Quedate en Casa

March 20, 2020

The Coronavirus first came up when one of my friends told me her family will be unable to go to China on vacation due to this new virus that has been spreading and killing people. After time past and summer came to an end, the virus had destroyed Italy, spread to other places in Europe and the Americas, and began to get people worried here in Chile.

My parents were supposed to come visit in April, but made the decision to cancel the flight when there was a suspected case in my high school in PA:(

We were in school for a week before we were all sent home for a 15 day quarantine period. At first, my host family was concerned because both my host mom and little host brother have asthma, so the coronavirus would give them more difficulties breathing. I wasn’t allowed to meet up with people, but I was still allowed to go out and run in the morning if I ran in places there were no people. When a study came out that said even the ground could be contaminated, I had to stop running and stay in the property the whole day. I am in LOVE with this family, so I have honestly not had any problems with being on lockdown; I found myself laughing so hard to the point of dying every time we sit down to eat a meal together. I think I am also enjoying myself a lot because I am really getting to know the parents as well as the kids. In other words, there are times when Allie goes outside with just the parents to converse while the kids stay inside and do their own thing for a bit (BTW my Spanish improved a lot during this period of time because we had a lot of intellectual conversations). I also get the amount of alone time I need and have been eating scheduled meals all together with the family. The family order and routine reminded me of that of my family in the US, so it was an easy adjust.

Although all is good on a familiar level, I did go through a period of time feeling super stressed and sad. Many of my exchange friends, including Mika, were being sent home. Mika’s group made him go home, but Rotary at this point still had not told us anything, so I was stressed that maybe I was going to be sent home (every exchange group except rotary had to return to their countries and even some rotaries across the world were deciding to send kids home). I was sad that I would be losing my Yungay exchange student friend and honestly overwhelmed looking at my phone and seeing my groupchats exploding. My friends at home were asking me if I was coming home, my parents at home were saying they might take me out of Chile to be at home, and many of my rotary friends were telling me they were deciding to go home. In reality, it is a very difficult situation because although there are still no cases in Yungay (fingers crossed), Chile could close its borders or the US could close its borders. Also, Chile right now is a ticking time bomb in terms of deaths and coronavirus cases (there are about 500 cases right now and 1 death, small but there are lots of worries these numbers will rise significantly in the weeks to come). Chile also doesn’t have the best medical system, so if a lot of people do get the virus, the hospitals would not have enough resources to help everyone, including me if I were to get it. There is a lot more medical security in the US, so I would be “safer” there, according to many exchange groups and my own parents.

It was just a hard time to see everyone being sent home and other people deciding to go home. I felt a lot of uncertainty because my “heart” is telling me to stay (I just moved into this new host family and am REALLY starting to enjoy exchange more and more), but my “brain” is telling me to go because there is a chance I won’t be able to leave in June when I was planning to.

I kind of shut myself down and tried my best not to think about the possibility of returning home, so I played tennis with my host mom every day, we did planks, we did Zumba, we baked bread and cookies, we cooked lunch, and we even learned some lady gaga songs to sing and play guitar.

Cooking lunch with my host mom...Italian day hehe

My attempt to go on a diet and become a religious mate drinker

All Chilean bread is made with manteca--just found out that means lard...

PJ parties with my host brothers almost every night!! We take food from the kitchen hehe

Me playing tennis at sunset

April 1st ("fools" day) 2020

Finally, my parents called me and told me I was to come home April 9th. As soon as I checked in with my host family to get the OK, that specific flight was canceled. My parents called me the next morning and we agreed we should pull the plug and I should get a flight home for the 5th, which was less than three days from that moment. We couldn't wait until April 16th because there was a high risk the flights would all be canceled, or Santiago/Concepcion would shut down completely, not allowing anyone to enter or leave. After I told my host family, they seemed very sad, especially because it was my little host brother's 8th birthday on the 12th: he was so excited to spend it with me. I felt so sick, and over the course of three days, I actually lost like five pounds just feeling incredibly stressed, sad, and regretful, but also kind of excited to see my family again. It was so confusing:/

It was especially painful to not be able to say goodbye to any friends or new family members either. People in Chile took quarantine very seriously, a lot more seriously than the United States, so I really wasn't allowed to get out of the car to hug my first host family for the last time (I did anyways, but we really were't supposed to). Jose also came to say goodbye, as well as Lory and Rosy, the two friends of my host moms. The night before I left, a couple of my school friends stopped by outside my house, honked, and threw some signs and balloons outside the car. I hadn't cried yet on my exchange, but I did in this moment--the moment I had realized I really was leaving. 

My host mom and sister made me a sign in the window (first family)

Last (and most intense) tennis match against my host brother and host dad

Some of my friends came and visited me before I left:(

One of our last nights:(

April 5th, 2020

My flight was over 30 hours long in total. I went from Concepcion-Santiago-Miami-Charlotte-Philadelphia, and had some insane layovers. I had to wear a literal welding headgear, a mask, and had two big bags, a carry on, a backpack, and three other little bags I was just hoping nobody would notice I was bringing on the plane with me. I was luckily traveling with the other two exchange students from the US, so I wasn't stuck all alone during the long flights and layovers. 

