Time is rapidly drawing near that I will be driving our exchange student, Anna, to Golden Triangle Regional Airport and watch her fly off into the blue sky back to her home country of Armenia. The past 10 months have been a wonderful experience for me and my family since Anna arrived to live with us for the school year to experience life in the USA.
It’s been an eye opening experience for her in many ways. She has found out that all American people do not agree with the political climate in the US and are quite vocal about it; especially at our house. I think that has been somewhat of a surprise. And ask her about sweet potatoes. The ones grown here are exceptionally sweet apparently; and we continue to ‘doctor’ them up by adding more sugar and cinnamon. She has enjoyed Corky’s Bar B Que, pizza sticks, grilled cheese sandwiches, and Bubba Gumps Resturant and Maharaja’s Indian Cuisine. There really isn’t any food that I can say is ‘typically’ American since all of our recipes and favorite food usually originated in another country to begin with.
She arrived with a list of things that she wanted to try and do and we have tried to mark off as many of those things as we could. We’ve had many adventures with her and our game plan turned into how many different states can she go to on a shoestring budget. She is even taking home a large wall map with all the places we have been marked. We succeeded in making it 16. Over Spring Break we hopped a bud and let Greyhound do the driving and went from Memphis to Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois. Add that to Mississippi and Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and Washington DC and she has been one very busy young lady.
We went to Disneyland, and that was a pilgrimage for me. My first trip to Disneyland was the year it opened in 1955. I can still remember all the rides and it still holds a sentimental spot in my heart even after all the changes and growth. Anna saw how it really was a fairytale place. We walked through La Brea tar pits and went into the museum there. We strolled Rodeo Drive and looked up at the balcony that Richard Gere and Julia Roberts stood on in Pretty Woman. We saw Las Vegas in the day light and it still glitters in that dusty desert. She saw the extremes that the US can be from farm land to hills; from river deltas to deserts; from ocean front beaches to majestic snow covered mountains; from salt flats to the birth place of grand canyons and colorful mountain ridges and land formations. She even slept through a California earthquake although I sure didn’t!
She has seen small towns and medium sized cities and megacities like Los Angeles and Chicago. She has seen the tallest building in the United States and several state capitols including Mississippi’s as well as our nations Capitol. She has seen that American people are not all rich and famous and that we are not all glitz and glamour like in the movies or on TV. And speaking of movies, she has seen more movies in the past few months than she probably will ever see again. She has stood on the beach of the Pacific Ocean at Santa Monica, stood on the banks of the Mighty Mississippi in Memphis and witnessed the power of the wind on Lake Michigan in Chicago. She has experienced the hustle and bustle of city life in LA and Chicago and the slower laid back sweetness of life in rural Mississippi and tent-camping on the banks of the Tenn-Tom waterway at Aberdeen.
We took several little day trips to do things, like ice skating in January in Tupelo and movies and up to Huntsville to the Space Museum and down to Jackson to see the Capitol. She was surprised to learn that the largest cities in states are not always the state capitol and not all state capitols have super tall buildings. What we consider old and historic here pales in comparison to her country. Our nation’s history dates back over 200 years while her nations history is over 6000 years with Noah’s Ark of 4000 years ago the part we usually think about.
She will leave here on Thursday and return to her land and her family and friends. She will finally be able to wake again and see Noah’s mountain from her bedroom window again. She will eat dolma and get hugs from her grandmother again. She will see her brother come home from the Army and take her college entrance exams.
So our year as a host family is now at an end and we say good bye to our Anna as she is leaving for even more of life’s adventures.
We will miss her very much and can only hope that she will remember us fondly and all the memories that we tried to make for her. She has been very much a part of our family since the day she arrived and we tried to figure out this tiny person’s personality. She arrived quite bubbly and full of questions and opinions and she leaves us pretty much the same; still opinionated and full of questions but there is a major difference now. There is a level of maturity. We know that what ever she sets her mind to do, she will achieve it. Good Bye dear Anna. We love you.
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