Our Family of Six

I sent two of my four daughters to South America this week.  I’m so proud of both of these young ladies.  Both are unofficial ambassadors for their countries.

Lisa went to Paraguay for two months, volunteering with the program Amigos de las Américas.  (You can read more about Amigos in an earlier post: http://our-family-of-six.tumblr.com/post/826085613/the-seeds-of-our-hosting-experience )  Sisi returned to her family and life in Brazil.

Coincidentally, of all the countries that Lisa could have been sent to, she was sent to Paraguay.  The headquarters city for her program is only 500 miles away from Sisi’s hometown!  Both girls flew into Sao Paulo, Brazil to make their connecting flights.  Lisa left a few days before Sisi, and the girls teased each other about which of them was “stalking” the other.

Liliana Ayalde, the U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay, told the Amigos volunteers, “Thank you for helping me in my role as Ambassador, you all are Ambassadors of the United States. Make your country proud.”

Sisi and I had a number of conversations this year about what it means to be an exchange student.  AFS Brazil told the students in their training to remember that they are representatives of their country.  Everyone they meet, their host families, friends, the school administration, will think of them when they hear about Brazil.

Of course one teenager does not really represent an entire country.  But it is human nature to make these connections.  From now on, whenever I hear “Brazil”, I will think about Sisi.  And it will give me positive feelings.  In the future, when Lisa’s host family thinks about the United States, they will think about Lisa.  Knowing my daughter, I am sure they will have a positive reference.

It was difficult to send my daughters off into the world.  I know Lisa will be coming back to me. But I won’t have any direct communication with her, except for mail.  Assuming she takes the time to write, a letter might not even get here before she returns.  The project staff will send program updates twice this summer, so I’ll have more news of her than my parents had of me.

I hope to see Sisi in person again in the future.  I suspect that I won’t hear much from her for a while as she settles back into her life at home.  But with the wonders of the internet, we’ll be able to stay in touch via email, Facebook, and Skype.

John F. Kennedy, one of the United States’ most popular presidents, said, “Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.” 

I know that both Lisa, at age 16, and Sisi, at age 17, are absolutely among the world’s most valuable resources. 

Alice had to drink and eat to get smaller and taller, but Kerri and Sisi (who are similar in height) just had to enter a room.

I didn’t use any photo editing with these pictures; the “distorted room” is built this way.

The room is in the Exploratorium - “the museum of science, art and human perception.”  As you can see from these pictures, they use cool hands-on displays.

Drinking from the toilet water fountain is a conflict between reason and emotion.

“Everyone is you and me.” This combination mirror/window blended Kerri’s and Sisi’s faces together.  It was pretty weird to see the two girls become one.

left: Thermal imagery with cold metal “tattoos” on Kerri’s hands.

 right: How can a straight rod go through a curved hole?

Kerri (left) and Sisi (right) dance in front of a light that breaks their shadows into the color spectrum.

A high-speed camera freezes a drop of water.  Kerri on the left and me on the right.

left: I didn’t change the settings on my camera.  It is really weird to look into this room and see in shades of black and white.  It is lit by a yellow light, which absorbs the other colors.

right: The “Rolling through the Bay” ball maze is made of toothpicks.  You need to watch this video to really appreciate how amazing it is:

http://player.vimeo.com/video/22461692?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0

There are other “Things to Make and Do” on their website:

 http://www.exploratorium.edu/explore/topics/#top

One is the story of “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut”:

http://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibits/ladle/  Close your eyes and listen instead of reading along, especially if English is your second language.

And to make a visit even more enjoyable, the museum is inside the Palace of Fine Arts. The rotunda (above) and other buildings were built for the 1915 World’s Fair.

If you’re ever in San Francisco, this place is definitely worth a visit, whether you are a child or an adult.

The Academy of Sciences has an aquarium, a planetarium, a natural history museum and a 4-story rainforest all under one roof.  It is the kind of place that makes education fun. 

rainforest picture courtesy of the Academy

butterflies in the rainforest

birds in the rainforest

The “living roof” design “is like lifting up a piece of the park and putting a building under it.”

aquarium

reptile exhibit

Sisi rode in a car with one of these Brazilian tarantulas once.  I’m not scared of spiders, but this one is a little too big for my taste.  In a cage, fine.  Loose, no way.

