This year Dilley is living in Los Andes, a city in the center of Chile not far from Santiago and not far from the Andes mountains. She reports she has made many ("muchos") friends while attending high school there. After school they often get together at the square at the center of the city.

Dilley has been helped in making friends by her proficiency in Spanish. She finds she can understand almost everything Chileans say, including all the slang, though her own pronunciation still marks her as a native English speaker. She had adapted well to life in Chile because she has been learning about that nation for several years.

The novels of Isabel Allende, especially "The House of Spirits" and "My Invented Country," have helped her understand Chile's recent political troubles.

She and her friends have time to talk because her high school, though very large, is not nearly so challenging as Northfield High School. As in many countries outside the United States, students stay in the same room all day. Students are also streamed into three groups, only one of which prepares them for the university. Dilley is in that group and takes courses in language, math, science and English.

The countryside around Los Andes is also very different from Minnesota. Going out from town, you see rolling hills and vineyards, streams, and in the distance the mountains.

She has traveled to other even more exotic places. On a Rotary-sponsored trip she visited Punta Arenas, perhaps the southernmost city in the world, and the nearby Torres Del Paine National Park, where blue-green lakes reflect towering mountains. Dilley has also visited Bariloche just over the Andes in Argentina, a place she compares to Aspen in the United States. She valued that visit not only for the scenery but for the wonderful talks she had with other exchange students from around the world.

There are problems. Chilean food is mainly meat, potatoes, and rice, and Dilley misses the variety she has at home.

More importantly, she finds that Chileans stereotype Americans based mainly on American music and movies.

"The older generation thinks rather poorly of us," she said, "while the younger generation wants to completely copy American popular culture. Either way, they think they know all about me before ever knowing me."

Nevertheless, Dilley would recommend the Rotary Youth Exchange program to students at Northfield High School.

The program sponsors about 7,000 young men and women between the ages of 16 and 19 to study each year in foreign countries.

Dilley, the daughter of Lee and Vicki Dilley of Northfield, plans to return in August and then to enroll in Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.

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