There is a conversation that has stuck with me since the week before I left for my semester abroad. My best friend, seeing my plans for Chile on a Google Doc laid out in color-coded detail, paused and said, “You know, I would study abroad too, if there weren’t so many ways for it to go sideways.”
I laughed it off at the time. But the thought lodged itself somewhere and wouldn’t leave: Had I actually thought this through? In the abstract, I knew that studying abroad required flexibility. I just hadn’t reckoned with what that would cost someone like me.
For a student who had never known a campus other than Foggy Bottom, the plot twists of Santiago arrived early and often. But there was one person in this story who made the whole proposition seem survivable, even elegant. Lise-Anne Strohschänk, GW Chile’s resident director, studied abroad in Santiago years ago, came back to study more, and stayed for love. She has not, in my five months of close observation, been caught unprepared for anything. Which raised a real question: how does someone so precise, thrive in a country where fixed plans are treated as more of a suggestion than a system?
As resident director of GW Chile, Lise-Anne has spent two decades walking students through Santiago’s universities, culture, and history with equal parts rigor and warmth. She is fluent in five languages: English, Spanish, French, German, and the considerably harder dialect of making a foreign city feel like home. She combines the instincts of a mentor, diplomat, school administrator and storyteller, often within the same conversation. Hundreds of GW students have passed through her program and left Chile with a deeper sense of the world and their place in it.
She calls GW Chile her “first baby.” She built the program years before she became a mother in the more conventional sense, and this September, that first baby turns twenty years old. What began as a direct partnership between GW and the Universidad de Chile has since grown into a network spanning two of Latin America’s most highly ranked universities, a stand-alone agreement with the Facultad de Economía y Negocios, and over sixty internship sites. GW Chile is no longer a single study-abroad “option.” Rather, it’s an ecosystem, with a Spanish track, an English track, and a brand new summer internship program layered on top.
On paper, Lise-Anne and I arrived in Chile from very different places. She grew up as a third culture kid in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and majored in Hispanic Studies after her late high school Spanish teacher gave her the linguistic foundation that would later bloom into a genuine love for Latin American literature.
I grew up in a Southern California beach town called Torrance. I learned Spanish in a bilingual elementary school, sharpened it for the high school AP exam, and then didn’t actually use it in conversation until I cleared customs in Santiago. If you ever decide to google Eau Claire and Torrance, the contrast is sharp enough that some of my European friends are bewildered that Lise-Anne and my hometowns are in the same country.
But let’s strip away the backstory. Lise-Anne and I are, functionally, quite similar. Same height. Fast walkers, both of us. And, most relevant here, structurally Type A. Our days run on caffeine breaks, box folders, and checklists that beget more checklists. We are passionate, highly “laser-focused on the vision” as I like to say. We are organized, task-oriented, and always on-the-move. A funny image it is, when held up against Chile. While not inherently opposites, Chile is certainly a country where punctuality bends, and work-life balance is protected like a constitutional right.
“You can clash with an unfamiliar culture,” Lise-Anne told me, “or you can let the unfamiliarity show you something about yourself.” She has tested that theory on people closer to home than her students. On one visit, Lise-Anne’s father stepped out of an Uber, watched someone watering a garden in the middle of a hot afternoon, and turned to Lise-Anne’s husband with real urgency: “Mauricio, why would someone do this, in this heat, at this hour?” It wasn’t a complaint about Chile. It was a German academic colliding gently with a country that simply runs on different math. A country where nobody is in that much of a hurry to be right about water conservation before tea time.
That collision, Lise-Anne says, happens to everyone eventually, and there’s no single correct way through it. Some people walk straight into the unfamiliar, ordering the thing they can’t pronounce, saying yes before they’ve thought it through. Others need a Netflix night in their mother tongue just to remember who they are. Neither instinct is wrong. The only real task is figuring out which one you are, and when. In my quest to make everything scholarly, I’ve dubbed this 'Mote con Huesillo Theory', after the quintessential Chilean summertime drink, made from dried peaches stewed in cinnamon and sugar, that you can buy from a cart on nearly any corner. Some days you want the thing that’s genuinely new to you. Some days you want chocolate chip ice cream. Wisdom is knowing which day it is.
