a two-day stay at Santiago

As the plane initiated its descent to Buenos Aires, she felt insecure for the first time. How would she handle having to speak in Spanish? She had never been in a Spanish speaking country and she had never learned Spanish. The only exception was a brief two-day stay at Santiago de Compostela when she went there, accompanied by her parents, to write her 11th grade Math exams.

As she failed the exams for two consecutive years in her Portuguese school, she was told by friends that under the new European Union legislation for the transfer of high school students, there was a private high school in Santiago where she could pass the Math exams easily, provided she paid a fee of five thousand euros per exam and showed some modicum of knowledge in the field. If she succeed, she could even consider staying there the following year for her 12th grade studies.

For several weeks, she tried to persuade her parents to pay the penalty fee and, a few months later, they reluctantly agreed. The following month, one Wednesday afternoon, they drove to Santiago. Cristina would write her 11th grade Math exam the following day at Escuela Secondaria Reina Isabel de Galicia. Her parents had already agreed that if she succeeded, she would stay there to complete her high school studies.

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This school had a special programme for disabled Math students which was run by highly paid experts and was approved by the European Union. The main feature of the programme was to tell students in advance the answers to the questions presented in the exams. As a uniformed professor handed Cristina the exam sheet with the first question, he told her in no unclear terms: "Cristina: the limit of the second expression is the same as that of the first".

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Yet, she failed miserably at it.