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Ferreira heads home with fond memories
Kurtis J. Wood/sports@qvpr.com
Felipe Ferreira didn’t have to change the colors of his wardrobe too much to fit in at Quincy High School.
Felipe Ferreira is leaving for his home country of Brazil today after spending the last nine months in Quincy as a foreign exchange student.
He has mixed feelings about leaving. He’s sad to leave the new friends he’s made in Quincy, but he’s also excited to return home to see his family and surround himself with familiar environs.
Plus, the World Cup is starting soon. And for Ferreira, there’s nowhere he’d rather be during the world’s largest sporting event than his home country.
“I’m really excited,” he said. “People in Brazil have parties during the World Cup and go out onto the streets to watch the games. It’s huge. Anybody will stop to watch the games. I think we have a good chance to win.”
Ferreira grew up in Uberlândia, the core city of the Brazilian region of Triângulo Mineiro in southeast Brazil. With a population of 622,441 as of 2008, the city is the second largest in the state of Minas Gerais.
Ferreira first thought of becoming an exchange student two years ago when he made his first trip to the United States.
“I went to Disneyworld in Florida,” he said. “I liked the United States and decided I wanted to study here.”
When he was told he would be coming to Quincy in August 2009, right before the start of the school year, Ferreira did some research and discovered he would have to make a lot of cultural adjustments.
“I come from a huge town,” he said. “The first time I came here, I was a bit surprised. I knew it was a small town, but there’s not much stuff to do (compared to home).”
He also had to make some adjustments at school.
“It’s really different,” he said. “My home town in Brazil has between 100 and 200 high schools by itself, and in high school there, students just study. They don’t play any sports or anything. When I first came here, my English wasn’t very good, and I didn’t know how to communicate. The teachers didn’t speak Portuguese.
“The first month here was hard because I missed my family and friends. But when people asked me things in English and I didn’t understand, sometimes they asked me again in Spanish, and that helped a lot.”
Ferreira had the support of his host family, Travis and Angel Kirk, and he was able to make friends fairly quickly.
“Jay Cedergreen was my first friend here,” he said. “His family accepted me real well. And the Kirks were amazing. They were great to stay with. In Brazil, it’s so big so you don’t really know anybody. Here you know everybody.
“The teachers were really good people. I didn’t expect that people would accept me so well. When I first came here, I was thinking one thing, and for me, it was so much better than I expected.”
Ferreira also engaged himself in a variety of extracurricular activities. He played on the QHS soccer team and participated in swimming as part of Eastmont High School’s co-op squad.
“I also had a chance to see snow, which we don’t have in Brazil,” he said. “I was expecting it to be really cold. I bought a huge coat.”
Ferreira is now done with secondary education; he participated in the QHS graduation ceremony last Friday. Now he’ll go back to Brazil and study to become a doctor.
He wants to eventually return to the United States.
“I want to come back here,” he said. “People talk about how great summers are. Maybe I’ll come back during the summer. I’d like to see my friends again. This has been a nice experience for me.”
