A whole year?

Still don't know when

Got a return e-mail from the travel agent a few days ago and she still doesn't know when the Spain kids will leave Seattle. At the orientation she said that it can take so long to get the guarantee forms back from the hosting district that some of the kids might be stopping by the FedEx office on their way to the airport.

That's an effective way of illustrating that they might not know where they're going until the last minute, but I don't think it's accurate. They can't get a student visa until they have the guarantee form that guarantees that they'll be a student, and it takes a while (at least a week, depending on the destination country) to process a visa application. To get a visa, you have to send the embassy your passport (yes, the actual passport), so until the visa is here, there can be no international travel.

Despite my ongoing efforts to see the glass half full, I'll feel much better when the guarantee form comes back. Until then, there's nothing stopping the hosting district from changing its mind about hosting an American student.

Local exchange student II

Continued from previous post Yesterday, the host mother told our friends that she’d unenrolled Maria from school and Maria was a bad kid and had to be punished. She disrespected the host father and she had to be punished (the host mother decided this). She came here with a prima donna attitude and expected to be pampered and she had to be punished. She said they’d talked to Maria’s father, who asked if they could try to work things out until the school year was over, but the host mother said that there’d be no working through anything and she wanted Maria on a plane within three days. The host mother has told anyone who’s tried to contact Maria that she is “incommunicado.” They won’t let her use the phone. Maria asked if she could call her friends on Vashon to say goodbye: “Absolutely not.” So she wrote letters to her friends and asked the host mother if she’d bring them with her when she unenrolled Maria: “I’m not your messenger.” She told our friend that she told Maria, “Now that you’re leaving I don’t have to be nice to you anymore.”

While the host mother was expressing her extreme anger to our friend, the host father was outside so Maria called our friend’s house to talk to the daughter. She whispered that they ignored her, wouldn’t talk to her even at dinner, and wouldn’t let her use the phone. What are they afraid she’s going to say?

Maria didn’t trash the house, stay out for days at a time, shoot-up in the bathroom, steal their credit cards, or drive their car into a wall. Reasonably sane adults should be able to work through a few personality clashes if only for a couple more months, so why the sudden flip in attitude from the host mother? It can only be that she’s not reasonably sane. If Maria had done something truly bad, it seems like they’d be only too happy to add it to their litany of complaints, but their complaints are about minor issues. Our friends don’t know them very well, but they’ve never seen this side of them before.

Our friend called their house ostensibly to talk about transportation arrangements (they coordinated taking the kids to the ferry) and ended up asking if he could talk to Maria, at least to say goodbye. The host mother refused because Maria had to be punished. I called my friend to be sure that the story I heard was accurate and to make sure Maria wasn’t chained to a post outside (they’ve seen her outside tending to the dog and she seemed fine). They’d left and the house had been dark for a while. Maybe they went to the airport. Maybe they were disposing of the body. The whole thing is very weird and not unlike a hostage situation.

Maria’s exchange is through an agency, but I don’t know which one. I hope her father has called them and that they are checking into the situation. I hope Maria is on her way home and will be able to put this behind her. If these people ever get another exchange student I will call the school and tell them to call the agency, the real parents, and the police. And then I will tell the student to run like hell and we’ll find you an extra bed.

This is an anomaly, but I can’t help but think of worst-case scenarios. There’s a safety net with most exchange programs in the form of an independent person that the host family and exchange student can go to with problems, disputes, etc. But if the student isn’t allowed to use the phone or get online, who’s going to know, at least for a while, that there’s a problem? If the student is taken out of school and has no other contact with people, she has no chance to ask for help or tell her side of the story. At least with Rotary that won’t be possible because, if I understand correctly, the Rotary host club is responsible for the student and the host family might not have the authority to take the kid out of school. I’m not too worried about Chloe because there are far more good host families than bad and I’ve been working on seeing most glasses as half full. But I’m going to be worried about Maria all night because her glass is empty after being smashed in the driveway.