Claude, the albino American alligator.

One of the food choices at the Academy. I just thought the translation to “El Hombre Taco” was really funny.

The maximum prison sentence permitted in Brazil is 30 years, even for the worst crimes.  In the United States, life sentences and even the death penalty are a part of our criminal system.  This difference was one of the surprising facts we learned this year.  The fun way to learn about another culture is to have an exchange student live with you.  Instead of learning from books, we learn from casual conversations, like listening to the news and comparing stories about our countries.

We recently visited a famous former federal prison.  Alcatraz is an island located in San Francisco Bay.  From 1934 to 1963, it housed the most dangerous prisoners.  It finally closed because it was too expensive to maintain. 

Alcatraz is 1.5 miles (2.4 km) offshore. 

 The views are beautiful; it must have been terrible for the prisoners to be so close to freedom.

There is a question whether anyone ever escaped.  A few prisoners made fake heads to put in their cots, and chiseled concrete from around an air vent.  They made it out of the prison.  Did they drown in the bay?  Or make it to freedom? 

From 1969 to 1971, a group of Native Americans from many different tribes occupied the island.  The occupation changed, for the better, the way the United States government dealt with them.

There is still graffiti from the occupation around Alcatraz. (See the word “Free” above.)

When we were done with our tour, we just got on a ferry back to San Francisco.  If needed, I will remind my kids of some of the regulations we learned. They sound like good rules for teenagers, as well as prisoners.

Luckily we left without a “white badge of courage” (seagull poop on our clothes).  Most people are not fans of seagulls, but these chicks were really cute.

Baseball is often called “America’s pastime”.  It is certainly played in other countries, but it’s not as popular as it is here.  Sisi asked me why the championship is called the “World Series”.  Good question, since only the United States and Canada have teams in Major League Baseball.  (That question also makes you wonder why they call it the “Miss Universe” pageant.)  Our local team, the San Francisco Giants, won the 2010 World Series; this was a huge deal locally.  Our family went to a game last week; it was a lot of fun.  And the Giants won – hurray!

• The Giants play at “AT&T Park”.  The stadium has a beautiful view of San Francisco Bay.  The Coca-Cola bottle on the left is actually a slide that the girls had fun on.

If you say “football”, people in most countries of the world assume you are referring to soccer.  “American football” is played in other countries, and is often called just that.  John and I root for different teams.  My dad worked for the San Francisco 49ers for many years, and John grew up rooting for the Oakland Raiders.  We didn’t go see a professional football game this year; the tickets are expensive.  But Sisi went to every home game at her high school, and was sad when the season ended. 

Sisi was very excited to play “Powder Puff Football”.  Powder Puff is theoretically a no tackle game, but after numerous overtime periods during the Junior-Senior championship game, it was looking a little rough.  

Sisi’s question about football, “Why do they call it a ball when it isn’t round?”

Soccer is the most widely followed sport in the world.  Soccer in Brazil is part of the culture.  Understandable, since Brazil has won the World Cup five times.  The 2014 World Cup in Brazil will have some matches in Curitiba, Sisi’s hometown!  It may be a time for us to visit Sisi’s family.  (Unless we wait for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.  Wow – what an exciting couple of years for Brazil!)

We’re a soccer family.  John coaches and referees for AYSO, which stands for “All Your Saturdays Occupied”.  Okay, it really stands for American Youth Soccer Organization.  But when all three of our girls were playing and John was coaching two teams at a time, all of our Saturdays were spoken for during soccer season. 

• Kerri (age 12), Lisa (age 8), and Rebecca (age 5) - the first year all 3 girls played AYSO soccer.

Sisi planned on trying out for the varsity soccer team at her high school.  After seeing that over 60 girls wanted a spot on the team, she left it to the students to whom it really mattered.  And she had fun going to Rebecca’s games and cheering.

Since John is a huge soccer fan, he bought the soccer cable channels.  Sisi has been able to watch not just the main Brazilian teams, but even her hometown teams.

The other “Ball” this year was a version of a prom.  Sisi went to Francesca’s Senior Ball with her since the girls had so much fun together at Sisi’s prom.

A girl and her dog make a glorious pair:

No better friendship is found anywhere,

For they talk and they walk and they run and they play,

And they have their deep secrets for many a day;

And that girl has a comrade who thinks and who feels,

Who walks down the road with a dog at her heels.

