Back in 1987, which feels like both yesterday and another lifetime altogether, I spent a year abroad in Belgium as a foreign exchange student. Something took hold of me a few years before, when I was pretty deeply entrenched in teen angst and rebellion, a wanderlust that I have been unable to shake even to this day. I had always been one of those people who wanted to be somewhere else, live a different life, experience something entirely new. How many middle schoolers beg their mothers to move to another city? Well that was me, and by 15 I had just enough French under my belt at school to know that I was wired for languages---I wanted to travel the globe. Belgium was my first taste of the expatriate experience. It was both a transformational trial by fire and a gift. Belgium stripped away my persona and its costume and left me to search for true identity and meaning.
Here is what I love the most about the interweb. I have started to craft a memoir about my year in Belgium, and I can look up pictures to jog my memory. This is Tavier, the first village I lived in. How far away from high desert Nevada could you get? Within the first few days, I had already attended a wedding reception inside the walls of a centuries old dairy and eaten Saturday supper with a group of the villagers. It was an amazing year. My sister joked that I am trying to single-handedly destroy the foreign exchange program when I told her a couple of the things that happened to me that year. I guess it's weird that there are things I've never told anyone--not her, not my parents or my husband even. As I think about it, I believe that I returned home so entirely different that I had to work really hard to pretend I was still the same. But I never was. I was totally "Exchanged".
