When I was seventeen, I spent a whole summer with my aunt and uncle in a small town near Cuenca, in the Ecuadorian Andes. My parents run a restaurant in Guayaquil, which is very busy in the summer, so they sent me to the mountains to help my relatives and, I suspect, to keep me out of trouble.
My aunt and uncle have a small farm where they grow potatoes and keep a few cows, and their two children were younger than me. I stayed for about ten weeks. My day started at six in the morning, which was a shock for me, helping my uncle milk the cows. Then I'd help my aunt in the kitchen or take my cousins to the river. In the evenings, my uncle taught me to play chess by the fire, because it gets surprisingly cold at night in the mountains, and my aunt told stories about my mother when she was a girl.
At first I felt bored and a bit resentful. There was hardly any phone signal, none of my friends were there, and the work was physically hard. But after about two weeks, something changed. I started to enjoy the routine and the quiet, and I became really close to my cousins. I also saw a completely different side of my family, and learned that my mother had been quite rebellious as a teenager, which I've used against her ever since. By the end, I didn't want to leave. I think that summer made me more independent, and it's why I'm still close to that side of the family today.