A short course in cultural sensitivity from an exchange student

Time alarm clock went off: 5:55 (very good), Time got out of bed: 6:30 (don’t ask how this happened), Minutes spent eating breakfast: 5, Minutes spent running around finding binders, pens, pencils, calculators, a notebook that I really didn’t need but wanted to find: 4.
Sirush Khalatyan, 16, brown hair long and curling, eyes dark, lives in Sonoma, California, USA. She hasn’t lived here forever and she’s already almost halfway through her stay. She’s an exchange student, a girl on the adventure of a lifetime. To get here, she passed five exams written in English—alien compared to her native Russian—studied late, woke up early, set her heart on something and caught it. Her home, Armenia, is a world away. It’s nestled in Western Asia, tight between Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Iran. There are mountains where Sirush comes from, forests. It’s white in the winter, red, orange, yellow in the fall, green in the spring. “Here in California, it’s dry in the summer,” she says. “In Armenia, it’s green.” She smiles to herself, playing with her hands, thinking of home, friends, family? “Sometimes I miss everything,” she says. And then she laughs, contagious. It makes me want to laugh too. “There is different food in Armenia. I don’t eat cheese here. Cheese in Armenia is different.” I wonder what the cheese in Armenia tastes like, wonder if I’ll ever get the chance to try it, a chance to see those green summers, white winters.
I ask her how Americans are different from Armenians, thinking she’ll say we’re more outgoing, louder. Her answer surprises me, even though it shouldn’t. “It depends on the person, their personality,” she says. “Not all Americans are the same, not all Armenians are the same. People are all different.” I realize suddenly how blind I’m being. I want to point and laugh at myself, knock some sense into my head. Of course people can’t be tagged by their nationality, can’t all be clumped into shyness, politeness, beauty, weight, shape, form because that’s all relative. It’s based on who you are and how you see these things. I’m ashamed of myself and I blush. We’re all people. We’re all different, like jellybeans tossed in a bag, I feel like shouting, but that might cause stares, raised eyebrows, snickers, so I don’t. I move past my long overdue revelation, on to what is next.
Sirush isn’t sure what her favorite thing about America is. She likes many things—sports, school (it isn’t as demanding here as it is in Armenia), holidays. She thinks Thanksgiving is a good holiday because family gathers, distant people called relatives group together for a few days, rediscovering each other, realizing that love endures miles and oceans and years.
“I give advice to other kids to study abroad. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but fun,” she says. Offhand, she tells me she’s started dreaming in English. My eyes widen. My mouth drops. Imagine, dreaming in an entirely new, foreign language. Sirush, 16, exchange student from Armenia is, no doubt, a lucky girl.