This trip has been very easy. We are staying in nice hotels, we are being driven around on tour buses and guided by bilingual experts. We are also in a country where I am familiar with the language, reasonably familiar with the culture and feel very much at home. On Thursday evening, we had the opportunity to reflect on our experiences and the positives vastly outweighed the negatives, in part because of this level of ease. Ease and work, as they pertain to my experiences of travel and living outside of my hometown and home country, have been running through my mind since William invited me on this trip very shortly before it began.
As I began to reflect on this trip, I turned in my mind to my first experience of living outside of my hometown. My parents bought a house shortly after they were married, and still live there. So, the first time I ever moved away, it was an event. When I was seven, my family moved to Cairo, Egypt. We lived there for two years for my dad’s work. It was the first time I had ever seen men with guns in public guarding presidential palaces, churches, and any other location prone to terrorist bombing. It was the first and only time I attended private school. Living in Cairo was made easy for me because I was a child and because the staff of the organization with which my parents worked facilitated visas, schooling, language learning, and so on. Coming back home to the same house and the same school was hard. For the first time I could remember, I did not like school. I was in a portable with 33 other children. The clothes I wore did not make me cool or give me many friends. To be blunt, thinking about this time tests my ideological commitment to public education.
In some ways, this experience of living in another country as positive and returning negative has led me pursue a life outside of my home. I have lived in a few countries, and almost six years ago, I immigrated to pursue employment opportunities and develop my career. Now, at U of SC, I travel fairly frequently for work. I do this in part because I am restless and in part because for me, travel is easy. This IPHE trip to Colombia has been made doubly easy because of the company that organized this trip. Even though I registered late, even though I had multiple travel hiccups, they made it seem like it was nothing. Of course, I am able to travel this much, and my immigration process was straightforward, for the same reasons that travel is easy for me – my social location as a highly educated middle class white woman carries significant privilege. Thinking about this experience of travel also makes me think that when I am working in ways that align with my interests, skills and goals, it feels easy, even when it involves stress.
And yet, because of this early experience of returning home, and home not feeling the same way, I am suspicious of easy. I fear that there is a catch. I wonder what will happen when I return to Columbia – will it be possible to develop the relationships that we began with some of our partner universities? Will it be possible to recruit students to a study abroad semester or faculty-led program? I hope to use the connections with other faculty and staff in Columbia to work in ways that align with my gifts and my values that feel easy even when they are, in fact, hard work.