Llegué hace tres semanas...!

(I arrived three weeks ago...!)

It's official...yesterday the three week mark of my arrival. Three weeks!? "When did you get here?," people ask. "Three weeks ago..." That's starting to sound like a long while. I can't pretend that I've "just arrived" anymore, or that my adventure is just beginning. It's BEGUN.

The way I felt when I arrived, walking up the stairs of this strange house, being lost in the metro system and on campus, not fully believing I was here...has begun to seem distant. Surely the next few months are still one giant question mark, but in the face of that I sense other little securities growing that I can count on. It made me happy to come from a long day of classes and realize I was relieved at the sight of our own front door. It gave me a small sensation of being home. Kristina and I were talking at breakfast about that...having a feeling of staying somewhere, a feeling of permanence. I feel a small sense of that, of putting down a few precarious roots, even with the knowledge that I'll be leaving at the end of five months.

I owe so much of the grace of this transition to all the people who've welcomed us with open arms, and of course to the family I brought with me from Texas, my dear Kristina, Femi, and Mark. Ma Terésa, our host mother, has outdone herself, saying constantly that she wants us to feel content and at home here. Surely our nana Irma has too. Irma's constant presence and generosity in setting our breakfast up, helping us with laundry, showing us how to turn on the stoves, has made me feel very welcome here. And there are countless strangers who helped me find the street, building or bus I couldn't seem to find on my own. Not to mention of course the Schoenstatt community surrounding us. We can hardly step into the shrine or go to mass without seeing at least one person who knows who we are, or wants to invite us over for tea or dinner, or even just spend a while talking to us. I am so thankful for them all.

There is friction in the transition, naturally. The nature of us being North American university students, going to a Chilean university and living in a Chilean home, holds enough subtle catches to cause plenty of friction. Because of where I come from, I am accustomed to being independent, to living with my friends, to going and coming under my own supervision, and to having fairly easy access to most things. Here I live with a Chilean mother, must take the metro system or ask a friend to get to lots of places, and often have to spend a long time figuring out how to get what I need, like texts for classes or books from the library. I am certainly not accustomed to living under parental supervision anymore, but am used to being my own parent (at least for the daily things, haha, I rely constantly on Mom and Dad for the big things). The fact that I live in the same city as my parents but don't live with them sounds absolutely unnatural to most of the Chilean students I've talked to. Their first reaction is usually, oh yeah, most US students can't wait to get out of their parent's house and go far, far away for college, right? There is a lot of truth to that, but I have to be careful with the subtleties it implies. It's not that we don't love our families or all want to escape our dreaded parents (truthfully I chose UT to stay close), but just that we're all geared for our independence. You can see it all the way down to the infant/parent relationships. Get the infant sleeping in his own room as soon as possible, experts say. Let your child learn to do things for themselves. So to me, seeing an unmarried 28 year old man living at home with his parents, though he is working full time sounds odd to me, though it is utterly normal here.

While I sit around pontificating about the differences and similarities, and try to open my ears to experiencing this on every level and not just superficially...I better not forget to make my bed or turn off the stoves, lest I upset our dear Chilean mama! Only kidding :) Sort of.