Tea today instead of coffee.
I have a cold again. It seems like I don’t get sick very often, but this is the second time this year. I shouldn’t complain because a lot of people get sick more often, but still… it sucks.
Also, it sucks that I haven’t blogged in several days. I have a lot to say but I keep putting it off. Last week, something interesting happened that I’ll share now.
I’d been put in touch with a girl from California, and her mother, because the girl was being sent to my little town in Norway as an exchange student where I was an exchange student many years before. We talked a couple months ago on the phone about which school she should go to, and I let her know that she was lucky to be going to Råde because there are a lot of wonderful people there. Then I didn’t hear anything about her until last week.
Her mom emailed me, desperate for me to contact her daughter who had been in Norway only a couple weeks. Apparently she decided that she didn’t want to be an exchange student anymore, and was doing anything possible to be sent home – well, not anything, but most effectively not going to school. Kind of important for and exchange student.
At first I didn’t understand the severity of the situation and thought it was just the initial homesickness that some kids get when they first go abroad. Then I contacted my old host father, and he told me that it had been decided to send her home, regardless of her mother’s protests.
I can’t even imagine going on my year as an exchange student and giving up before even giving anything a chance. My situation was unique to me, of course… but I wonder if this California girl (who seemed "perfect" and is clearly adored by her mother) decided that it was her mother’s desire for her to be an exchange student and not her own. All of the other exchange students I know, including those who ended up going home in the middle of the year, always started their Norwegian adventure off as, well, an adventure.
I had wanted to be an exchange student since Middle School, and an adventure it was for me. It definitely had its challenges and was hard sometimes, but it helped me grow and get to know more about myself. Plus I got a second family and a few long-term foregin friends out of the deal. Granted, the family environment I had at home was lacking a stable emotional base, plus I had graduated a year early from high school so I could go forward and not look back. Maybe I would have been miserable toward the end of the year if I had known that I had to go back to high school…
But if you or anyone you know has spent some time in Norway (getting to know people, rather than just being a tourist), I highly recommend the book "How to Understand and Use a Norwegian" by Odd Borretzen. It’s funny,
I’m working from home today and it’s taken me an hour to assemble this post as I go back and forth with various work things. Now it’s back to work.
