Greece

I was in Greece about 2 and 1/2 months ago.

 I can't believe it was that recent - a life of hostels, delicious seafood and ancient ruins seems so completely different from my current reality. 

As I type this I'm sitting in the kitchen, where my roommate is playing cards with four little Dominican girls from the neighborhood, while one of their mothers is cooking lunch for our visiting volunteers. 

My life consists of Haitian children, lots of them - breaking up their fights, blowing on their booboos, holding them in my lap, attempting to teach them some math.

My life is hot, sweaty, and smells like cooking empanadas,

so very far from the cool ocean breezes of the Greek islands.

But I really was there, because I distinctly remember the acute embarrassment of 

arriving in Athens to realize we had no euros (only Turkish lira and Georgian lari) and there was no money changer within walking distance of our bus stop

 and we stood around looking and feeling very foolish

until we were rescued by a nice Greek couple who walked us to the bus

and generously gave us some euros and probably walked away wandering

why Americans can't plan well. 

After that Dickens-length sentence, some photos of Greece!

Oh hey Acropolis! Just wanted to drop by with my shaggy hair 

and Christmas scarf from Kurdistan!

The Parthenon felt unreal - was I actually seeing this? 

I think I was. 

View of Athens (and Jamie!) 

We like ruins

and cool murals

I remember being so happy on the ferry ride to the islands.

 I think the amazing cup of coffee I was sipping on had a lot to do with it. 

A sunset on Santorini! 

The island was mostly abandoned because of the season, 

which was sometimes nice and sometimes creepy. 

Que bonita! 

Then a water spout almost sucked up this couple!

(Not really but it could have!) 

A seafood lunch

View from our second hostel in Athens, where we returned for New Years Eve

I loved this cool lamp street! 

We took an overnight ferry back from Santorini, spent New Years Eve out on the town, on New Years day I got on a bus for 15 hours, a second bus in Istanbul for 27, 

slept a night in Tbilisi and then took three planes to get home. 

By the 2nd plane, I was hallucinating due to my sleepless state and aching bum.

But what can you do? The price of being a cash-strapped traveler.

When I am an rich old woman I will return to Turkey and Greece and eat expensive meals and stay in nice hotels and take First Class plane rides. 

But at least the cheap way makes for some great stories - 

or at least a great way to shut down the kid that complains of their flight to France. 

My First Dominican Republic Post

Or January Was Insane and Now I'm Insane 

January of 2013 was welcomed in at an Irish bar in Athens, Greece and that month of new beginnings saw me cross four countries, by bus, boat, and airplane, and finally land in a fifth one, my new home for six months.

Scroll through the following pictures really fast to get an idea of how all of that felt:

Christmas in Istanbul!

Ferry in Greece!

More Christmas in Greece!

New Years!

Back through Istanbul!

Lots of airplanes!

Christmas at home!

Beaches and Spanish! 

Dizzy yet?

 I'm hoping February is slightly more tranquil.

It is high time I had a first post from the Dominican Republic. I've been here just over three weeks and let me tell you, from Eastern Europe to the Caribbean is a transition to be reckoned with. I left in a blizzard and arrived (with less than a week stopover in the USA) into heat and humidity.

Moving to a new country is always intense. Even more so if the last country hasn't left your mind yet. I feel like my Georgia experience hasn't found full closure yet (expect more posts about it, and my travels after!). I miss it deeply, much more than expected. I miss the food, my small town where everyone knew me, my adorable students, the music and the dancing. But I am delving into my new country as best I can, with the smell of khachapuri (Georgian cheesy bread) still clinging to my hair.

I spent my first week trying to forget Georgian, stopping myself from saying "bodishi" (sorry) and "sahd aris...?" (Where is...?) and other Georgian phrases. I didn't always stop myself in time but I'm hoping no one noticed the strange "flaca" (skinny girl - in Spanish) saying strange words. I sat in the beach and read It's Not About the Tapas, a hilarious book which I highly recommend about a woman biking across Spain. I got sun burnt, went for runs and felt tropical and daring.

I spent my second week trying to get used to living next door to a bar, where music plays from noon until midnight (or past it) every day. I was shocked when a Dominican colleague of mine caught a pigeon with her bare hands.  I read The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood, which was supposedly "post-feminist" and definitely brilliant but depressing. I mostly got used to the bugs.  I went to the market.

I spent my third week trying to remember Georgian (how do you say the days of the week?!). I joined a gym and made it through an aerobics class while a very sweaty man screamed at us. I think he was surprised the "blanquita" made it through. I finally snapped at one of the men shouting at me on the streets and told him very rudely to go away. I became addicted to Choco Rico, the very rich chocolate milk here.

