Out the Door

When did I become a wanderer? I attribute it to freshmen year of high school sitting in home room and watching the morning announcements. During Channel One a commercial came on for a foreign exchange student program, it showed some hip little kid with a backpack walking down a romantic dirt road in Italy. The song was B52's "Roam" if you want to, without wings, without wheels. I was sold. There's your proof advertising works. Although maybe not the way it's supposed to since that particular company was not the one I traveled with.
When I got home from school that day I quickly told my parents then I wanted to be a foreign exchange student. My dads typical discouraging remark was "good luck trying." I was an unhappy child, stuck in the small town small mind set of a po-dunk one dirt road intersection with a post office that was Sahuarita, my home town, although I usually claim to be from Tucson. With lack of diversity, there is not much room to be different, but I was, and I was ostracized for that. At least in my own head, which is the worse place for it to be. I didn’t wear Nike, I wore Converse. I didn’t shop at the mall, I preferred thrift stores. To hell with sports, I’d rather sit through a good play. I wasn’t Mexican, and I wasn’t a cowboy, there was no room for me there. This predicament can do dark things in the mind of an impressionable teenager, with all the angst and emotions that come along with it. I either had to kill myself or get the fuck out of dodge.
It was in this mind set, my sophomore year, that I sat through a particularly brutal English class, doodling nooses and ‘I want to die’ in my notebook. And wouldn’t that be the day i forgot my notebook in class. By time I had sprinted back three minutes later, my teacher had, upon opening the book to see whose it was, read it and took it to the school counselor. Who promptly called my mother and me in for a meeting.
It’s amazing that in hindsight we are able to see the seamless beauty of the universe pushing us down our path, and I’m glad my teacher took my notebook to the counselor, but at the time I despised them all. I sat there weeping, trying to name the reasons for my profound unhappiness, all of them petty, but all of them reaching the same conclusion, that I hated it here. I mentioned to the counselor the commercial I had about the foreign exchange, and she began to pull out catalogs of the various programs. My mom hemmed and hawed over the prices.
Then my counselor handed us a brochure on Rotary International. They are an international gentleman’s club. The scholarship essentially broke down like this: I would pay for my plane ticket and health insurance while I was there, Rotary would find me a family to live with and give me 200 markas (about 60 dollars) a month for discretionary spending. They would also provide variety of actives and trips to participate in, though some of the longer trips I would have to pay for. The first thing I had to do was contact my local rotary club, and ask for their sponsorship. My mom and I sat through interviews and went to meetings in order to gain it. After they approved me, they then had to place me with a rotary club oversees. I could vaguely request a country or area, but the choice of country was ultimately up to the club.
So I got a job at the local grocery store and started saving my money, I had to pay for my plane ticket and the health insurance. i eagerly waited my letter, telling me where I would be off to. I was ready for anything, everything, as long as it was something different. Then one day a package came, for me, from Finland. I was going to Lieto and little town ten minutes northeast of the third largest city Turku. Thus started my year, my travels, my passion, my life.