Kyle Hepp

March 19, 2009

Leave a comment with a link to your post when it’s up and I’ll start putting all the links up in the morning!

Amanda: Her story started when a Yugoslavian and a Chilean fell in love.
Abby: Forced to come at first, fell in love later.
Lydia: Came looking to be out of her element, and will leave because of the struggles of various proportions (economics, community, education, etc.)
Emma: “What is the deal? Are we all from the same womb? Is our generation instrinsically prone to latin-love-affairs-turned-serious-life-altering-decisions?”
Aimee: She was hoping not to like Chile in order to have a reason to “just be friends” with her Seabass.
Shannon: She came for love but she’ll leave so that she can afford the 5 kids of her dreams.
Tamsin: The man of her dreams brought her here and who knows where the future will take her.
Sara: Nostalgia and La Tercera convinced her she was making the right decision.
Emily: Santiago promised distance and dictatorship.
Miyaunna: She was here in Temuco on a scholarship and wants to come back to see if she can hack it one more time.
Clare: She didn’t choose Chile, Chile chose her.
Leigh: In the battle between good versus, aka Chile versus Ecuador, guess which country won out?
Tyffanie: A careful study of study abroad programs led her here. Robbery at gunpoint makes her question whether to stay or leave.
Emily: For her, it all started in high school with a Chilean exchange student who lived with her family!
Irini_ta: Running from a broken relationship, she wanted far FAR away vacations. Mexico was too close, Peru and Bolivia sold out…she ended up in Chile where she met the true love of her life.
Jessica: Chile wasn’t interesting to her at all yet she was desperately needed by an organization here.
Renee: My favorite quote from her post says, “I’ve gained a sense of why my favorite writer loved his birthplace and also why he left.”
Isabel: A gut feeling combined with her heritage led her here.
Andre: Hot girls were the original motivating factor in his arrival in this long country

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In the beginning, way back in the beginning, when I was 13 or 14, nothing drew me here. In fact, quite the opposite — my mom sent me to Chile. Not necessarily against my will, but when she sent me I was more than a little hesitant, wary and unsure of what I was getting myself into.

But, I arrived to a host mother who was more than accommodating and willing to accept me as her hija gringa, classmates who were patient with the exchange student’s non-existent Spanish, and incredibly kind and welcoming nonetheless. We were so young that there was nothing of politics and prejudices involved in my friendships back then. I was often homesick and frustrated by my complete lack of communication skills. As I spoke almost none of the language, I was isolated into my own little world — being able to break out of that was a challenge, and we all know there’s nothing I love more in life than a good challenge.

Studying abroad in Chile in high school had a bigger impact on me than probably anything else in my formative years, aside from my parent’s divorce. It was in this country I learned to be independent, to be a little person all on my own. In the neighborhood of Puente Alto, one small sector of Santiago, yet much larger than my entire home city of Grandville, Michigan, I learned to depend upon myself, to be stronger than I thought I could be. I grasped a better understanding of how to communicate with people and how to try and fit in with a foreign culture. I learned how to learn. I started to learn how to accept people because, not in spite of their differences (although if we’re really being honest here, I’m still working on the kinks on the full grasp of this concept). I witness poverty and compassion and generosity firsthand. I learned that there is an entire world outside the U.S., so different from anything I had ever seen, heard or experienced before. But while the life might be different, people are still the same. People are always the same.

After I came home from study abroad and went back to the relatively small town of Grandville, my world was never the same. I felt like my classmates no longer me understood me, and vice versa. In a way, it was almost as isolating as not speaking Spanish in Chile. Again, there was a communication barrier, albeit, a very different kind.

I loved my high school experience. It was amazing. My friends were incredible, my high school was top notch, I felt passionate about sports and music and a lot of my academics. But, I still continued to spend the next three years in Grandville feeling that I was somehow seeing things differently than other people. It sort of felt like when you’re drunk and the world is spinning, and you see someone completely sober walking down the street like normal…and you just can’t understand how they can stroll along with so much ease, but you can’t make the ground stop moving beneath your feet in order to the same. I was the drunk girl (figuratively, not literally…at least until college) and my classmates were the sober ones. So I longed to go back to Chile, where everyone was drunk, both figuratively and literally.

I thought I was drawn to come back to this country because of a love of the language and the culture and the country itself. But, when I got back and was assaulted on day #5 of my second stay in Chile, when I quickly grew sick of catcalls and daily harassment on the streets, I felt disillusioned. I thought, “I did not spend the last 7 years dreaming of coming back to this Chile.” This isn’t fun. People aren’t nice like I remember. Santiago is uglier and more polluted than it used to be. To me it seemed, things were different here.

But, looking back, I realized the key. All along it hadn’t been Chile itself that held the enchantment for me. It wasn’t the Andes Mountains glowing purple every night with the sunset, or the sexy mullet’ed men whispering the language of love in my ear. What I was longing for was the personal growth, the independence I found, the challenge I could rise to. That was what I found in Chile the first time around, and that’s what I eventually found again when I moved back. I guess you could say, out of total stubborness I was drawn back to Chile by me — the person I was, and am able to be in this long skinny country.

P.S. I’ll have to write about what drives me away in a different post next week. This is far too long already!!!