Staying Humble in Uruguay
By Evan Schaffer, University of Pennsylvania '27
June 24, 2024
If there’s one thing I learned during my jam-packed first week in Uruguay, it’s the value of being humble when working in a foreign country.
The Ollas del Mundo food festival at the Espacio Modelo in Montevideo
I like to have everything under control. But when I arrived in Montevideo two weeks ago, struggling to recall the Spanish terms for airport security, I wasn’t in control. When I impatiently boarded the 522 bus to Pocitos instead of the 149 because I didn’t trust Google Maps, I wasn’t in control. And when I was getting lunch from a corner store on Calle Colonia and I anxiously (and accidentally) ordered a well-done steak, I definitely wasn’t in control.
Gnawing on that overcooked chunk of meat made me realize something: I needed to admit to myself that I had no idea what was going on, and that was okay.
It turned out that being embarrassingly non-fluent in Spanish was the best thing that could have happened to me. Once I got my ego out of the way, I really started enjoying my time down south—taking advantage of all that Uruguay has to offer.
I rode an elevator to the top of a government building to see the Montevideo skyline. I took a spontaneous long-distance trip to my company’s steel factory in Punta del Este—Uruguay’s Miami—in the middle of the week. I helped fix a steel roll-forming machine by translating between Spanish, English, and Chinese. I learned about scaling up a small industrial company—the high-cost, high-reward nature of capital investments. I tried wild boar stew in the beautiful winter countryside, learned the rules for Uruguayan “mate” tea, and had confidently non-fluent Spanish conversations with my homestay family about everything from Uruguayan slang to geopolitical anxiety.
This newfound humility also made me more outgoing—after my workday at the coworking office, I’m usually hanging out with the other GRIP interns. Last week, we strolled through a couple of food markets, watched the sunset on the beach, checked out a local steakhouse, and explored the Prado botanical gardens. We found the only authentic Chinese restaurant in the city and met Taiwanese Uruguayos, talking about life stories in three languages at a time. Yesterday, we were guests at a local English school and made international friends joking about how the US eats dinner four hours earlier than Uruguay. I even joined some Princeton students at a Spanish-speaking church last Sunday—it was unbelievable meeting so many people with the Uruguayan kiss-on-the-cheek greeting and singing Spanish worship songs together.
I applied to GRIP primarily for the work experience but discovered so much more. Soon, we’ll be traveling to Colonia, a UNESCO world heritage historical town. Then we’re volunteering with a house-building nonprofit, taking the ferry to Buenos Aires and Brazil’s Iguazú Falls, learning how to play the candombe drums, checking out countless museums, and even more.
My Spanish still isn’t perfect, but that’s less of a problem and more of an opportunity for me. An internship abroad is all about getting out of your comfort zone, and I’m more than thankful for it.