When will I ever use Portuguese?

Native Brazilians on Learning English
The first section of this geocities (blog?) site has students of english write in english about why learning english is important to them. They state the most extreme importance under travel (being understood everywhere you go), and secondly for business(convincing americans banks to give them loans) and thirdly for education (reading articles in english).
I attempted to find an article on the difficulties of learning another language, but I was then bombarded by free trials of language learning software. This article (if you can call it that)/assignment was the most solid thing I could find on a personal approach to learning another language.
My personal experience with Portuguese could be summed up in one word: challenging. I got on my plane to go to Brazil, at the age of 16, with the same stereotypes that we all grow up learning. Well, all of us that attended Walker High School grew up learning. That is that "everyone around the world speaks english". Though this was the basis of my train of thought, I also thought it was essencial to learn a little spanish to smooth the edges of my Brazilian experience. Our highschool offered us German and Spanish. I opted for spanish, mistakingly thinking that it was probably very similar to portuguese.
When I arrived in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, I walked off the plane and was greeted by my first host family.
I had just gotten off a flight that was only supposed to be 8 hours. It turned into a 12 hour flight because of my inexperience flying and unreliable 'rides' and yadda yadda.
I started to unleash my apologies for being 4 hours too late. It was answered by blank faces. That was my first reality check. No one understood what I was saying.
This is what went on for the next 3 months of my experience. Though I was learning, I felt like the biggest idiot. I was communicating in english, portuguese, and spanish. I obviously didn't starve to death, but it was frustrating to only be fully understood... once a week. That was when I made a call home to my parents. My parents would have to endure a bawling child, pleading with them to take me home from the backwards country of Brazil. For three months my brazilian experience revolved around those 'once a week' conversations.
I started to learn, but it proved to be a lot more tasking than I had planned for it to be. After the 3 months of hell, I began to become more confident about Portuguese. I was beginning to have mini conversations with fellow students. I learned that their curiousity with me was virtually out of this world. I began to be confident in words and sentence structure. People began giving me compliments. I couldn't believe it.
The weekly conversations started to become bimonthly chats. I realized that I had learned portuguese fully when I entered the home of my third host family. Denise, my host mother. I had entered her small home with the same dumb look on my face that I had entered all the other homes. I felt, again, like a special education child that this family was going to have to take care of for another 3 months.
Denise asked my host brother if i knew any portuguese. I spoke up and proclaimed,
"Eu fala com fluencia, se tem otras perguntas, pode pedir me." I speak fluent portuguese, if you have other questions, you can ask me.
She seemed a little taken aback, but it proved a very positive experience. My third host mom, I can honestly say, was the only one that treated me with the respect and love of anything close to a real daughter.