White. Female. Irish-Catholic. American. At St. Michael’s College, it is not uncommon to find someone who fits this description. At a congested, chaotic market in the Hindi-speaking, sari-wearing city of New Delhi, India, senior Julie Griffin-Carty was a minority.
Griffin-Carty spent the fall 2007 semester in India, in the arts and culture program through the School for International Training (SIT). She is among an increasing number of students who choose to travel to unconventional study-abroad locations.
You’re going where?
Griffin-Carty, a business major, says she knew that she did not want to go abroad to a country she considered a “honeymoon destination.” After doing her research on several programs, a gut feeling made her decide on India, she says.
“I’m a ‘go big or go home’ person,” she says. “I figured if I was going to experience culture shock, I might as well shock the heck out of myself.”
Griffin-Carty had to defend her decision to friends and relatives, she says.
“India was a tough sell,” Griffin-Carty admits. The summer before her departure, she avoided bringing up her concerns to her parents, because she was afraid to worry them more, she says.
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"I miss going to markets and bartering," Griffin-Carty says. "Here you just drive to Shaw's and get what you need, how boring is that?"
(Photo courtesy of Julie Griffin-Carty) |
Junior Erin Gilmartin, who leaves for Senegal through SIT in January, echoes Griffin-Carty’s experience.
“Convincing my parents was definitely the toughest part of my decision,” Gilmartin says. “I told them that St. Michael’s wouldn’t let students go somewhere that wasn’t safe, and that I was ready for the challenge of being out of my comfort zone.”
When junior Jonny Drummey told friends he was spending his fall semester studying abroad in Jamaica, they were surprised that it was even an option, and cracked jokes about his “academic ambitions” at such a location, he writes in an e-mail from Kingston.
“Most peoples’ perceptions changed when I told them I would be living and working in Kingston—a city with the highest murder rate per capita in the world,” Drummey writes.
Junior Meghan Kerrigan also studied abroad through SIT in Ghana, and says friends and family often spoke about her “going to Africa.”
“I felt like I was constantly teaching. Africa is a continent, not a country.”
Broad horizons
Study abroad director Peggy Imai finds that students who study abroad in African countries typically have a drive to travel to that continent.
“They often don’t know why, but they know they want to go to Africa,” she says.
The recent popularity of sociology, anthropology, global studies, and peace and justice classes has had an influence on students' study abroad choices, Imai says.
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Children from the village Kerrigan lived in during her time in Ghana fetching their daily water.
(Photo courtesy of Meghan Kerrigan) |
“Students are learning about developing nations in these classes,” she says. “They are taking their learning outside the classroom and into the community.”
Money is also a factor in students’ decisions, especially in the current economic climate, Imai says.
“In terms of the economy, I don’t think we’ve seen what the effect really means yet,” she says. “I think more parents are going to start saying ‘you’re not going to go,’ or it needs to be cheaper than Paris or Rome.”
Imai notes that for the Spring 2009 semester, there will be a wide variety in location choices. There will be individual students studying in Botswana, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Uganda, Chile, Peru, India, and two in China.
Reentering the bubble
Living in any foreign country forces students to adjust their normal routines, but in countries drastically different from Western nations, unique challenges are presented.
“[In these countries] you don’t necessarily have that sense of comfort with your surroundings as you may have in Europe or Australia,” Drummey writes.
Kerrigan and Griffin-Carty both recall being very aware of being a woman while in Ghana and India.
“I was proposed to so many times, I had to start wearing a fake ring on my finger,” Kerrigan says. “I neglected to tell my mom about that kind of stuff until I got back home.”
Griffin-Carty explains that when students return to the United States, they are changed people.
“When you come back, you are different,” she says. “People expect you to slip back in to the lifestyle you’ve had for 20 years. There has to be a mutual understanding that both you and your friends have changed while you were gone.”
Experiencing the poverty in developing countries makes it particularly difficult to return to the wealth of the United States.
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Junior Jonny Drummey attends classes two days a week, and works with street boys at the Kingston YMCA the other three.
(Photo courtesy of Jonny Drummey) |
Drummey is studying through the International Partnership for Service Learning and Leadership (IPSL), and working in the Youth Development Program at the Kingston YMCA.
“You have an amazing opportunity to grow yourself in an environment that is stripped of the familiar. You begin to understand what comprises you as a person and what you want to dissociate yourself with,” Drummey writes.
The challenges and frustrations Griffin-Carty experienced in India made her push herself, and ultimately she learned a great deal about the culture and herself, she says.
“India is loud and overwhelming and chaotic, and it’s not all destitute and horrible,” she says. “I fell in love with it. I didn’t think it was possible to fall in love with a country, but I did.”
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