Some very impressive Humphrey Fellows and me.

Some very impressive Humphrey Fellows and me.

It is a long way between meeting someone for the first time and marrying him.

I saw my future husband for the second time early the next morning as I collected the entire group of Humphrey Fellows to escort them to their welcome meeting.  As an international studies major, I was in quite the fan-girl tizzy over the Humphrey Fellows, specifically the Fellow from Bhutan.  There are only about 700,000 Bhutanese in the world, and I was going to work with one!  I’d been bringing her up in conversation regularly for months in an effort to compete with my roommate’s stories from her internship on Capitol Hill.

On that typically humid August morning, I found my Brazilian waiting in the dorm lobby next to the Fellow from Kenya.  We chatted as the others slowly trickled down.  There was a lot of hand shaking and slow pronouncing of names, my own name included.  “It’s pronounced like Lynn, except with a Br instead of an L.”  “No, it’s not a boy’s name.  That’s Bryan, with an A.”  “No, I don’t think my parents knew my name would be unpronounceable to, apparently, the entire world.”

Orientation for an international exchange program is probably the most emotionally exhaustive thing a person can go through that doesn’t involve a birth, a death, or a space suit.  A person is expected to navigate a new place, new culture, possibly a new language, and new people, all while jet lagged and in some amount of digestive distress from new food.  It’s not a vacation.  There’s no sleeping in.  I met the Fellows in the lobby at 8:45am for a welcome meeting that started at 9 sharp, and from that moment on for the next two weeks, it was a race to get them registered for classes, bank accounts, cell phones, and long-term housing before fall semester began.

Our Fellows had an added emotional blow as they went from being up and coming stars of their respective professions to nobody.

Welcome to Washington DC!  It has the highest concentration of PhDs, law degrees and self-esteem per capita of any city in the world.  You are now officially unimpressive.  You will not have maids.  You will not have secretaries.  If you don’t know how to send an email or cook, well…we can teach you how to email.  Try not to starve.

Undergrads who study abroad don’t have these problems.  They haven’t been on their own long enough to be embarrassed by dependency.  The Humphrey Fellows however ranged in age from 35 to 50.  They arrived for their year in Washington with impressive CVs and very fragile egos.  Working with them taught me how to explain what to do with used toilet paper without sounding condescending.

Culture shock and a complete lack of family and friends explain why I, at 22 with the ink still drying on my diploma, was treated by the Fellows as an equal.  Nobody asked me to get their coffee.  They asked me to explain the online course registration.  They asked me to listen as they cried over how much they missed their kids.  They asked me to explain the endless variety of milk in grocery stores.  At that moment in their lives, they needed an insiders guide to Americans.  I was an American with a embarrassingly fortuitously empty social calendar and that huge fan-girl crush on them.  I became the group’s cultural wingman.

I started hanging out with the Fellows on weekends.  We went to a coffee shop at Dupont Circle for s’mores.  We hit some bars in Adams Morgan and tried out an Ethiopian restaurant for lunch.  The group changed depending on who had a paper due or a bad case of culture shock, except for one member: the Brazilian.  In my memories he’s always there.  Always up for anything.  Usually available for lunch.  He’d rented a basement apartment close to where I lived, and we often ran into each other on the shuttle heading to and from campus.

But I was so hung up on his resume and the sixteen year age difference, I never imagined he actually thought of me as a fellow adult.  I was sure the Brazilian, like the other Fellows, was being incredibly polite to someone helping him.  When he paid close attention as I took him through every picture from my semester in India, I must have subconsciously chalked it up to good manners because I would never, NEVER, have brought a photo album to lunch with someone I actually hoped to date.

About a month after orientation, the Korean Fellow invited everyone to his apartment for dinner.  I clearly remember a few wonderful minutes in the kitchen as the Brazilian taught me how to make caipirinhas and I tried one.  I blamed my flushed cheeks on the cachaça.  Later a group of us took the subway home.  It was several blocks to the metro station, and the temperature had dropped changing my sandals from cute to extremely impractical.  My toes were slowly freezing and I probably would have lost a few, if the Brazilian hadn’t stopped, taken off his shoes, and handed me his socks.  He gave me the socks off his feet.

And I still didn’t see the first kiss coming.  But that night deserves its own story.