Spring break took on new meaning for Jennifer Bly ’08 this year. She left her graduate work at the University of Maryland and headed off for a eight-month opportunity to teach and study in Uruguay courtesy of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program.

With only a couple weeks to prepare, life was a whirlwind for Jennifer. When she arrived in Uruguay, the excitement hadn’t waned and if her first few weeks are any indication, it won’t any time soon. “The excitement has still not worn off,” she said. “I don’t think it will, everyday seems to bring new excitement and new challenges.”

The thing she has enjoyed the most has been meeting the Uruguayans. “The most surprising thing I noticed when I arrived in Uruguay is that everyone greets you with one kiss. Here they pull you very close and give you a big kiss on your check — even someone they are meeting for the first time.

“They are some of the most friendly people I have ever met,” Jennifer said. Invitations are extended all the time to meet families, attend events, and visit in their homes. “They are very welcoming.” The welcome wasn’t limited to adults. Jennifer’s elementary students made posters, wrote her notes with hand-drawn pictures, and on her first day sang a song they learned in English for her.

Challenges start with teaching diverse levels of skills and abilities. Jennifer works a few hours in an elementary school teaching English and American culture to students in kindergarten to fifth grade, a few more teaching university students who want to be English teachers, and then some time spent on conducting research and taking her own classes.

“The challenge in teaching such an age range is the amount of preparation it takes to find appropriate material for so many different levels,” Jennifer said. “Talking about colors or body parts in English with the younger kids is age appropriate, but the older students need more challenging material, yet at the same time they aren’t able to understand very complex subjects in English.

“I had been teaching an oral communication course at Maryland,” Jennifer continued. “So I feel like I am very prepared to teach in this age range. Also, one of the courses I am helping with is linguistics, specifically in the analysis of discourse, which is very exciting to me.”

No matter what level she is teaching, Jennifer uses experiences from her own life to not only illustrate the subject but to explore the cultural differences between the two countries. “For Easter I told the kids about coloring Easter eggs and going on Easter egg hunts and they told me about their tradition of flying kites during Holy Week. For the university students I prepared a presentation about Pennsylvania emphasizing the beautiful snow we have in the winter and they told me about the hot springs they have in Salto where people go to relax.”

The sojourn in Uruguay is Jennifer’s fourth trip abroad and her first in South America. Her first experience was to Panama with a Global Expeditions mission trip the summer before her senior year in high school. She went to Spain as part of her study abroad experience while a student at Ship and she also earned a scholarship for the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education Honors Abroad Program to study the Renaissance in Europe.

Her interest in Latin America was the result of her trip to Panama. “Life was very different than I had known in the United States,” Jennifer said. “I wanted to know more.” This desire to learn was further fueled by her studies concerning globalization. “I realized political communication in this area of the world is very interesting to study because of its unique histories and budding democracies.”

While a member of the Honors Program at Ship, Jennifer was encouraged to apply for the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program. At that time she was hoping for a chance to teach English in Latin America. The Fulbright is awarded each year to about 800 scholars to lecture and conduct research in foreign countries. The Fulbright program is sponsored by the United States Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

The unexpected

A conversational speaker of Spanish, one of the unexpected things Jennifer ran into was understanding Uruguayan accents. For example, the “ll” which should sound like a “y” sound is pronounced as “sh” in the country and a “j” in the city. “It takes me a minute to process what they are saying and by the time I figure out that one word, they are already two sentences ahead,” Jennifer said. “I’m hoping I can adapt pretty quickly.”

Being south of the equator means the seasons are reversed, so while Jennifer left here in the spring, she arrived in autumn. At the time she returns, she will be leaving in the spring and arriving in autumn, having completely missed summer. It will be two years until she can experience summer fun in 2010, at least summer as Jennifer is used to. Autumn in Uruguay has been pretty warm, Jennifer reported.

Shortly Jennifer will be taking off for the second part of her Fulbright and living in Montevideo, the capital city of this small South American country. There she hopes she will be able to learn how to cook local dishes while continuing the excitement of teaching and learning at the same time.

Once back in the States, she will resume her graduate studies in rhetoric and political culture at the University of Maryland-College Park and share her South American experiences with her students there.

Jennifer reports she is blogging from Uruguay. Visit http://myfulbright.blogspot.com for the latest.

Uruguay welcomed Jennifer everywhere she went, from posters to learning a song in English for her and more. In the top photo, Jennifer is with some of her elementary school students. The next photo is of Maria Celis Da Rosa who is Jennifer’s mentor in Salto.