Category Stories: Family Matters
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How My Host Mom and I Almost Moved
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Growing up, I moved with my parents twice across the country, and we often reflect on the moving experience as a stressful but exciting time. For the first two months of my semester abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a real estate agent weekly showed the apartment I shared with my host mother to potential buyers,…
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How I Coped with Losing A Loved One While Abroad
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I will never forget my 21stbirthday, not because I was spending it on an incredible Spring Break Trip in Australia, although that certainly helps make it a bit more memorable. No, the reason I will never forget this birthday is because it was the day I found out my grandfather had passed away. When I…
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Dealing with Family Loss While Abroad
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Going abroad is exciting and wonderful but can also be a little intimidating. Leading up to my departure to Edinburgh, I had all those conflicting feelings. I had asked all the necessary questions to students who had studied in Scotland and I felt confident in my abilities and ecstatic for the opportunity to live in…
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Living With a Host Family | Love, Language, and Learning
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“Cabra chica, a comer!” My host mom endearingly called to me from the kitchen when it was meal time. I helped set up and the two of us, along with my host sister and dad, sat down for an evening meal called “once”. This is a particularly Chilean meal that resembles an extravagant tea time more…
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Studying Abroad with my Family Abroad
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Experiences Living with my Japanese Peruvian Family in Lima For a long time, Peru was somewhere I was curious about. I’d heard mentions of it from my dad, though he didn’t like to talk much about his years living there before moving to the US.I’m half Japanese Peruvian. My dad was born in Lima, Peru;…
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When Abroad, Phone Home!
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Reality Hits It’s that time of the semester when there is increasing popularity of memes speaking to many students abroad who are slowly realizing that they still have academic responsibilities and are bracing themselves for the impending doom of neglecting them. The academics may be different from back home, but assignments, essays and exams still do exist on…
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Mi Familia Chilena: How I Found Home After Being Uprooted Abroad
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About a month and a half into my semester abroad, I had to switch host families for reasons beyond my control. While this experience was disorienting and stressful, in the end it turned out about as well as it could have, and it revealed a lot to me about the support network that IFSA-Butler cultivates…
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The Best of Two Continents – Cultivating Your Image Abroad
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Never in my wildest childhood dreams did I think that I’d pull a Hannah Montana and get The Best of Both Worlds– or in my case, the best of two continents. I’m not quite sure what I expected when I went abroad. Part of me had grasped the concept of starting a new- sort of -life, but I hadn’t…
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Unprecedented: Being the First but Not Last Generation Abroad.
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Who we are is a story that we tell ourselves. It is a sentiment I have heard reiterated by coaches, professors, and friends as a means of motivation. “You are strong if you believe yourself to be!” “You can do remarkable things if you believe that you are worthy and are capable of them!”One of…
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A Very Special Poya Day
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October 15th in Sri Lanka was more than just another Saturday: for me and my family it was Poya Day, it was my amma’s birthday, and it was a day full of bonding and fun! (Just for reference, “amma” means mom, “akka” means older sister, and “tatta” means dad in Sinhala – these are my…
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