Local exchange student

Neighbors of our friends (whose kids commute to Vashon for school, too) have a Mexican exchange student. She’s about 16 and also commutes to Vashon. They are in their 60s and have grown children and grandchildren. I met them for the first time at a 16th birthday party at our friends’ house a couple of weeks ago and asked them what it was like to host an exchange student. They said it was a great experience, Maria was a wonderful kid, and they’d known her since she was a baby because they’d hosted her aunt twenty years ago and they’d been to Mexico to visit her family. She also said that they didn’t want to go through Rotary because Rotary doesn’t allow exchange students to stay with people the student knows and they wanted to have her the whole year rather than move her among families.

I was curious because I’d heard that Maria liked to party and was enjoying herself to the detriment of her schooling. She was getting bad grades, but when told by the school that this exchange was not just an excuse to party and that she’d need to get better grades to stay here, Maria settled down and got to work. Here was my chance to get the straight scoop from the host mother instead of second and third hand rumors.

I had to be careful when talking to the woman because she asked me if we were going to host an exchange student next year. We want to the year Chloe comes home, but aren’t going to next year because there will be no kids here at home, the student would have to commute by herself, and it’s hard to get back and forth to the island (where all of the kid’s friends would be) outside of commute hours. In short, if we hosted an exchange student next year, the kid would be in the same situation that Maria is in and that’s lonely and not a lot of fun, which was not something I wanted to hammer home to this gracious host mother.

Continued in next post

Dictionary shopping

Chloe and I were at Barnes and Noble looking for a Spanish-English dictionary. We've gotten so much contradictory advice on the Latin American vs. Castilian Spanish issue that we can't decide which dictionary will be the best, or at least not the worst. We're way overthinking the decision, discussing it, trying to figure out if "comprehensive Latin American Spanish" means that the dictionary is focused on that, or if it also includes that. The one with the blue headwords and plastic cover is kind of cool, but does it have as much useful auxiliary information? And to think that not too many years ago I thought the definitive answer to any word question was no more complicated than, "It's in the dictionary." If you'd asked me, "Which dictionary?" I'd have said, "What difference does it make - they're all the dictionary."

A youngish guy in the same aisle timidly interrupted and asked if we were looking for an English-Spanish dictionary. Yeah, but, and I went into the whole Spanish-Spanish bit. He said, "You're not going to find a Castilian dictionary here." Already it's obvious that he knows way more than me. He said he grew up in Puerto Rico (and had no accent whatsoever). He'd been to Spain (looked like he was in the Navy) and said the words are mostly the same (akin to the UK-American differences in English) and, unless Chloe was using a Mexican friend as her Spanish slang authority, she'll do fine with any dictionary.

He had an excellent point that had never occurred to me: Chloe is going to be struggling with the language in an American accent, so no one is going to have any idea what kind of Spanish she learned. Even if she diligently studied Castilian every day, she wouldn't fool anyone into thinking she was a native speaker. He also said they talk slower in Spain and he'd just gotten back from Puerto Rico yesterday. "Even I couldn't understand the girl at McDonald's taking my order - they talk too fast."

The salesperson at Barnes and Noble knew even less than I did about Spanish dictionaries, so we went back to tell her what our fellow shopper had told us. We all learned something today.

I've realized that we're worrying about this way too much because a couple of Rotary people (who haven't been to Spain) have repeatedly implied that it's really important to learn "proper" Spanish because the Spaniards are very particular about their language and it's vitally important to speak it correctly or they'll be offended or think of you as an illiterate peasant. This is silly, of course, because what kind of people are going to be mean to a high school student who is obviously making an effort to speak their language? Two of the three former exchange students who spoke at the orientation said they knew no more than a couple of words in the language of their host countries when they left here. The girl who went to France (she'd had several years of French) said her first host family spoke Chinese. The boy who went to Germany said his first host family spoke Spanish. You can't go to school for a year in a foreign country and not come home bilingual.

We ended up with Webster's New World Concise Spanish Dictionary and SparkNotes Spanish Vocabulary Study Cards.