I made a big mistake and put on makeup for the trip, as well as used new sneakers without high socks. After the first flight just to Santiago, my mascara had smeared all over my face and I had sweat through all my clothes, including the jacket. My feet were also bleeding on the heels as the skin was peeling off. I still remember very clearly the stressful feeling of trying to carry all of my luggage through Miami to take it through customs, or attempting to lift my carry on bag to put it in the overhead bin while I was still holding my rotary jacket, backpack, and 3 other little purse-like bags while there was a line stacking up behind me. Hopefully I'll never have to do that again...

One of the exchange students I traveled home with

It was war

My last morning:(

To the left Antuco and right big mountain that was always
visible in Yungay

When I got home, I wasn't supposed to touch my family; they told me I should be in my own quarantine for 14 days. That "quarantine" lasted 1 day because it was SO HARD to not spend time with them downstairs or outside. I remember feeling like no time had passed since I saw them last. Chile kind of felt like a dream, even though I had remembered every moment of it so vividly. My friends came and visited me (or I them) and they talked a lot about everything I had missed and all the drama that had gone down throughout the year. They too had been robbed of end of the year activities, like prom, afterprom, senior picnic, graduation, senior week, etc., so they were all upset and disappointed. I found myself zoning out for most of it, which I felt bad about, but I had kind of moved on from High School and really didn't care to hear about what couples broke up, who was mad at who, etc. Something that really surprised me and was almost frustrating was that maybe one or two friends asked me about my exchange beyond the question, "how was Chile? You went to Chile, right?" And that's kind of an awkward question to answer because you know the person is kind of interested, but doesn't want an earful about how it REALLY was. My default response was, "it was so wonderful; I had a lot of fun!" Also, how do you start to describe an experience that changed your life to someone that just couldn't understand many of the important aspects of exchange, like the highs, the lows, the awkwardness, and the overall experience of living on your own for a while? My other exchange friends also expressed disappointment in this aspect of coming home, so I didn't feel too alone.

I still facetime my families

Now, I am writing and it is June 26th, almost three months after coming home. I had expected to be a little more outwardly depressed about exchange ending, but what I have kind of began to realize this week is that I had not let myself feel the pain of coming home. I have finally gotten a little breather: the exchange student who was living in my house from Ecuador went home about two weeks ago, and my family started this intense isolation period to see my Grandmother at the beginning of July. I have felt extremely tired (I've been sleeping over 10 hours every night), I have gotten a headache almost every day, I've been kind of irritable, I've dreaded talking/interacting with people outside my immediate family, and I've been soaring through a new TV show called Elite (I usually don't watch TV unless we are doing it as a family or I'm doing it with a friend). Consciously, I can't pin down an event that is making me feel this way other than my exchange, so I guess this is what post-exchange depression feels like:/

The roller-coaster graph of the emotions of an exchange student really captures what it means to be on an exchange. In my experience, my emotions and feelings were hyper-sensitive due to the fact that I was out of my comfort bubble and constantly on my guard; for example, if I was invited to an awesome party and was dancing all night long with friends I had made myself in a whole new language, I would feel a high like no other. On the flip side, if I was in school and people weren't exactly paying too much attention to me, and I felt like I was boring to them because I couldn't talk and make them laugh as much as I wanted to, I would feel more lonely than I had ever felt in my life. I would think about all the friends back in America that I had lost connections with because I left for a year and was bad at responding to messages, and I would think about how hard it was to make a real friend or be in a real friend group in Chile. 

I think for me, it was important to become so familiar with these low feelings of rejection, loneliness, frustration, jealousy, and discomfort. I felt them very often and sometimes all at once, which made me realize some of the previous insecurities I had felt in friend groups or within myself at home. I had an incredible amount of practice teaching myself to be confident in my abilities and to be okay with feeling out of place, alone, or hurt sometimes. 

Something I have also realized looking back on my pictures and beginning to get my presentation ready for Rotary was the amount of crazy, put-yourself-out-there things I had done and I guess been OK with. In particular, I was just thinking back to the morning I had been woken up by my host mom telling me in Spanish I couldn't understand that I had a dance to perform with some girls from my dance group--a dance I had only practiced once without thought of actually having to do anything else with it. I had never improvised in front of so many people in my entire life. But I just remember smiling like crazy to distract the crowd from the fact that I literally had no clue what was happening. And you know what is even crazier? Things like that kind of happened a lot...I was told 1 minute before that I had to perform improve rap in front of my entire school to compete in the Anniversary celebration (memorizing every line to Hamilton really saved my butt on this one), I was told one hour in advance that I had to dance with some girls for class to compete in the dance portion of the Anniversary competition, and I was some times woken up out of the blue and told I will be spending the day with this person (I didn't know who "this person" was). Plans were constantly being changed, I was constantly taken to meet new people and experience new things, so spontaneity, confusion, and mistake-making were kind of the norm, especially my first 5 months. Learning to not take myself too seriously and be comfortable in making mistakes have helped my confidence immensely, and really made me learn to enjoy every single moment, even when things don't go my way or make me uncomfortable.

Well there you have it: my exchange experiences and life this past year. If you survived even one of my like 4,000 word monsters, thanks for sticking around haha.