Gabriela Nunes is a West Seattle High School foreign exchange student, a junior from the world's sixth largest city, Sao Paulo, Brazil. She is studying here for one semester. Her hosts include Terese Machmiller and daughter Simone, also a WSHS student. Terese serves as Westside Notetaker Moderator for the high school's PTSA and is in communications. That is where she got involved with the foreign exchange program. Some may know Terese and Simone through their singing participation at Hope Lutheran.

"She's a model kid, more like a model 20 year-old," said Terese of Nunes, impressed with the Brazilian's maturity and grasp of the English language.

Nunes observed, "Here, you say you are from Brazil and they are like, 'Oh, nice! cool. That's amazing!' I'm not used to that. In Brazil they're grumpy all the time.

"I had a boyfriend. He broke up with me after one month of my being here," she added. Sounds like he may have become grumpy without her.

Nunes said she has taken some acting classes and had voice training in Brazil. She will appear in this spring's WSHS musical production Oklahoma! as a dancer and in the chorus as the character Armina. Simone will portray Laurey, the lead.

"I heard about Oklahoma! in Brazil," Nunes said. "We have big musicals there like Phantom of the Opera and Beauty and the Beast but Oklahoma! is not on the list of musicals people have seen.

She plans to enter medicine, possibly her father's field, intensive care. When her parents pick her up here this summer to return home they will stop to visit Las Vegas. She has two sisters.

"I'm only 15," she said. "In my country, I can only drive at 18. I could take driving lessons here but when I come back to my country in the summer I'd have to return the license."