di Emilia Pengue 4ªS2 – Studentessa del Telesi@ in stage in Canada –
It’s been a month since I arrived in Canada: a journey started on 28th January and ending in 5 months, in June. The first few weeks were not easy to deal with: it was all new to me. A different language, different people, a different family and a very different culture.
I realized I was really here the first morning I woke up in a bed different from mine and the first day I went to a school where eryone was speaking a different language. I felt like an outsider: I felt lost, confused and sometimes alone; all my entire life was 6000 km away from me. I can’t deny that the first few days I was afraid: I would go back to home and resume my daily life, with the same people in my usual city.
Things began to get better when I met those I now consider my friends: an Italian boy and Spanish, Turkish, German and Canadian guys, that made me feel part of a group and helped me to overcome the first difficulties, especially with the language.
School is really cool here: when you start school, you can choose which subjects you are going to study for the rest of the year. My choice was obviously conditioned by what I study in Italy, as a consequence I chose subjects like advanced maths, chemistry and biology and others like french, healthy living and social studies, that is a mix between economics, politics, history and geography. We start school at 8:50, with the first two periods. After the second period we have a break from 10.50 to 11.10 and then another hour of class. We have the lunch break from 12:10 to 13:00: during this time you can decide either to leave school and go where you prefer to have lunch or to stay at school and eat your meal in the school cafeteria. School is like in the movies: you have your locker, you have to change class every period, the gym is very nice and everyone plays basketball; no one cares about how you dress and you can wear whatever you want… skirt, shorts and dress too. The first thing that struck me about this school is the attitude and the accessibility of teachers towards students: the approach is very different, less authoritarian. They’re like friends and they really care about the mental health of students.
However, the relationships between people are more superficial and social life is very different to the one we are used to in Italy: they don’t go to the bar to take a coffee in the afternoon like we are used to do, they don’t go out for a walk just to spend time with friends and on Saturday night they usually stay at home. Food is better in Italy too: they are used to eat unhealthy food, like fastfood and a lot of cookies and sugar.
Lifestyle is really different here: this is why it took a lot of time to adapt to this culture and to feel comfortable and the reason why there are days in which I really feel homesick and disoriented. I’m learning that change could make us more vulnerable and that in each individual nothing is more powerful than resilience.
