Once upon a time, I was an exchange student

In my late teens, I spent a year in Brasil.  And there you will see the first evidence of the enduring power of my exchange – I am actively incapable of spelling Brasil with a z.  In Portuguese, the country is called Brasil.  Ever since I lived there, I have written the country’s name with an s, even when writing in English.  It just looks right, and therefore, it is.

I will preface this by saying that exchange, like all things, is not for everyone.  Not every teenager will deal well with leaving everyone they know to go and live somewhere else, with a completely new family, where (most of the time) another language is spoken and there are cultural norms and directives that are completely different . . . but if that is your thing, then it will absolutely, 100% be the making of you as an adult.

I am, by nature, relatively introverted.  At high school, I was always classed as one of the “smart kids”, the ones who were good at maths and science and very much NOT good at sport or actual human interaction outside of my group of friends.  I was definitely not cool at school.  I’m pretty confident that no one will remember me J 

And then I went to Brasil.

At my Australian high school, I was unremarkable.  At my Brasilian school, my brown hair was significantly lighter than all of my friends’ hair; my green eyes made me practically exotic.  The part where I’d grown up on the opposite side of the world, in a place that my schoolmates had only ever seen on television?  Well, that made me exceptionally cool.  And it was both completely bizarre and wonderfully awesome to be considered fascinating after many years of being unremarkable.

I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in Brasil.  I went to (small town) Carnaval.  I came dangerously close to falling in love with a Brasilian man.  And I did fall in love with Brasil.  It is the most enduring love affair of my life, with the place that helped make me who I am.

I was homesick for Australia when I first went to Brasil, but that paled into comparison with the homesickness I had for Brasil when I returned.  I’d guess that I mentioned Brasil at least once a day for the first five years after I came back; it probably dropped to three or four times a week after that.  Even now, over 25 years past the experience, it is not uncommon for me to talk about Brasil, and I probably think about a specific event or person connected to my time there on a weekly basis.  Before I got married, I took my husband to Brasil.  He met the families that I lived with, spent Christmas and New Year with my friends and relatives.  Our eldest daughter’s name is Latin-derived, and I have always pronounced it as a Brasilian would.  Our second daughter’s name features in a Brasilian Carnaval song, and I frequently sing it to her.  I considered a Brasilian name for our son, but I decided against it – my favoured choice would have been horribly massacred by the Australian accent.  I often call all three of my children by Brasilian terms of endearment.

The dearest friend I’ve ever made in my life was someone that I found in Brasil.  Like me, she was there temporarily, also on exchange, but in her I found myself.  She’d always been one of the cool kids (or at least that’s how I saw her), and she was the first person that helped me understand that just by being me I was good enough.  She never compromised, never tried to be something that she wasn’t, and she explained to me one day how irritating it was to be seen as just the “pretty girl”.  I’d never actually understood how annoying it must be to be valued on your appearance only.  She was (and remains) the most beautiful person that I’ve ever met, both inside and out. 

It is 26 years since the day I arrived in that far-off land at the age of 17.  I can still remember the passengers on the plane applauding as we touched down.  I can smell of cigarettes in the terminal (it was still ok to smoke indoors in those days).  I can still see the handpainted sign that bid me welcome, waved by my host sister and parents.  I remember being overwhelmed by the size of the city; Australia’s population in a single place; being exhilarated and terrified and missing my mother.  

Literally every room in my home holds at least one tangible reminder of that year.  There is a small stone house on a shelf in our dining room, a gift I was given during my year in Brasil.  There is a painting of Rio on the wall that my husband and I bought while in Brasil just before we got married.  It’s hung on the wall of every house we’ve ever lived in over the almost 20 years that we’ve owned it.  Beside my bed is a notebook of “Day-sies”, given to me by the aforementioned dear friend.  That little book of quotes, one for every day of the year, has been beside my bed since the day I arrived home from Brasil.  There are two books of photos of Brasil in the bookshelf; a photograph I took from Pão de Acúçar that’s always hung on the wall.  And then there are the other types of reminders, the ones that aren't things.  There are the names that go onto my Christmas card list straight after our immediate family every year – my three host families, two close friends.  There’s the fact that whenever I hear a samba beat, I start to dance, in the same unconscious way that a mother rocks an empty pram (and I do that too).  There’s the way I can always recognise the Brasilian national anthem (and still sing a large part of it) when it’s played at sporting events.  And I always call it futebol, not soccer, just for the record.  I still have a full-sized Brasilian flag in a cupboard downstairs, which I’ve waved at multiple sporting events over the years.

When I picked up the forms to apply for exchange, when I sat the interviews and did all the preparation for my year away, I never imagined that, 26 years later, it would still be an active part of my life.  In the years that followed, I participated in the interview process, this time as an interviewer, and I worked with the exchange students, both in-bound and out-bound, to help them with any challenges that they might face.  And yet, I still never considered the notion that I’d still be thinking about my exchange year once I was grown up; married, with children and mortgages and all the rest.  And yet, it remains one of the central and defining features of who I am as an adult.

The best individual days of my life (so far) did not happen in Brasil.  For the record, one of those happened in a little church in Perth; the other three were in the maternity ward of a hospital in Brisbane.  The best weeks and best months of my life . . .well, I think most of those probably happened exterior to Brasil as well. But, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the best complete year of my life occurred between January 12, 1993 and January 12, 1994, and I can’t imagine that another complete year will ever match that one for its amazing, incredible fabulousness.  I was close enough to adulthood to be treated as such, but still not old enough to have much in the way of real responsibility.  I got to have that year of awesomeness in the land of Carnaval.  And I got to be cool while I did it.