To drive

Chloe got her driver's permit today. Because she's not currently in driver's ed, she had to take the written test first, so that's out of the way and all that's left is the driving test. We found out that, if you've had your permit for at least four months and have completed driver's ed, you can take the driving test up to 60 days before your sixteenth birthday, then go back when you're sixteen to actually get the license. We still don't know when she's leaving, but the guy at the DOL said he'd give it to her on the 31st if she was leaving on the 1st, her birthday. He gave me his name and title and told me to write it down, because "I know for sure that I won't remember this when you come to me on August 31st asking for an early driver's license."

Paying for it

I heard about a high-school girl who helped pay the fee for her year in France by making and selling things at craft bazaars. I learned this after it was too late for Chloe to do something like that (should be done before the holiday season, and may take a couple of years), but it's a great idea and I wish we would have thought of that.

Siesta?

At Allexperts I posted a question about siestas--do people really break for siesta every day, or have all the guidebooks failed to update that paragraph? I got this answer, from someone who lives there, in less than 24 hours:

The siesta is more a "myth" than a reality. Usually babies and small kids take siestas (at home or at school ) but a "typical person" doesn't. If you have time, you can take a nap, of course, but it depends on your daily routine. The school day for pupils of 16+ is, usually, from 8 am to 3 pm. It depends, again, on the school, and some of them have one day per week with classes at 16 or 17 pm. Dinner is at about 9.30-10.30 pm. Never or very rare before 9.30. We don't sleep a lot here ;) If a teenager goes to bed at 10.30 he/she can sleep 8.30 hr until 7 am.

Sleep until 7:00 on a school day? How civilized.

To drive, or not

It’s the little things that interest me and, it seems, only me. Chloe turns 16 on September 1. She’s many months younger than almost all of her friends in the same grade, so most of them already have, or are about to get, their driver’s licenses and Chloe hasn’t even taken driver’s ed yet. We were going to wait until she got back from Spain, but on Saturday we found out that she probably won’t leave until after her birthday, which means that she may be able to get her driver’s license out of the way before she goes.

But, if she leaves on the second, that means her only chance to take the driving test is the day before (the day she turns 16). We’re not going to add one-more-thing-to-do to her list of predeparture details. The inevitable emotion and stress surrounding her departure would not be conducive to passing a driving test. Adding to the pressure would be the knowledge that, if she didn’t pass the driving test, she wouldn’t be able to re-take it until then next year. If, however, she leaves a few days later, it would probably work out. That means she could take driver’s ed this summer and, assuming she passes the driving test, she would have her license. Rotary students can’t drive any motorized vehicle of any type, so she wouldn’t use it in Spain, but at least she’d have it done. Another thing to consider is the cost: the several hundred dollars for driver’s ed could be better spent on getting her ready to be gone for a year. But, the cost seems to rise every session, so it may end up being much more expensive next summer. Especially since the local high school has quit offering driver’s ed, so private schools have a captive market in a bunch of teenagers who can’t wait to drive.

I contacted the travel agent and she’s going to contact Spain to get the actual departure date. After that, we can make a decision.

So what? you say? Well, we have to balance Chloe’s exchange year with her current, regular life. So what if she doesn’t get her driver’s license before she leaves? She won’t be able to use it for a year, anyway, and we won’t feel sorry for poor little Chloe just because she has to wait to get her driver’s license because she’ll be too busy spending a life-altering year in Spain. We won’t be calling the wahmbulance any time soon.

But. We don’t want to put everything on hold. She still lives here and she’ll be coming back here. I want her to live her life and not make the next four months only about going to Spain. The whole experience is a balancing act: she’ll miss Christmas at home; she’ll be in Spain. She’ll miss her friends’ and family’s birthdays; she’ll be in Spain. She’ll miss the homecoming dance; she’ll be in Spain. It’s easy to dismiss any mention of what she’ll be missing by pointing out, “But you’ll be in Spain, dammit!” It’s not easy to feel sorry for one’s self in this family.

Part of what I want Chloe to get out of this experience is that traveling and even living somewhere else is always an option. If we make the months preceding her departure about nothing but her year away, it will seem less like a normal part of life and more like a one-off adventure. This trip is about expanding horizons, not collapsing them.