Simone Rose Akgulian was really rolling the dice when she signed on to participate in a Rotary International youth exchange program. Of the long list of countries she submitted, she knew it was unlikely she’d be sent to her top choice. In fact, she was told not to put down any place in her top 15 choices that she wouldn’t be completely willing to visit.
This was a problem in itself because Akgulian wasn’t even sure which continent she most wanted to live on. She was torn between Northern Europe, where she lived for a while as a child while her mother taught primary school on a Fulbright grant, and South America, where she hoped to learn Spanish.
In the end, she got neither Europe nor Spanish. Akgulian was placed in a tiny, remote village called Mineiros in rural Brazil, which seemed to the 17-year-old to be light years away from any other civilization.
“I was so sublimely scared,” Akgulian said, in an interview the day after she returned from her yearlong excursion to South America last week. “It’s undeveloped Brazil.”
That much was clear just driving into the place. Hours from the nearest international airport, Mineiros is a town of a little less than 50,000 residents, according to the most recent census data. And it’s surrounded by not much more than raw nature.
“You literally have the city and that’s it. There’s nothing around it,” Akgulian said. “It’s a very small farm town in the middle of nowhere.”
But appearances were deceiving, and before long, her fear turned to wonder and affection for her temporary home, and the lifelong friendships she developed there.
Akgulian always knew she’d spend time living in another country, and she decided high school would be as good a time as any to do it. She came across a Rotary International program that would allow her to spend a year studying in a foreign country, living with host families. The application project was intensive, but Akgulian was accepted. Following her sophomore year at Oak Park and River Forest High School, she left Oak Park in August of 2010 to spend her junior year abroad.
It took some time to adjust to Mineiros. The weather was one of the first great hurdles. During the dry season, the strong, bright sunshine caused nightly headaches, and the intense heat left her feeling fatigued. But once she got used to it, she welcomed the sun. After a rainy spell during the wet season, she was all too happy to welcome back the blazing heat.
“At the end, it made me feel energized,” she said of the weather.
Akgulian lived with three different host families during her 10-month stay and eventually befriended the locals with whom she attended school. That, too, required a period of adjustment.
One host family consisted of a farmer and his schoolteacher wife, who owned another home at a remote farm hours away. They took Akgulian for overnight visits to the farm, which meant a long ride down a bumpy dirt road in a truck. The property itself didn’t have electricity or running water. Bats flew around at night — inside. The remote town of Mineiros seemed luxurious by comparison.
“I have never called myself high maintenance, but then I went to this farm and saw what the definition of low maintenance is,” Akgulian said.
It was challenging to make new friends in her town, especially because her classmates had divided off into rigid cliques. But the schoolwork was a relief from the rigorous work expected of OPRF students.
“I wasn’t expected, nor did they want me to, study the way I do in the United States,” she said. Sharing answers between classmates was the norm, and kids often went to Akgulian for help with English. Eventually, she said, she began to fit in.
Some things were simply lost in translation. At first, Akgulian was thrown by the unusual ways her new classmates treated her, but eventually realized it was only harmless teasing.
“I didn’t understand that at first,” she said. By the end of the year, the students gathered for regular barbecues after Saturday morning school exams.
Akgulian now wears a friendship ring, engraved with the initials of her two closest girlfriends, and back in Brazil, the two girls have similar jewelry. Around her neck is a pendant from another close friend.
“I’m really happy to say I made some really deep friendships,” said Akgulian.
It’s something she didn’t expect at the beginning of her trip, when all she knew was that she’d be taking her laid-back, liberal mentality to a more conservative, religious, rural Brazilian village. But she soon learned that true open-mindedness comes from embracing even those viewpoints that vary deeply from your own.
“You have to be tolerant of everybody,” she said. “That’s what true tolerance is.”
The day after her long journey home, which included hours-long drives and airport layovers, not to mention the plane rides themselves, Akgulian wore an homage to her foster country in an unusual place; on her fingernails. She returned from Brazil with a colorful manicure of tiny green, yellow, and blue Brazilian flags. It’s one of the things she’ll miss about the country; the fact that it was so affordable, and commonplace, for women to pamper themselves. In fact, she became quite used to her weekly manicures and other luxuries, like eyebrow shaping. She said her manicurist cried when she said goodbye.
But there were things she sorely missed about the U.S. and looked forward to upon her return. Starbucks coffee was a major one. Akgulian jumped at the chance to grab a cup when she landed in the States. But not everything is as perfect as memory makes it out to be.
“You know what? If was the worst cup of coffee I’ve ever had,” she laughed.