OVERSEAS BRIEFING

Author: ANNA SPENCER

MONTEVIDEO, URUGUAY - Being abroad has changed my perception of home - again. My first change of perception came when I moved out of my parents' house and into Stewart Hall my first year. Suddenly "home" became my dorm room and where I went over Winter Break was my parents' house. Of course, I'd never tell my mom that. It'd break her heart. But now that I am about a third of the way around the world from both Middlebury and where my parents live, "home" has taken on a broader meaning. "Home" is where it is easy to find peanut butter and normal to eat it in a sandwich with jelly. "Home" is where I am not a foot taller than every other person on the sidewalk. "Home" is where people politely ignore strange accents. "Home" is where I am not.

Here, I blend in well enough on the surface. Uruguay is a country of immigrants largely from Italy and I am of Italian descent. My great-grandmother, or was it great-great-grandmother, immigrated to Utah from Italy. (North Italy, she would hasten to remind you. She was not related to the Mafia in any way.) I have the correct brown hair and the correct skin tone, but my eyes are claros, meaning "not-brown." That's the first clue I am not from Montevideo. The second is a bit more obvious and one I cannot hide by wearing dark sunglasses all the time - my accent.

Two days ago, I was leaving the National Library after spending several hours studying in its cave-like reading room, anxious to get home, when a man asked me for the time. What ensued was a 45-minute conversation that began with "No sos de acá. ¿De dónde sos?" ("You're not from here. Where are you from?") He continued on to discuss the storms in New Orleans, the wrath of God, according to that particular literature professor, the fall of the Twin Towers (also God), Mormons, Iraq, peanut butter, Texas, the Civil War - and would have continued for another 45 minutes if I had not suddenly remembered I had to get home to my, um, very sick, um, grandmother.

I have been to New Orleans once in my life and yet here I am considered an expert on the subject. "Home" has expanded to include the entire United States. "Home" includes Louisiana, Texas and Utah and all those parts of the United States that I used to consider so different from my small Boston suburb. I still do consider the different regions to be distinct, but there are certain things that tie them together. Things like our common language, our common government and our political disagreements, grilled cheese sandwiches, Hershey's chocolate - little things and big things that make up the United States. The United States: land of the mostly free and sometimes brave, the fascination of Montevideans, "home."