To begin...

¡Hola!
For all of you who don’t already know, my name is Sela and I’m a junior in high school. This February I will be leaving New England and traveling with AFS to Chile where I will spend the spring semester of my junior year. SO PSYCHED!! I’ve wanted to go on exchange ever since I was in the third grade and my teacher told me about his daughter going to France. Back then I was taking German so I wanted to go to Germany, but after I started taking Spanish I decided I would rather go to Latin America instead. I have been taking Spanish for four years and I am completely in love with the language. I am so excited to be immersed in it for five months. I already find myself thinking in Spanish sometimes. I’ve heard that Chilean Spanish is wicked hard, but once you master that accent you can understand any of them. Plus they use a lot of slang, which sounds cool.

Why do I want to go on exchange at all? For a lot of reasons. I have always been really interested in other cultures and languages. I love meeting people from different countries and learning words from their languages, even if I forget them soon after. Over the last few years I have had the opportunity to travel to Costa Rica, Switzerland and Mexico and I discovered how much I loved traveling and experiencing other places. I was in Mexico for a month, stayed with a family and made friends who spoke only Spanish. I got to try new foods, see other customs and expose myself to a different way of life. When I came home from Mexico, I was incredibly excited to study abroad and again get to experience a different way of life.

I applied to go on exchange back in March. It involved a HUGE application and a lot of waiting. My first choice country was Chile, second was Paraguay and third was Argentina. Originally I wanted to go to Paraguay, but in the end I decided on Chile because the AFS organization there seemed very solid. I’m really glad that I picked Chile though. I chose Chile for a lot of reasons actually. For one thing, they are a Spanish-speaking country and I want to become fluent in Spanish. The culture sounds uniquely Chilean without a ton of US influence, which is also something that really appealed to me. According to the pictures I have seen and books I have read, Chile has an incredible landscape with mountains, forests, lakes and penguins! I really hope that I see a penguin while I’m there. Anyways, I sent my application in my application for Chile in April but AFS-Chile didn’t start looking at applications until September so I had to wait all summer to find out. Turns out I wasn’t officially accepted into the Chile program until mid-October. Then came the fundraising. I worked all summer and fall at a café to raise part of my tuition. This basically meant having no social life on the weekends all fall but I made a fair bit of money, and I think that working so hard for it made it that much more worth it. I also received a merit scholarship from AFS, which helped me tremendously. To raise the rest of my tuition I wrote to friends, family and people in the community asking them for contributions. I got no responses back from the businesses and clubs I asked, but my family and friends were incredibly generous in their support, which meant a ton to me. To everyone reading my blog who contributed to my trip: THANK YOU!!

Once I got accepted to Chile, it was really open about when I would find out about my family. I waited and waited and waited, and explained to my parents over and over again that I didn’t know when I would find out. I got my all of my visa stuff ready but still no family information. Finally last week during English class I was working in the library and checked my email for news, even though I wasn’t really expecting any. I was surprised to see I had an email and shocked to see it was from my adviser, with the subject: AFS Placement. It was super exciting! I’ll be living in Quillota, which is in between Santiago and Valparaiso. Quillota is both a region and a city so I’m not sure if I’ll be in the city or not because I don’t know how to read my family’s address. I’m going to have five siblings. Two brothers, ages 2 and 20 and three sisters, ages 8, 12 and 18. I’m glad that I’ll have siblings because coming from a big family it’d be strange being an only child. I emailed my family but am still awaiting their reply so not much else to report there.

I leave in one month, one week and four days. I’m super excited! I’ve already gotten in touch with a lot of AFSers from all over the world who will be in Chile with me. There is still a lot to do to get ready though…

That’s all for now!

Hasta luego,
Sela