.




<--Dedicating the Chillan plaza in Mendoza's park








It was fairly hot out and during the whole hour-long ceremony everyone was standing. It was very lucky that one of the Chilean Rotarians is a doctor and the captain of the firefighter squad was there because they were very much needed. After the third fainting, I whispered to one of the women next to me, "Wow, they are just dropping like flies!". Apparently all of the Rotarians thought this comment was hilarious because when the ceremony was over and we piled back into the bus to go to lunch, at least five Rotarians chuckled, "Están cayendo como moscas!" when they passed me.

A few years ago, the Rio Cuarto Rotarians came to visit Chillan and they had stayed in Rotarians' houses. So one evening, those Argentenians invited the Chileans who had hosted them to their hosues for dinner.





<--My dinner group



As the tagalong American teenager, I got invited to go to a house, too. I went to Bicho's house and it was so nice to see a typical Argentenian house and meet his wife and daughter.






<--Easily two of the most characteristic people I have ever met, Bicho from Argentina and Enrique (a.k.a. Quique) from Chillan

Bicho really impressed me because in spite of his eighty-two years, he is as full of life and sprightly as an eager eleven-year-old. His fidgety movements and bubbling laughter were infectious, and it was impossible to be bored. Bicho is one of those rare people that truly applies the Rotary message of "service above self" to every aspect of his life. He told me that before he
joined Rotary fifty-seven years ago, he researched the organization thoroughly so as to know exactly what it was that he was getting into. He read every article, book, and pamphlet about Rotary that he could get his hands on and has the most extensive, organized collection of Rotary materials I have ever seen. His Rotarian magazine collection includes every issue since 1952 and is annotated and indexed, so that if he ever wants to reference an article, he can access it in less than a minute.







<--The Rio Cuarto Rotarians singing a farewell song, led by the vivacious Marta




Our farewell dinner was especially touching because it was clear that although this trip could have been a stuffy, rehearsed, empty visit, it was the exact opposite. My favorite moment was when at the very end of the dinner we all stood up, holding hands, and sang a Rotary song. It was the epitome of Rotarianism that I had ever seen--these two countries that had been on the brink of war in 1979 were now singing and holding hands and eating pizza.







<--Me singing "Sweet Baby James" by James Taylor. The sharing of cultures continued...




The biggest downside to the trip was definitely the return journey home. I spent all of Easter Sunday on a bus traveling back to Chillan. We left Rio Cuarto at 6:30 AM and pulled into my driveway at 2:45 AM the next day. It was exhausting, but during our forty-five minute break in Santiago I got to meet my "host sister" Tamara, her husband José Manuel and their two little kids, Cote and Trini. They were so cute and reminded me of the way my family was sixteen years ago--parents trying to enjoy a meal and conversation while running after little kids in rest stops.

So even though I was thoroughly bored at times and had longed for company my own age, I was really happy that I got the chance to go on the trip. Now I have a better idea of Argentenian culture and can manage five languages now: English, French, Spanish, Chilean and Argentenian.