di Emilia Pengue 4ªS2 stagista in Canada –
Almost every day I receive from my friends or my family the same message: ‘’how are you?’’ or sometimes ‘’how is it going?’’. Most of the time the answer is always the same: ‘’I’m doing good’’: the classic answer given when you have so many things to say but you don’t feel like doing it. How do I really feel? I don’t know. I’ve been here for around four months and I have only one month left.
If I think about the first two months I can exactly remember all the pain and all the fear I felt: that feeling of loneliness and insecurity. Over the time I started feeling better: maybe because I got used to the absence of certain people or maybe because I started to appreciate more those I met here. I can’t tell you what exactly helped me to overcome certain situations but I can describe all those little or big things that made me suffer or feel good.
The first time I wrote something for the Italian school, I decided not to talk about my host family and my relationship with my host parents: first of all because I thought it was too early to talk about it and second because, to be honest, things were not going very well. This is the first big thing that made and still makes me suffer. I’m not ashamed to say how things really are; I just think I haven’t been really lucky and I can’t do anything to change things now. I’ve never really felt like part of the family: I asked myself ‘’why?’’ a lot of times and I tried to figure out some possible reasons, because I didn’t want to feel like the only cause or the problem. First of all, to give you an idea, I have to tell you that my host parents are of a certain age: they could be my grandparents and I think this is one of the things that has affected our relationship. We don’t have a lot of things in common and many times I don’t feel like they can understand me. Moreover, my host dad is very quiet and he’s also a really private person. We never eat together even though we have supper at the same time. But this doesn’t bother me. I think. I don’t usually talk with him, even if sometimes we both try to struck up a coversation. I usually talk more with my host mom, but our conversations are not that long. How can you imagine, I’m just trying to get used also to this and to think about the fact that maybe we just have different habits and different personalities.
Anyway, apart from all the support and all the love I receive from my family and my friends in Italy, what maybe has helped me and still helps me feel good are my friends and all the experiences we are sharing together here: the walks in the parks, the evenings at the bowling, the bonfires on the beach, the afternoons at Tim Hortons’, the baths in the ocean with only 10 degrees, the prom and all those little things that you start to appreciate more when you realize that time flies and each single minute is precious.
I’m really glad to be here because I’m learnig how to deal with problems by relying only on myself, because I’m learning what is really important for me and how much I’m lucky to have certain people in my life. So, what is the answer to the question ‘’how are you’’? I’m good.