Homogany

As someone who has never traveled anywhere outside the United States, I had fantastic images of what I thought it would be like to live in Europe. For one, I always pictured the lifestyle in Europe to be vastly superior to that of my consumerist and, perhaps at times, superficial American existence. I thought that I was going to find a life that would be more culturally open and diverse. After all in Europe one travels a mere handful of hours before passing the boundaries, which separate extremely different worlds. I think that this was one of the main reasons that when I uncovered the monotony which was presented in Belgium, I was taken aback.

When I am faced with the task of describing my Belgian friends to people I find that it is nearly impossible to find things that distinguish the majority of them. For example, almost all of the girls that I know at my school wear their long with bangs that start almost on the other side of their face and swoop across to the other side. They are about all the same height, the same body type, with the same kinds of clothes. A very popular style here is an all black wardrobe with large woolen scarves knit into circles. Let's just say that my large lumberjack plaid coat, bright green converse, and jeans stand out a mile away screaming "AMERICAN." In my first host home, I ate the same thing for breakfast every single day for five months. In my new home, I find that it is the exact same meal. Everything about my life in Belgium is the same everyday. There are certainly benefits to living this way. It is not as though it is not comfortable, it only lacks a space for change and sometimes for different ways of being.

One of the things that I must not have realized in the United States was the huge amount of diversity that it provides. There are countless opportunities to do a large variety of activities and have a large number of experiences. In addition one of the benefits of living in the United States is that one can change their way of life at any point in time. For example, one of the things that my new host family commented on the first night I came to live with them, is that in America, one can truly turn from rags to riches whereas in Belgium that kind of thing is much more rare. In addition, the way that people live varies greatly. My parents have been happily married for quite some time, I have a great relationship with my brother, and am a good student. One could say that I live a classic middle class lifestyle. However, I have friends who live both above and below my standard of living. At school one can find a wide variety of clothing styles and a bigger focus of being an "individual." Small or large things that make a person different are more desired, even if that means that a person will not be "just like everyone else."

Vive la vie, la vie est belle

Yesterday I came home from a spiritual retreat with my school. We spent three days in a castle named the Diglette in the town of Saint Hubert Belgium. It is part of the required activities of the rhéto year. Every rhéto class in my school took a trip together to build and strengthen the relationship between the students and to uncover parts of yourself that we otherwise hidden. As I believe I have previously mentioned my school in Belgium is composed of several "classes" mine being 6B. At first I was extremely hesitant to embark on this "journey of discovery" due to my lack of connection to the students of my class and the complete three day period of isolation where I was told we would be doing a lot of praying. In reality it was a wonderful retreat and it succeeded in helping me personally to feel a stronger connection to the group of students I see every day.

There were several parts of this retreat that were particularly note worthy. The first would be the level of engagement that a large part of the class had in the discussions that we lead or proposed by the spiritual leader. It has been my experience in my own country that when the students are presented with situations like the one we were in, that they are much more resistant to expressing their true emotions and being frank and honest with the material. However, each time I engaged in a discussion with someone or simply listened to the conversations that were being held, I found that everyone was immensely reflective, thoughtful and honest with their responses despite the delicate nature of some of the topics. One instance in particular was when we divided into groups to talk about our families. I discovered that I am really fortunate to have the kind of family life that I do in the United States because almost everyone in my group had the exact opposite. While they were open amongst their peers, it appears that for the most part they are much more cautious with sharing information with their families. On the contrary I have the opposite and have a large number of American friends who have the same experience as myself. In addition I found that here I know many more people who have divorced parents. This came as a surprise to me because I know that the divorce statistic in America is 50% of all first marriages ends in divorce, whereas I was unaware that the statistic in Belgium was almost as high with 44% of first marriages ending in divorce. By these statistics one would assume that I know more people who are divorced, but I think that because the United States is so large and the number of people are divorced vary with regions and sizes of the cities, where as Belgium is smaller. The population simply lives closer together.
 

Overall it was a wonderful retreat where I was able to find the opportunity to speak to the students of my class that I had not dared to speak to before. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it had an strong impact in a way that I didn't think that it could. Thanks to Père Gilson et la Diglette. Vive la vie, la vie est belle <3