Day: May 1, 2020

By Jason, Tufts 1+4 Participant

Saudades. This was one of the first words that I ever learned in Portuguese. The best way that I can describe this word are the little feelings you get once you deeply begin to miss something or someone. Now more than ever, I have many of them.

It has been roughly a month since I left Brazil, and for most of that time I have been at home reflecting on my past seven months. Thinking about all the ways in which that bridge year has influenced me and the way I think at home has been something that seemingly has become part of my daily routine. Those seven months had gone so right in so many ways that it’s hard not to miss it. From my wonderful host family, to my apprenticeship, and all the things in between that made my host community what it was, it is impossible for me to have wished for anything better. Although this is the case, there is one factor that acted as a parasite which wove itself into my mindset and grew into a problem which I did not address until it was too late.

I think that it’s safe to say once you have become comfortable within your host community, you can give yourself a pat on the back because that means you’ve reached a point that many people struggle with when it comes to living somewhere drastically different from where they are originally from. Unfortunately, with this feeling of being comfortable, comes the danger of becoming too content in your community.

For me, the consequences of this contentment did not come until the final week of my bridge-year. I had been living most of these past seven months with the idea that there would always be time to do the things that I wanted to do, and although this was true during the former months, it quickly spiraled into something that lasted with me even in the final weeks.

The unfortunate consequences of this tendency to push things off to a later time did not truly hit me until my final weekend in the country when I realized that I was rushing to do everything that I ever wanted to do in that country in those final few days. Even then, there was nowhere near the amount of time that I needed to fully see all my plans through.

Granted, the time that I am writing this is spring of 2020 when the world is going through a rapidly growing pandemic. Even though this did cut my time in the country short by three weeks, it’s still something that I must acknowledge when reflecting on my time in Brazil. The more I think back on it, the more times I realized that I had this tendency to give the “I have plenty of time for that” excuse, which obviously was not true in the long run. During my last weekend in Brazil I was rushing to do all the fun things that I ever wanted to do in those last two days, which made that weekend some of my best moments in the entirety of my seven months there. Finally visiting the Sand Dunes of Lagoa, hiking up various trails, trying some food that I’ve always wanted to taste such as natural açaí and pasteis. I absolutely loved my bridge year in Brazil, but to think how much better it could’ve been if I had been doing all the things I wanted to do makes me wonder.

Because of all this, there are still a ton of things on my list which I never got to do in Brazil. So if there is anything that I would say to anyone who is going or about to go on a similar journey, it would be to please live everyday in-country as if it could be your last. Even if it’s your first week and you’re 100% sure that you have plenty of time, do your future self a favor and start checking off things on your list now instead of tomorrow

By Abigail, Tufts 1+4 Participant

My hands struggle to remain steady as they carefully transcribe each character into my notebook. My feet, propped up on the metal rail in front of me, try to keep balance as the bus races down the hill, turning sharply and stopping every few seconds to open the door and let more people in. In both ears sings the soft and silky voice of Yoon Mirae — Korean R&B — in an only somewhat successful attempt to block out all the noise around me — the constant swishing of the folding doors, open, shut; the subdued hum of men and women coming back home from work or shopping; the excited shouts of grinning schoolchildren just getting out of school.

My eyes lose their light-source temporarily, a shadow hovering over my paper. One of those students has sat next to me, and is leaning over to see what it is that I am doing. “¿Eso es inglés?” — is that English? — she asks curiously, staring at the Chinese characters on the page.“No,” I begin to explain in Spanish, removing my headphones and placing them in my pocket. “This is Mandarin Chinese. It’s a language that uses characters rather than an alphabet.” She looks up at me, fascinated and perhaps a bit confused. As we continue conversing, I explain to her that I take Mandarin classes in the city center, where I’m heading now, and she tells me about herself — her age, grade level, and school she goes to. She still looks interested in the strokes I’ve written, so I ask her if she’d like to learn a bit of something. “Yes!” she exclaims excitedly. So I turn the pages until I get to where I wrote down the numbers and begin teaching. “Uno” is “yī”, “dos” is “èr”, and so on. She repeats after me, seeming to soak it in. Then her stop comes up and her siblings, who were standing nearby, call her to get off. She bids me farewell Ecuadorian-style — never “goodbye” but rather “see you later” — as she demounts the bus.

That singular, brief interaction was one of the most memorable experiences of my bridge year. At that moment, just as the little girl got off, I realized what a modern interaction that was — me, a native English speaker, listening to Korean music, speaking in Spanish to an Ecuadorian schoolgirl about the Mandarin Chinese language. This is one of the best examples of cultural globalization that I have personally been a part of. 500 hundred years ago, or even 100 years ago, such an interaction simply would not have been possible. Technology has made it possible to listen to music in practically any language, schools and exchange programs make it possible for foreigners like me to spend some time in Cuenca not just as a tourist, and people’s increasing curiosity of cultures and countries far from their own make it possible to study a wide variety of languages. To be a part of such a complex intercultural exchange, even when it seems to be something as simple as teaching an Ecuadorian schoolgirl  some Mandarin numbers, filled me with a sense of thankfulness for the beautiful, diverse, and ever increasingly connected world we live in today.