It’s been a little over five months now since I tiredly shuffled off a plane that had taken me away from Rwanda, a tiny African country where I studied abroad last spring, and plopped me back down in the good ‘ole U.S.A. I’ve spent these five months reflecting on my time in Rwanda, but no matter how long I mull it over, I still don’t have a good answer for the inevitable question that is asked of me when the topic of my semester abroad comes up: “How did it transform you?” Ultimately, I think my inability to craft a nice and neat response is because the four months I spent in Rwanda didn’t transform me, at least, not in the way people expect it to have done so.
Sure, I can think of countless experiences that have shaped me and left me wrestling with the weight of injustice and global poverty. I am easily reminded of the incredible friendships I made while abroad, both with the rest of my cohort and with the many Rwandans who became like family to me. And I’m often still filled with a mixture of joy and sorrow when I think back on the many wonderful memories that I made last spring, knowing that they’re only memories at this point and that my experience there is over.
Despite all of this, I still don’t know how to answer the grand “Question of Transformation” and often become frustrated when it surfaces. Why? Because it implies that transformation could have only occurred overseas.
So often, well-meaning friends and family avoid simpler questions such as “How was it?” or “What was your semester like?” in an attempt to be sensitive to the fact that I had a set of experiences that is largely unfamiliar to them and cannot possibly be summed up in a measly sentence or two. This is of course true. I have had a set of experiences that is largely unfamiliar to them and cannot possibly be summed up in a measly sentence or two. But what I’ve never understood is why they don’t recognize that, whether or not they were in a foreign country, so did they.
All of us have been exposed to and changed by things that the other will never entirely understand because we have all had experiences for which the other was not present, whether they happened at home or abroad. For some reason, though, we talk about international experiences in such awed and reverent tones, expecting the person to have come back entirely transformed, while we almost entirely dismiss the possibility that someone could have been equally or even more transformed as they went about a typical four months of their life.
An argument could be made that spending a couple of months overseas puts you in the way of many more unfamiliar and therefore potentially transformative encounters, and there might be some truth to this. At the same time, though, I question whether our heightened feelings of transformation while abroad stem more from the fact that we do not approach our time at home with the same expectancy to see God use our experiences to change us. For that matter, I think that if we really wanted, we could fairly easily put ourselves in the way of equally unfamiliar experiences without venturing too far from home; Buffalo’s refugee population isn’t that far away after all.
At the end of the day, I think the opportunity to go abroad is wonderful. But I’m wary of glorifying it to the point that we begin to think that true transformation can only occur when we’re overseas, so we must somehow get over there,anywhere but here,to finally see the world and our place in it clearly. When we do this, we simultaneously cheapen the value of our experiences at home and place unrealistic expectations on our international travel to produce such a radical change in us, unlike anything we’ve experienced before. In reality, though, transformation can occur as authentically amidst the mundane occurrences of our daily lives as it can in our “once in a lifetime” experiences.
Marina is a senior majoring in communication and international devlopement.