In 1966, my father told me about an offer for a Rotary Club scholarship in the United States open to children of Rotarians. I applied and obtained it. I had to freshen up my English after a hopeless year at the British Institute while I was at the Journalism school. I took six months of American English and they told me I knew enough vocabulary to pass the GRE.

The flight to the States on Pan AM was very long at that time, (18 hours) and it required a stop in Buenos Aires and then in Panama. It was September 1967 (still cold in Chile in spite of being Spring time) and I was wearing a wool suit, nylons and a girdle. When we stopped in Panama and the flight attendant opened the back door of the plane for us to deplane, I thought I had died and arrived in hell. In less than two seconds, I discovered that women can also perspire on their chest. It had never happened in the wonderful climate of Chile. Desperate, I found a restroom at the airport and took off my girdle and nylons and, of course, the long slip. What a relief it was to be liberated from that oppression! (I could not suspect then that I was going to feel the same way about my spirit later in my life!) Then, I found a decent looking folkloric Caribbean-style dress and a big tote bag, and back to the restroom I went to change. I had a hard time folding and fitting my wool suit in the large tote bag.

In Miami, I was greeted by a couple who took me to their home to spend the night. They were volunteers that did this good deed for foreign students. I never learned why. Although now I suspect they were Baptists. Next morning, I was taken by a Greyhound bus to Atlanta Georgia. On the road to the couple’s home, which seemed really far from the airport, I let them know that I had forgotten my toothpaste in Chile and needed to buy toothpaste. So they stopped at a Seven Eleven and waited for me in the car.

Of course, I had never been in a store without an attendant behind a counter who would get you what you needed. I wandered from aisle to aisle, not knowing where to look for toothpaste. In one of my turns, I saw coming toward me what looked like a very loud colored mountain. It was a woman with rollers on her head and dressed with a hardly visible purple short that showed her legs. Each leg was about eight times the size of mine in height and circumference. She was also wearing a sleeveless neon lime top that showed her big, black three rolls stomach. She said something to me but I did not understand a word, so I rapidly escaped to the next aisle. I finally found a small toothpaste tube.

When I went to pay for it the Arab-looking attendant said something I could not understand either. At least, he accepted the bill I gave him, and I went back to the car with some change in my pocket.

Then the couple told me they wanted me to meet her newborn granddaughter and drove to a very small house in what years later I recognized as Hollywood, Fl. An extremely young couple greeted us. A baby, no more than days old, was lying on a carrier on top of the dining table. The young father was feeding her with a spoon. I almost fainted. No bottle? A spoon that came back and forth from a tiny jar labeled with a baby. The tiny baby was very red and desperately trying to do something with all the paste that was coming nonstop.

Nobody seemed to worry and I could not take my eyes off this baby that I was sure was going to die by asphyxiation. I could see the titles on the newspaper the next day: Baby drowned by food given by her inexperienced father age 15.

Later I wrote about this poor baby to my mother and her letter back said she was also scandalized.

Next morning I was taken to the Greyhound station. I was careful in pronouncing: “One ticket for Atlanta.” The cashier looked at me and said: Did you say Alanaa? I was prepared so I took my pen and paper and wrote Atlanta, Georgia. She smiled and gave me a one way ticket.

That night at a cheap hotel in Atlanta I was introduced to Carol Burnet by the TV. She would never know how much I owe her. Between her shows and watching the news, both in Spanish and English, I learned much more Southern American English than in any course I took at the English Institutes in Chile. However, at the American Institute in Chile, they had told me that I knew enough English to take the GRE. I did. I passed the TEOFL and the GRE with pretty good scores.

However at the University of Georgia, I was sent to English as Second Language classes to learn how not to say “I have problems with my bowels” and say instead “I have problems with my vowels.” It is still difficult.

In those classes, I met a student from Pakistan who was very eager to know and very relieved to learn that I was not interested in marring him. So he invited me to go with him to the “Homecoming”. I did not know who was coming home, but I was interested in learning since I was continuing my studies in journalism.

I asked the girls at the dorm and they told me that Homecoming was a football game. So I put on my jeans and a pullover and waited for the Pakistani guy. He came in a three-piece suit and sent me back to my room to change into a formal dress and a hat. The girls at the dorm didn’t tell me that I was supposed to dress elegant for a football game! At the game, all the boys got drunk and sick with beer. I guess they spent much money before the next Homecoming sending their suits to the dry cleaners.

All my professors used two-pieces suits and ties. One of them, the one teaching a course in radio journalism, had a pretty good scare from me because of his tie. I encountered him in a classroom building hall and tried to explain to him that it was of no purpose for me to memorize all the call letters of the radio and TV stations in the US since I was from Chile and I was going back to my country with no intentions of working on the radio in the US. We did not have so many stations in Chile to start with and did not use those names and call letters. As I talked to him, I was getting closer, keeping the proper Latin America space between us, which is about an elbow-length, but he was going back in the hall, keeping the proper US distance, which is about a arms-length. I was so nervous with this maneuver that without thinking twice, I grabbed his tie and immobilized him. He was terrified and agreed with everything I said, of course.