Mesa West! This is Marcela Sousa, your inbound exchange student from Brazil reporting from Flagstaff. At the end of this month, I will complete 9 months in the United States! During this time, I have made the most amazing memories and have had so many awesome experiences that I will never forget with people that I’ll take forever with me. This exchange experience was so important for me and taught me so much! I’m so grateful to Rotary for making it possible! With the threat of COVID-19 and having so many of my friends going home, I was afraid of everything that could happen and how it could affect my experience on the final months of my exchange but I chose to stay.
I had just moved in with my third and last host family and was with a friend of mine for the week of spring break when everything started.
I was in Pine, Arizona in her cabin with Gretchen, future outbound in Argentina, and her parents. We had an amazing time and I even had the chance to feed female elks! Probably the most awesome thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. Once I got back to Flagstaff, quarantine wasn’t on its full power mode so I was able to go out a couple of times before everything nonessential shutdown.
I haven’t got the chance to go places with this host family (hopefully) yet, so with one host sister, 12, and one host brother, 10 we’ve been keeping ourselves entertained. We’ve been baking - from sugar cookies to Brazilian cakes. I’m used to baking back home. We've been having nerf wars and binge-watching movies and TV shows. For the first time ever, I decorated eggs for a first-time-ever egg-hunt in our backyard. I had so much fun!
It’s important to remember that what we are going through right now is so we can be doing normal stuff again very soon. Staying at home is not that bad when we realize how lucky we are knowing that we can help others by being in the comfort of our houses. Everything will be better soon, and I hope to join one of the Mesa West Zoom meetings soon enough!