Message From Natal

After getting through  The Super-Hard But Super-Awesome Zombie Weekend, I went to Natal to do a mini-intercâmbio. I don't know if you can do this with AFS in other countries. But basically, a mini-intercâmbio is like a exchange year...except only for a week or two.

I am in Natal, another city in the Northwest, for just one week. Just one.

Everything that I have to say about Natal is currently unsaid - that'll have to wait until I write it in my journal, and I am still getting through The Super-Hard But Super-Awesome Zombie Weekend (on page eleven...and I'm still on Saturday. Sigh....). I'll blog it about it later, after I blog about everything else that happened before. And I'll backdate them, so that this blog reads a bit more tightly.

But that's not the point of this post. I'm sitting here writing a letter to my host family here, thanking them for welcoming me into their home for this short period of time.

But how do I write this note? How do I write it, leave it someplace they'll find, and just get up and leave, without knowing when I'll be back? Do I just leave this bedroom and this house, which has become so familiar over the past week, and get up and go?

If this is hard after just one week, how hard will it be with my family in Fortaleza?

Should I even be worrying about that, right now?

.....................

Redefining family. That's not a modern concept. We live in the age of the nuclear family, but what about those days where your extended family was just as close? Was the idea of an isolated nuclear family just as...radical?

People have all kinds of relationships.

Some of us have two mothers, or a single parent. Some live in foster homes. Some live with relatives. Some have parents that divorced and then married somebody else, and they have three, or four families.

Some of us go on exchange.

Who makes up my family? What does family even mean?

Can you live with somebody for a year, two years, five years, and not call them family? And can you live with somebody for a month, who becomes closer than your own brother?

How does that even work?

Surely, such abstract thoughts before the bedtime hour are not good for digestion.

My goodness, Freud would have a field day with all of this.

....................

I already hugged my Natalian sisters good-bye. I won't see them in the morning. My mother here works in Sustaneability, and gave me a reusable bag, which is now functioning as my carry-on. Or so I hope.

I'm already packed. The only things still left are the things I'll be using in the morning. Deodorant. My camera. Toothbrush. And, of course, everything in that nifty reusable bag is easily accessable, namely, my journal.

Good-byes are never fun. My sisters here wrote in my journal and made me promise not to read until I'm on the plane. The kids at my school threw me a picnic party. Nothing much is better than ham and cheese and peas and corn sandwiches. Especially with cream cheese.

Leaving them was hard.

And I just realized that I forgot to say good-bye to the woman who manages all of the exchange students. But it happens. Inevitably, you forget to do something on your way out. I hope she doesn't think too badly of me.

There's no way you can just wrap it all up. Absolutely no way.

......................

But I don't think that wrapping it all up is necessarily the best thing to do. I believe I'll come back. I'm sad I have to leave, but I know I'll come back.

The sooner we leave, the sooner we come back, isn't that how the world works?

I can only hope.

......................

Off to finish this letter, and then it's back to Fortaleza.

Back for the last two weeks.

Let's make them some of the best two weeks I've ever had.

Até mais tarde,
Jake