Oona Vitikainen

2008-09 Inbound from Finland

Hometown: Hollola, Finland

Sponsor: Lahti-Joutjärvi Rotary Club, District 1390, Finland

Host: Miramar-Pembroke Pines Rotary Club, District 6990, Florida, USA

School: Western High School, Davie, FL

Bio

Oona's Bio

Hi! My name is Oona, I'm 16 years old and I'm from the land of thousands of lakes, sauna, black rye-bread and salt liquorice candies called “salmiakki”, Santa Claus, white and freezing winter, Nokia cell phones, and the world's tastiest chocolate (okay okay, we all know that the best chocolate comes from Switzerland, but ours is not bad either J). And just to make sure you haven’t got anything wrong, I must tell you that no, we do not drive polar bears to school and no, heavy metal is not our traditional music genre.

Finland is a beautiful country in North Europe. I live in a small town called Hollola with my mom, dad, and two years younger baby sister, but my life considers more in a bigger city Lahti, that is next to my hometown.

There are only 5 million people in a huuuuuuge territory in Finland so we have lot of clean, untouched environment with weird wildlife. Nature is very close to Finnish people’s hearts and we spend lot of time outdoors. In my country, I’m used to walking EVERYWHERE, so for me it takes a little time to get used to the fact that here in the US, it's just impossible to go somewhere by foot..

I am very outgoing and independent person so my life is very hectic and I'm always going or coming from somewhere. I am a cheerleader (but! we don’t cheer for any team, we do hard trainings and we practice our routines for competitions) and I'm also coaching a cheerleading team. Coaching takes lot of my spare time but the girls in my team are well motivated and incredibly talented so I really enjoy coaching them!

I love to try different things, challenge myself, and rush into new adventures. Being an exchange student wasn’t just one of my many ideas, not at all, it has been my dream as long as I can remember. Since my first school years in elementary school, I’ve been telling my parents that when I'm old enough, I will do the exchange. And here I am! Finally!

I am enjoying every second of my new life here in Florida. My home is in Weston, 40 minutes from Miami. I really like the city and my community, but the best thing here is absolutely my new family! They are amazing! From the first moments, I’ve been feeling very welcome and part of their family. My host brother and his girlfriend were both last year as exchange students in Finland, so at home I have always somebody to talk Finnish with and someone who knows exactly what I mean when I'm talking about either well-working public transport, “mustamakkara” or Finnish people. I'm so lucky!

October 6 Journal

My adventure started 9th of August, when I arrived to Miami after 14 hours of flying. At the airport I got warm welcome from my new mom, former exchange student who stayed in my host family couple years ago, my host “sister-in-law” who was outbound student in Finland last year, Rotarian Roy and inbound student Marzen from Poland. I was so tired and confused, but also extremely happy to finally be here. And after that, the time has flied super fast!!

My host family is from Colombia and our house is full of Spanish and music. When I arrived here two months ago, I didn't know a word in Spanish, but now I’ve started to learn more and more everyday and I'm very excited about that! I wish I knew more and I'm really doing my best to improve my Spanish skills. My family is very motivating and they help me a lot with learning Spanish. I feel very lucky to be part of this family!

I am attending Western High School in Davie. The yellow school bus picks me up at 6:30 every morning, which is a new experience for me because we don’t have school buses and I’ve never had to wake up that early for school in Finland. Couple first weeks it was very hard to get up, but now I'm already used to it. In the first semester I have English “for foreigners”: the only subject that I'm having with Gabriel (inbound student from Brazil), Spanish, math and drama. The drama class is so much fun! I’ve met a lot of nice people there, everybody is very friendly, helpful and interested in my country and language. I’ve been teaching a little Finnish to my friends, maybe after this year they can talk as fluent Finnish as I do ?? That’s my goal! I’ve got some very good friends from school and I’m very happy to live with a good family who let me go out and spend time with them. Also my friends try their best to help me improving my yet-not-so-great Spanish skills. I hope during the year I could have actual conversations in that language! I'm so excited!

One of the greatest things about Rotary Exchange is that we had an opportunity to get know all the other exchange students in Florida during the first month we were here. We had orientation weekend with almost seventy exchange students from all over the world, and that was truly one of the unforgettable times in my life! Everyone was so nice and warm persons, no matter what part of the world you are (except Jeppe hates me ‘cos I'm from Finland J ..just kidding ), what color skin you have, what language you speak or what do you believe in. I got very good friends from that weekend that I'm sure will last for the lifetime. I really miss all the exchange students and I can’t wait to see everybody again in Disney World!

Of course after that weekend I’ve met exchange students from our 6990 district (the best district in the world, but don’t tell anybody) and they’ve become very good friends of mine, I love them. It’s hard to explain our relationships but because we all are going through the same things, we know how each other feels. I think it’s healthy to have also exchange student friends, so you know you’re not weird if you haven’t missed your country at all and the next day you feel like you miss every single little thing from there and the day after that you don't miss anything.

Even though I’ve been here almost two months, sometimes it’s still hard to believe that my dream to be an exchange student has finally come true. I can’t describe how grateful I am for this opportunity that has been given to me. I want to thank ALL the people that had been somehow involved in making not only my, but all the inbound and outbound students' dreams real. Rotarians theme for this year is “make dreams real” and for us, that’s exactly what they have done. Thank you.