9/2/13
My second day of Green School and I’m still not happy. It is a little bit better then yesterday but not the best. On my bed I can feel the medal springs under my body. This is super uncomfortable. This room is really crappy too. There is no heat so I have to take extremely hot showers to warm up. There is no wifi in this cabin but in other cabins the kids have wifi. In order to call my parents, I have been using all my minutes up. I call my mom upset, but I won’t tell my host family. As far as my host family is concerned, “I’m great and everyone is great here!”
The weather is freezing here. Rainy, windy, and cold. I have to wear 2 pairs of pants, 3 layers of jackets, and sometimes gloves. A warm shower definitely does the trick at night.
Today is a big blur to me. I built an airplane with a group of girls. It looked more like a kite to me by the end. Plus the girls didn’t know what to do so I was trying my best to communicate to them. They were more concerned on making it look pretty then having it function.
Later we went to a class where everyone learned CPR. The teacher talked in Polish so I ended up falling asleep because I didn’t understand anything.
After dinner, we went to the gym to play sports. My team in volleyball dominated. The kids were surprised I played so well. I’m sure I would have made Gina very proud if she saw me play. But one thing that is different in Polish gym then in America..they have very different warm ups. They run around the perimeter of the gym swinging their arms. I guess it’s to warm up their arm muscles but in America we definitely do not do that. It was extremely funny to me to watch the kids do these exercises.
The Headmaster of my school taught 4 of us about a poem written by Seamon Hearey. He is known as the greatest poet of all times, won many awards, a proud Irish man, and sadly passed away this year. We read the poem “A Call” which was about the anticipation of death. Death causes you to love deeper because it represents how short life can be for anyone. Everything is only temporary. This made me think about the exchange; it sucks now but that will only temporarily last. By the end of the exchange I will be crying about how I DON’T want to go home. Soon it will be okay!
After supper, Sunny and I hid in our room. I am tired and it is freezing outside! It’s about 7 degrees Celsius. But sadly a teacher came looking for us and told us we had to go out and find something to do. We ended up going to this drum session in the basement of one of the cabins. It was actually really fun and the drum teachers spoke English to us. Sunny and I beat on the tops of the drums until our hands hurt. We were the last ones in the room. One of the drum teachers with long dreadlocks did a very interesting trick on me. He took this medal bowl and cork stick, placed in on my chest as I laid on the floor, rubbed the edges of the bowl gently with the cork stick, and the bowl vibrated my chest. I could feel it vibrate my heart and my chest. It was the most interested feeling I have ever felt. He said it relaxes people as they focus on the vibrations that are sent through their bodies. It was nice to focus on something other then my frustration with the language.
Honestly, Sunny and I cried to each other again in our room. We are extremely homesick and the lack of friends here…it adds on to our shoulders. I am very lucky to have Sunny as a friend. We sat together crying about how we missed our moms and we didn’t realize how hard this exchange actually is on people. Sure people warned us about the heartache and frustration but when you live it, it is completely different. You never understand truly how it is to be frustrated until you go on exchange to a country where you can’t speak the language.
I absolutely tip my hat off to all exchanges around the world right now! Stay strong everyone..I hear it gets better!
Stephanie Raquel
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