Pour Some Sugar On Me! By which I mean in my coffee. Which I'm going to need to get through the morning: why your exchange student is so tired

It's been a long couple of weeks. Wonderful, and not especially physically taxing, but long.

 In high school, I became accustomed to the ever present exhaustion that is trying to get your life together and fix your GPA. No matter how much sleep you think you're getting every night--and my classmates can back me up on this--you're never fully rested and you're always ready for bed. I can't articulate why, but school is draining. Even through the ups and downs of my 4-5 years at Uni, though, one healthy habit never left me: when I got home, I was always able to catch twenty sum minutes of respite. It may not seem like a big deal, but even just twenty minutes away from school can give you the energy to get going and pick up where you left off.

When you're an exchange student, it's not like there's a lot of pressure on you to perform well in school. I mean, I've already graduated, so my grades don't matter. Most Rotary kids are in classes taught in the native languages of their countries, so they can't really be held responsible for not understanding. But, that doesn't mean exchange students aren't trying to understand and/or trying to learn. Our main task on arrival is to pick up the culture as fast as possible. Basically, it's our job to study the language, all day every day instead of math or history or biology.  As an exchange student in an immersion program, there's no twenty minute respite to get to. In our home countries, we can get away from school. As an exchange student, school doesn't really end. At least, not for the first few months. So, as an exchange student, I'm always tired.

It's important to note that being tired doesn't mean I'm not excited to be here! It doesn't mean I'm stressed even. It's just frustrating to want to know something so bad, to want to impress teachers and peers and host families with new sentences, in my case to prove that I'm not some American dependent on worldwide English fluency and that there's something in this head other than hot air. To want all of this and still know that only time and patience can give you language competency  is a game of mental red-light-green-light that I would not be sorry to see end.

With all of this in mind, I would just like to express how in awe I am of all the multilingual people I know. All the students here in Hungary that are able to switch from Hungarian to English and back again just for me; all the students I know in America who speak English with friends, something else at home, and study another foreign language in school; all the people who come to America not speaking English and teach themselves from TV and magazines and whatnot. I don't know how you do it. Forty-five minutes in my German class is enough to total me for the day. I understand some of the German, even less of the Hungarian, and sometimes students explain something to me in English. I don't answer questions much because what comes out of me is usually a jumbled mess of broken German grammar, inserted English words that I don't know in German, and then Hungarian apologies. As I like to say "Es tut mir leid! Ich habe zu viele Fremdsprache in mein Kopf!" But, it's worth being exhausted all the time, because everyday I can have a better conversation with the lunch ladies. Every day I can tell my host mom one more trivial thing about school. And, every day I'm a little less embarrassed of what I know.

So, basically, don't worry about your exchange student if they're tired! It's pretty normal. Coffee is always appreciated though, and so is sugar, because it's probably gonna be a long day.