Thursday 12 April 2012

I'm sorry.

Sorry guys. I know I promised back in February that I’d be blogging every few days, but about a week after I posted that, everything started to go downhill at about 100km/ph.

So, I guess I owe you all an explanation, and I’ll start at the beginning.



10 Jan – I arrived in America, all happy and full of adrenaline for the next six months.

17 Jan – One week in and I'm feeling homesick, call up my friend in Kentucky and after, I'm feeling much better.

24 Jan – Two weeks, the ‘honeymoon’ period has ended and things are not how I thought they would be.

27 Jan – Tina’s house! It’s a rainbow in the storm that’s become my life!

1 Feb – I promise that I’ll be blogging more and that everything is calm.



But in actual fact, the last entry was pretty much a lie. I really hated my exchange, and I still am. I felt really uncomfortable with my host family. Our personalities didn’t merge at all. I was loud, outgoing, adventurous, individual, family orientated, crazy and occasionally stupid.

My host family was quiet, introvert, not exactly timid – but they weren’t adventurous, strict and extremely Christian. Now, I don’t have the slightest problem with people being extremely church revolved, not problem at all. But the other things bothered me. They didn’t have a family dinners, my host sister never called her mum ‘mum’, only ‘mother’ and referred to her as ‘mother’ too, and, to be honest, she was a complainer. My host dad was barely ever home, so I didn't see him much, but when I did see him, I got along great with him. My host mother was extremely strict and if you stepped out of line, you knew about it straight away.

So you can see I couldn’t be myself, I couldn’t relax or settle down properly, as they never really ‘welcomed’ me into the family.



10 Feb – One month in and I want to change families desperately. My host sister is having surgery to fix something in her nose so I stay with my IEC and her exchange student.



Now would have been the perfect time to tell her about everything, how I'm uncomfortable, alone and unrelaxed. But I don’t. I tell her exchange student from France.

    And the exchange student tells me that their past student felt the same way -.-

So I confine in the exchange student, tell her everything that’s going on and how I want to move. How my parents want me to move if I'm feeling like this and how I absolutely hate it here. She tells me that she agrees that this place isn’t the best and she would prefer to be somewhere else too. She says that I can always tell her things that are going wrong, and when I finally decide to tell my IEC she’ll be there for me.



17 Feb – I want to go home. Please.  Someone send me a one way ticket to Sydney.



But hey, Tina’s over! And Omaha tomorrow!



24 Feb – Still depressed here..

1 March – IEC’s house again, I planned on telling her, but I chickened out.

10 March – Told my IEC everything today.



Told her how much I hate it and how uncomfortable I am. How I wasn’t relaxed and that I felt so alone, that my host family didn't ever really feed me and that I wanted to go home or change families. She didn’t really do jack shit. Talked about it all with her husband – my other IEC – and then told me a few days later that we were having a meeting with my host mum about it all.



16 March – Meeting with host mum and IEC today.



She denied everything and shifted all the blame onto me so it looked like my fault that I was alone and uncomfortable and under fed. She didn’t take the slightest bit of blame.



17 March – My Dad’s birthday. I really wanted to be home and spend it with him.

19 March – DISCOVERY TOUR! One week away from all the shit in my life!!

26 March – Possibly the best week of my life. I loved everything about it!



This, I will do a full blog on, most probably be a extremely long post, but my Discovery Tour NEEDS to be written about. So far, it’s been the only time I’ve been happy while here.

   Got into some serious shit though, I met with the EF lady in charge of Nebraska while on tour, and told her everything, apparently she hadn’t been told about it at all…yeah. That’s right. She was completely oblivious to the fact I was unhappy. So she rings my IEC and my host mum, and when I get home, I'm in trouble because I told her and apparently didn't trust my IEC to tell the EF lady. I wanted to shoot someone.



1 April – Went to the capital for my host sister.

10 April – Three months of misery.





So I know it doesn’t sound all that bad, but it’s been horrible, somewhere in there I had another meeting with my host sister, host mum and IEC. The blame was shifted to me again, and my host mother even had the nerve to say the only way to fix it all was for me to go home early.

  Not once had EF tried to move me families, even though I’ve been asking and asking to move. I’ve told them so many times that I would be happier somewhere else, but it almost seems as if they want us to suffer. Is it just me, or does that seem wrong? That they are denying kids their happiness? Another Australian girl is even going home on Friday because EF did nothing to help her, she got so sick and tired of their crap, that she decided the best thing was to go back.

  The only thing keeping me here is knowing that I’d be failing myself if I left.

  So what happens now? Well I'm stuck here to summer holidays, then I'm off to Alabama and spending time with my cousin there until my family comes over from Australia. I'm hopefully also going to Kentucky and visiting my friend there.

  I hope you can all forgive me for not blogging the past two months, but I really haven’t been in the spirit, nor the mood to be writing out all the crap that’s happened. I’ll keep you updated on everything whenever I can. But for now, I'm going to go drown my sorrows in the homework that’s been piling up for the past two weeks.



One thing is for certain though, it has NOT been worth the 10K so far.

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