| Right now, I have nine days until I head to the Santiago International Airport and hop on a flight back to California. As I finish my eleventh week in Chile and begin my last, I am inevitably reflecting on my time here and what adjusting back to life will be like back home. Honestly, back in November when I was accepted into my program for winter quarter, I was looking for an escape from Bellingham. I was feeling stressed, unfulfilled and all around exhausted by school and thought that jumping on a plane to a new country was just the distraction from my daily life that I needed. Surely meeting new people, seeing new sites and trying to navigate a new country in a language I was barely proficient in would spark some excitement and passion again. However, when I got off the plane and was greeted by an immigration officer I could barely understand, began orientation that included how to use a metro station I hadn’t even seen, and got on my first sweaty and bumpy bus ride with my host mom while struggling to communicate, I felt even more disconnected from myself than before. To avoid this feeling in my first month, I traveled anywhere I could: the beach, the mountains and was about to go to the desert until Mother Nature or something above said “no” and flooded the driest desert in the world, making it impossible for me to go. Instead of taking a step back, I sat on the airport floor with my friend and planned a trip to southern Chile, in the complete opposite direction. We frantically bought overnight bus tickets headed south and spent four days immersed in the mountains with crystal clear lakes, a bike ride to the most incredible waterfall I had ever seen and experienced a region wide power outage that, although inconvenient, made the stars sparkle against the sky. It was then, on the bus ride back to Santiago as I was looking at the sun dip behind a volcano and light up the lake with pink and orange, that I realized how badly I needed to just slow down. I was doing everything that would make my study abroad sound incredible, but when I checked in with myself, I felt exhausted to the point where what I was experiencing felt like a diluted version of the reality. I realized I wanted to rest – a word that seems like it shouldn’t belong in one’s “study abroad experience”. But I did. I wanted to see more of Santiago, read my books in parks, and spend more time connecting and practicing Spanish with lovely host mom. I started understanding that not only did I have a lot of preconceptions of what my time abroad should be like, but that as a working student in the United States, I have been conditioned that “rest” means you are missing out on something else or not being as productive with your time as you should be. By giving myself this rest as I went into my second month abroad, it was an adjustment. Not just from the previous month or even four, but from many years of internalized guilt about giving myself the space and time to just be, and with that, be content with my unique study abroad experience. By stepping back, I gave myself the space to connect more deeply with my host mom, improve my Spanish and be fully present in what I was experiencing. With this intention, I am excited to say that the language barrier DID get easier and I am great friends with my host mom. I was able to not only feel more connected with the people and places I was immersed in, but have been able to reflect on my life back home and why I thought I needed Chile as an escape. Before I left, I assumed I was going to experience “self-growth” – that is pretty much the tag line for study abroad. Not only did I experience this growth by finding more confidence in traveling and speaking Spanish, but by being able to examine my life in Bellingham from a distance. It’s true that I did find aspects that I want to change, but what I saw even more was how much I am grateful for. Living in a concrete jungle for three months and knowing maybe forty people in an entire country had a very special way of making me miss fresh mountain air and my incredible support system back home. For my time in Chile, I am so thankful for the places I saw, people I met, and that I was able to, eventually, step away from outside expectations of studying abroad and instead, accept what I wanted and needed from my experience. |