Imagine all the confusion, akwardness and out-of-placeness of a foreign exchange stay. Picture living with a strange family you can’t talk to in a strange place eating strange food (my first meal was porcupine…one of my first French phrases as “Excuse me, what kind of meat is this?”).
Now picture knowing you absolutly have to learn a foreign language well enough to teach computer classes in it in the course of ten weeks. This means six days a week on intense, often one-on-one language training from dawn till dusk, with only classes on teaching to break the monotony. I have no gift for languages, and it was probably the first thing I’ve ever tried to do that I havn’t been naturally good at. I worked my ass off, was scared to death I wasn’t going to make it.
Now picture you have to start teaching surly high school kids (having never taught before) after only a few weeks. First year teachers have a hard enough time in America. We had to learn teaching from scratch in classroom conditions that make the worst American high school look like a palace.
Finally, place this all in Africa. It’s hot. There are bouts of dysentary and malaria. Everyone yells “Hey white girl” every time you go outside. You have learn stuff like how to take motorcycle taxis and how to reject about one million marriage proposals a day. There are no Doritos. There are no movie theaters. Your only comfort is crappy beer and the company of training volunteers who are just as out of it as you are.
Worth every moment. But no doubt the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
PS The kid in that bad homestay story is a lightweight. The last group of volunteers training here had three guys who lost between 40 and 80 pounds in their ten week homestays. The diet here can be pretty meager at times, but these guys had plenty of money to fill up on street snacks and beer. Sickness, change in apetites, etc. can do that to you. Anyway, street food in Egypt is dirt cheap. He could have eaten like a king (though granted probably not the pricey imported food he could find in supermarkets…which he felt compelled to steal) for pennies a day. He’s just one of those people who didn’t take to living abroad (and there are plenty) and was looking for someone else to blame.
Like Dinsdale, it wouldn’t be the death of my dad - he had been sick for awhile so we kind of knew it was coming. And I had a great support system. Probably the hardest thing was give up my daughter for adoption.
One thing that sticks out for me was putting Queen Bruin on the bus for her first visitation to her dad after we had separated. I knew it was a mistake, but I had to do it. (He tried very hard to keep her from returning. He lost. Badly.)
His father was dying. We knew that. We’d come home from running errands and he was laying down for a nap. His sister called and asked to speak to him, and I knew why she was calling. I tried to stall by saying, “He’s sleeping now” but she very quietly said “You need to wake him up.”
Second was making the decision to put our German shepherd down. I’m standing against the wall, tears running down my face, while the vet is explaining what’s happening to him. Ivylad has agreed it’s time, and has turned to me for confirmation. I knew the second I nodded the line would be crossed…I’ve never found it so difficult to bob my head up and down.
Hardest thing I’ve ever done was be an exchange student for a year. For all the reasons others have posted.
Hardest thing physically was a bike tour from Berkeley CA to Boulder CO when I was about 21. We ended up hitchhiking through most of Nevada due to below-freezing temps at night, but still, it was about a thousand miles altogether. I’d do it again in a heartbeat though. It was a fantastic experience.
Yep, me too. It didn’t help that my professor was a complete and total psychopath.
It was FIVE years before I could even LOOK at my dissertation.
I realize (and maybe Creaky agrees) that as bad as Grad school was, it of course pales in comparison to mourning a loved one, etc…
And it may sound like a hard thing to do to other Dopers, but kicking him to the curb was pretty easy.
The hardest thing I did was similar to River Hippie, only a neighborhood kitten had been mauled by a dog (I live in the sticks, where this sort of thing isn’t entirely uncommon). I wish I had had the balls to shoot her; I opted to suffocate her. Suffocation takes longer than I thought it would. All I knew was I couldn’t let the poor thing continue screaming in my yard and dragging its broken body behind it. I cried the whole time and asked forgiveness.
Holding my 2-1/2 week old premature daughter in my arms as they took her off the breathing machine as she passed away.
Then doing the same thing 2 days later with her twin sister.
It sucked, sucked, sucked big time.
My first semester of college was the most difficult period of my life. Not because of the usual transitioning to college stuff, though. The day after I graduated high school my family moved 110 miles away to live with my great-grandmother who had Alzheimer’s. Her personality changed to be increasingly evil and extraordinarily difficult to live with because you’re not supposed to want to hurt elderly people - but when they laugh over their own son’s obituary just after his funeral or give your mom a concussion, you do want to. At the same time a friend I’d known since the end of 5th grade convinced me to room together in college. It very quickly killed our friendship. She later confessed to doing things to purposely upset me.
So there I was, trying to adapt to the whole college thing, and unable to bear to go home because that meant dealing with my crazy evil great-grandmother, and unhappy to stay on campus because of my dissolving friendship with my roommate. There was no place to escape from people making me miserable. Eventually my roommate moved back home and commuted to college which she probably should have done all along - one of our biggest issues was having her family over in our tiny cramped room 5 days a week - and I finally felt like I wasn’t going to go crazy myself. If I was ever going to take up drinking or substance abuse, I’m pretty sure it would have been then.
I should have been specific. He refused AA because it’s so heavily Christian (his words - I know nothing about it), and we got him into a private program.
Delivering my father’s eulogy. Putting down my four legged friend of 16+ years.
Task: In the shop manual for the 1986 Bronco-II/Ranger, there is a procedure for removing and replacing the oil pan in-chassis Keep in mind that this is a 4WD and the front drive line is very much in the way. I managed to finish this, but I swear if I ever do it again, I will just pull the damned engine out first, as that will be much easier. I decided that the procedure was put into the shop manual as part of a contest to see who could come up with the most preposterous entry, and have visions of some nerd blowing Dr. Pepper out his nose when he read what his colleague had written.
I don’t have kids, my parents are in good health, and I’ve only lost one grandparent (and that was semi-expected). So the hardest things I’ve done are all work-related. Telling kids that their parents don’t want them at home anymore and are giving custody of them up to Children Services is a really, really shitty thing to have to do.
Going through with my son’s adoption, and walking out of a hospital without him. Walking away gave me the only real “WTF am I doing?” moment that I’ve had in regards to that decision.
I was seventeen when I lost my dad, very suddenly and unexpectedly. That was…hard.
Another one is when I had to ask my apparently-suddenly-ex-fiance (as in during the span of five minutes he went from fiance to ?) “Does this mean it’s over?” In the long term it’s been a good thing, but at the time, not so much.