Over the past five months, I have said yes to more unfamiliar things than I had in years of life prior. I went kickboxing, reforested hillsides outside the city, wandered Santiago’s open-air mural districts like an outdoor museum, learned to cook food I’d only ever ordered, picked up new rhythms on the batería (drums), hiked through native Chilean flora, and rode on horseback through the desert.
What I haven’t done is sand down the parts of myself that make Raphi specifically Raphi. I know exactly where in Santiago to find a crème brûlée that would pass in Duke’s Western Market. There is a tin of ceremonial-grade Japanese matcha quietly living in my host mom’s pantry, and oatmilk in her fridge, placed there by me and defended by me. I still write my to-do lists on palm cards, in the colored pens I brought in my check-in luggage. I’ve put Mote con Huesillo Theory in practice more times than I could count.
When Lise-Anne arrived in Chile for the first time, she came for the fall semester. Anyone who begins their time in Chile in September can attest that the weather can be brutal. The cold necessitates multiple blankets at night, and when you compound that with missing friends and family back home, the feeling of whimsically entering a new country isn’t as cinematic as some might expect. Lise-Anne recalled to me the protocol she constructed. “I would take a micro (bus) to a call center on Sundays, pay for the long-distance call up front, then be assigned a booth with a phone in it and an allotted period of time.” During her first months in Chile, that call anchored each of Lise-Anne’s weeks. She anticipated it with the intensity of someone measuring life in milestones rather than days, mentally collecting observations like a “cultural anthropologist” to report back across hemispheres. The conversations served as reassurance that everything familiar remained exactly where she left it.
But somewhere along the way, almost imperceptibly, the ritual began to loosen its grip. The change coincided with Santiago's annual act of reinvention. Winter surrendered to spring. Bare branches erupted into blossoms. The city, which had initially felt like a place in which Lise-Anne was a mere visitor, began to feel more like home to her.
I, on the other hand, arrived in Chile for a spring semester where the weather timeline was reversed. I arrived in Santiago’s sweltering February heat, a month where everyone seemingly evacuates the city for the cooler port towns, or the more manageable climate of Chile’s Patagonia region. Meanwhile, I began the task of navigating the streets of a country I’d never been to before in intensely dry 90-degree weather. For better or for worse, I had the luxury of coming to Santiago in an era where I could FaceTime anyone at any given moment right away (al tiro, as they say in Chile). This allowed me to see my friends live-action playing in the snow-filled U-Yard while I applied layer after layer of sunscreen.
One thing is clear. Early on in our respective semesters in Santiago, the Type A in Lise-Anne and me proved to be less of something to overcome and more of a tool for survival. Lise-Anne’s inherent drive to start a routine paved the way for Sundays at the call center to make the distance feel manageable. My sense of urgency and the desire to ‘do it all’, albeit frustrating at times when hit with the reality of its impossibility, has enabled me to come quite close to actually having done it all in hindsight.
So, what is the fate of the Type A person in the Southern Cone? I used to think the answer would arrive as a kind of submission, that five months in a country allergic to my spreadsheets would finally break me of them, and I’d come home looser, lighter, cured. What actually happened is closer to what happened to Lise-Anne twenty years ago: the competitiveness and the perfectionism didn’t quite disappear, they just stopped being load-bearing. I discovered that a ‘transformative’ semester abroad isn't replacing yourself. It's learning which parts of yourself are essential and which parts were optional all along.
Lise-Anne is still unmistakably Lise-Anne, twenty years and one adopted country later. I don’t think I’ll come back to the District unrecognizable either. But I’ll come back as someone who’s watered the garden in the heat of the afternoon, just to see what the hurry was even for.
Raphi Rebucas
Spring 2026
GW Chile - Spanish Track (GW Study Program)
Columbian College of Arts and Science
Political Science & Peace Studies Double Major