I used to be a girl with a plan, and everything was very predictable. I had the "be well-rounded plan" that necessitated playing sports and music throughout high school, the "go to the University of Virginia plan" and the "study abroad in Italy plan."
It all went very smoothly, from acceptance to this fine institution all the way through Italian 202. Unfortunately by the first semester of my second year, I became disillusioned with my prepackaged life.
Of course, even my soul searching was rather predictable. My parents told me it had a name, "the sophomore slump," and not to worry. They told me my brother went through the same thing until he studied abroad in South Africa.
"All souls will be found -- just please graduate on time while you're searching," my parents said.
Their advice unwittingly renewed my interest in an alternative to my preplanned collegiate life. I began to think about South Africa and other destinations outside Western Europe, and as the fall 2003 study abroad deadlines approached, I felt a wave of spontaneity -- I could drop at least part of my preexisting plan that now seemed so uninspired.
Once I got off the Italian track, the options of study abroad programs were overwhelming. Countries I had never heard of, countries I could not find on a map and countries I had only seen in movies flooded my imagination. Thus began the real story of my suddenly rerouted life -- my life as a student who ditched her Western Europe plan for a program she knew nothing about.
For 30 years, the International Honors Program has sent groups of mostly American college students to travel around the world and engage in comparative studies for either a semester or a year.
I applied to be a guinea pig for the inaugural semester of their "Indigenous Perspectives: Rethinking Governance and Stewardship" trip, without knowing what governance meant. My ignorance, however, was of secondary importance because I was very excited about the prospect of going to India, New Zealand and Mexico for a little over a month each.
I was warned repeatedly not to have any expectations and told to open my eyes and experience things without attempting to manipulate them into my American framework. Being an open-minded person, I thought that was obvious -- naturally I intended to refrain from judging others. Quickly I realized it was not that easy, and by the end of my trip, I began to grasp how much my tinted lens was not something I could remove.
If I tried to describe India, I would fail. What could I truthfully tell you? That India is incredible, that everything that is a social norm is not necessarily a human norm, that people are actually similar everywhere you go, that I was disturbed with how women are treated there. None of that is authentically India, though -- it is all just my "India."
I can more accurately describe my experiences. I used squat toilets for the first time and used water instead of toilet paper for a month. I watched a woman collect cow dung with her bare hands in the morning, and I slept on her cow dung floor that night. I hiked through a massive national park that rests on the edge of Mumbai, one of the largest, most polluted cities in the world. I ate most meals with my hands. I was stared at constantly. I watched miles of India go by from my seat in a Jeep, bus and train.
There is one particular experience that strikes me as the best example of how surreal the entire trip seemed. During our first week in India, we spent intense periods of time in class to familiarize ourselves with issues from land management to indigenous art before "going into the field."
One night, after a particularly long day, a lawyer came to speak to us about her work with families who live in the slums. My group was tired, still jet-lagged and disinterested with whatever lecture we were about to sit through.
But it was not a lecture -- it was a narrative. The lawyer introduced herself as "a failure" because that day in court she was not able to save any of her clients from eviction. She explained that with nowhere else to go, approximately 85,000 families moved into the national park on the edge of Mumbai and built a little cement jungle of their own. The Forestry Department was in the process of evicting everyone, and she was representing all 85,000 families.
While she was unable to win the case, she convinced the local government that if they were going to evict, they must provide a new place to live, and she was in the process of negotiations for plots on the outskirts of Mumbai. This extremely well-educated, compassionate lawyer referred to herself as a failure, but I am actually quite convinced she is a saint.
After the emotionally-draining month, right when I started to get used to rupees and street food, I was thrown on a plane and sent to New Zealand.
Five weeks after that, after I became very fond of people speaking English and Maori, morning and afternoon tea, maraes and snowcapped mountains. My friends literally had to force me on the plane to Mexico.
By the middle of December, I had danced for hours in the sand (which is extremely difficult), slept on a beach, learned small talk in Spanish, ate handmade tortillas and then ended up back at home -- the same place where I had started. Except now I had an entirely different kind of baggage -- Western, liberal, white-guilt baggage.
On my voyage I was privileged to travel with and meet people who led lives on paths I never knew existed. I had a teacher who spent all of her 20s and early 30s traveling through dozens of countries, only returning to the States when she needed to make money, so she could set off again.
We met an Australian-educated, German woman who married an Indian politician, who now owns a tiger prawn aqua farm in his hometown. While in a remote part of Mexico, we were hosted by a woman who conversed in Triqui and barely spoke Spanish. (Despite popular portrayal of Mexican culture, colonization never fully succeeded in abolishing indigenous dialects, and over 60 indigenous languages continue to be spoken).
We met ex-patriots, Green Party members of Parliament and an incredible number of indigenous activists who are fighting an uphill battle against dominate culture to retain disappearing language and customs.
All of this has led me to two firm conclusions: I have no idea what my next step is, and I have no plan.
With four semesters of Italian behind me, I still love Italy and intend to spend a considerable amount of time there. But now I want Italy to be a chapter in my longer travel memoirs -- not the only destination.
Roads will diverge in my near future, and the greatest gift I received from my time abroad is the clarity to see that one need not know where she wants to go, as long as she has the will to go somewhere.
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