P.S.

The Cycle Continues. I stumbled into the hotel lobby at 3 a.m., exhausted yet oddly alert. I love to travel, even if it is across the country on what has become a grueling 11 (or longer!) hour trip with a long layover in Texas due to thunderstorms. But I am back in D.C., my adolescent home-away-from-home, and the site of where I began my Fulbright adventure last year. How much is the same, and how much has changed. The Fulbright should come with a warning label, another Fulbrighter joked once. "Warning: May change your life completely." It sounds glamorous and exciting, but sometimes it's just plain hard.

But that morning, at 3 a.m., I only felt excitement, eager to help prepare the new teacher group for their Mexico-US exchange year. Over the next day and a half, I attended sessions with the group, and told them as much as I could without overwhelming them. Looking back on the year, so much of what you need to know you need to be there to understand, and it is difficult to transmit the experience through words. I brought some visuals, which were helpful - posters Mexican colleagues had their students do for presentations, so the US teachers could see what their Mexican students were used to. Official documents I had had to turn in and get copied and signed in triplicate. My schedules, both the "official" version and the real version. Yes, that's actually how they were referred to by the administrator who gave them to me!

Best of all, my time with the 09-10 Fulbright group was capped with a trip back to Mexico, and on the flight from Chicago to Mexico City the program director and I sat together and talked the entire time like the good friends we have become. There were small reminders of how far I've come in my language skills- the airline attendant didn't know if I was a Mexican or US citizen. "US," I said. "Resident or citizen?" she asked for double clarification. It was a surreal moment. In Cuernavaca, I attended the quinceañera birthday party I had been invited to and spent a few days visiting friends and eating tacos al pastor, fresh mangos, and lots of tortillas.

A year abroad will change anyone. It'll make you re-evaluate what you want, what is important to you, and where you see yourself headed. Mexico no longer feels so far away, nor so exotically different. Working in another country makes you an active participant in a way being a student does not. Caution, the Fulbrght application should read. May make borders less permanent.