She may go where she will and her dog will be there,

May revel in mud and her dog will not care;

Faithful she’ll stay for the slightest command

And bark with delight at the touch of her hand;

Oh, she owns a treasure which nobody steals,

Who walks down the road with a dog at her heels.

No other can lure her away from her side;

She’s proof against riches and station and pride;

Fine dress does not charm her, and flattery’s breath

Is lost on the dog, for she’s faithful to death;

She sees the great soul which the body conceals—

Oh, it’s great to be young with a dog at your heels!

“A Boy and His Dog” was written by poet Edgar Guest in approx. 1908.  I’ve taken the liberty to change the boy to a girl.

Lisa’s dog Butterscotch died last week at the age of 16.  The picture at the top is Lisa, age 6, with her best friend.  Butterscotch was a great dog; we’ll miss her a lot.

“I guess there is something called dish soap and something called dish washer soap and a huge bubbly mess if you use the wrong one,” said Sisi on her Facebook page.  Sisi did this just the other day.  It was kind of funny that it took her 8 months to make this mistake.

S’Mores (and roasted marshmallows) are delicious.  Sisi first heard of them in Brazil while watching the show “Jon & Kate Plus 8”.  Every time we’ve gone camping, she asks for “some more”.  (Yeah, you can groan, but my international readers probably didn’t know what that stands for.)

Going to Chuck E Cheese, a “lifelong dream”, was not as exciting as it looked on the show “Dexter’s Laboratory”.  (Have I mentioned that Sisi watched a LOT of American TV in Brazil?)

Chopping wood with an axe and using power tools is a lot of fun.  Sisi helped me build sets for Rebecca’s show; she loved using the power saw.

Other things Sisi had never seen before:

Drive-thru pharmacies, banks, mailboxes

Self-service gas stations

Garbage disposals (kind of scary)

Milk in individual cartons

Self-serve soda machines; Self-serve frozen yogurt

A few foods Sisi had never tried before:

Dr Pepper – tastes like candy

Root Beer – tastes like medicine

Donuts – delicious; a BIG hit

Peanut butter – thumbs down

Artichokes – thumbs down

Orange Chicken from Panda Express – way too spicy

Whoppers (chocolate malted milk) – a new favorite candy

The “Coelhinho da Páscoa” (Easter Bunny) visited us from Brazil on Sunday.   That is one tough bunny.  The chocolate eggs he carries are huge.  And he hides them so well that it takes at least 30 minutes, and lots of hints, to find them. 

Sisi went to Yosemite on a school trip over Easter weekend (more on that later).  Luckily, the Easter Bunny also went to Yosemite so that the high school students could hunt for the plastic eggs the American Bunny typically uses.

It was an unusual Easter.  I spent almost the whole day sick in bed.   Lisa wasn’t feeling so well either.  John took Rebecca across the Bay to his family’s Easter ham dinner. 

Sisi got home in the evening and hid the eggs that were sent from Brazil.  It was the first time I hunted for eggs since I was a little girl.  I hid small chocolate bunnies for the girls. 

Not a typical American Easter (for those who celebrate it), but for Sisi it was a new experience.  She’s even taking the plastic eggs home to Brazil.

*Intentionally misspelled:  the high school mascot is the Knights, so pretty much every prom title is a play on the word night - A Knight to Remember, etc.

Prom is a big deal at most American high schools.  There are other countries which have traditional graduation dances, but most exchange students have seen American movies with prom scenes, and there is a mystique about prom. 

I’m not sure about schools across the United States, but here it is very common for same sex friends to go together if they aren’t dating anyone.  Sisi asked her friend Francesca, an AFS exchange student from Italy, who lives in another part of the Bay Area.

Proms here are typically held in hotel ballrooms.  For a change, this year’s prom was on a ship in the San Francisco Bay.  This was especially nice for Sisi and Francesca; cruising the Bay at night was a nice sightseeing opportunity.  They even sailed underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to my kids singing “Prom Night”.  If you’re familiar with Rebecca Black’s infamous song “Friday”, you may know that she “performed” the same song with different lyrics:

It’s prom night
Who’m I gonna dance with (Prom Night)

Prom Night is one of those “big events” that merit a blog post.  It is harder to write about more mundane stuff, but I’ll try to post more often.