Oh, and I also taught pre-school during this time, which deserves its own post entirely.

Lessons I've learned thus far:

1. When out for a jog, run fast so the cat-callers don't get even creepier.

It's great motivation! The cat calling, street hollering, general reactions here are insane. There is a thing called "sankies" in the DR - men who woo foreign woman to weasel out some money or to get a green card. It's the ultimate catch, my Dominican friend told me, to be taken back to the US with a wealthy American lady. I'm not sure if all the men who shout at me are sankies, but they certainly are enthusiastic. After spending 4 months in a country where no one gave me a second glance when walking down the street (I look very Georgian), it's strange to create such a stir when going to the grocery store. I am called "flaquita" "princesa" and "muñeca" (doll). I am told they want to take me to dinner, give me a ride, practice their English, get my number, etc etc etc. The worse is the strange "ssssssttt" hissing noise that never fails to startle me.

Of course, plenty of Dominicans are just friendly and helpful, such as the nice man who guards the museum beside me with a giant gun and shouted "good morning!" from across the street around 5 pm. And the cat-calling is mostly just a problem in the touristy board-walk area.  A nice older man told me he was surprised to see a white person walking around by herself - "like you don't care at all...tough!" because most "blancos" are afraid of "us brown people". Maybe that's my problem - I should ask my gun toting neighbor to walk with me.

This is the Malecón where I (and many others, both local and foreign) go for evening runs.

I haven't worked up to balancing food on my head yet though. 

2. Shake out your pants before putting them on.

Cockroaches will hide in them. In fact, all of the bugs of the area will find you and do their best to startle, sting and bite you until you have gone mad. This is just a test. Stand strong! (And buy the incense coil things for mosquitos)

3.  Motoconchos are magical.

Motoconchos are the motorcycle taxis. In Peru a motorcycle taxi looked like this:

It has a little compartment built on top with a seat and, if you're lucky, a door. (It's open air in the Amazon regions though).

Here it is just a motorcycle. I have seen 5 school children casually riding along, squished on the seat together, looking precious in their uniforms.  Two (fully grown) friends and I have piled onto one behind the driver, who then drove rapidly through town, over a small ditch, onto a bumpy dirt road and we didn't die or even fall off. Magic.


It's only the beginning of this new adventure, so stay tuned and I promise I'll deliver more interesting anecdotes, Dominican slang, and beach photos to make you jealous!

Not a beach, but the park near where I live

Looking down over a beach - I love the little jungle areas you can find nearby!

The Helpless Traveler

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This is a story about helplessness.

I keep meaning to write more fun and exciting stories about hiking in the Andes or trekking around the Amazon or busing through Greece, but instead this is the story that keeps rattling around in my head. It's not very happy. 

I lived with a host family in the country of Georgia. They spoke Georgian. I spoke English. Misunderstandings and frustrations abounded - but they were kind and patient with me, fed me well, gave me gifts and were hospitable and polite to a fault. In Georgia hospitality is very important and so is family. Married couples often live with the husband's parents (something a co-teacher of mine complained about). My host family had a grandmother who lived with us. I was forever unsure if she was my host dad's mom or his grandma or maybe a great-aunt, but it didn't really matter. She lived with us and they were terrible to her. She had her own little stove outside in the garage, instead of being able to use our kitchen. Her room, as far as I could tell, was a cot in the dining room where clothing was stored and the kids would often bust in, shouting. She either was not allowed to sit on the regular chairs or chose not to for some reason. She sat on tiny wooden stools. She was never offered the coffee or treats I or other guests were. She was ignored completely in fact, except when she was sometimes shouted at. I couldn't fathom what was happening - my host family was so kind to me, so hospitable with their neighbors, even the cane-hitting older neighbor was always being offered chocolates and coffee. Why would they treat this grandmotherly relation this way? 

A friend suggested maybe she had been a really evil person before and now no one wanted her. Scrooge without the revelatory ghosts and life change.

One weekend I stayed home, sick with strep throat, when my host family went to a baby baptism. Many Georgians don't believe in germs, and my family was no exception, so it took tears and pleading and calling up a translator to get them to allow me to stay home in bed. Finally, the house was quiet. I dragged myself to the kitchen to eat some of the kinkalli my host mom had left and there was my host grandma, sneaking bread. Did they not feed her, ever? How did she get food?

She looked worried about me. She went off to her little stove in the garage and brought me her tiny pan of fried potatoes. She would come up to my bed and check on me a few times a day. She got our neighbor to check on me too. For the first time since I met her, she was moving around more and speaking and seemed so happy to be doing anything. When my family returned, she went back to being silent.

I made a point to offer her my seat or a bit of whatever snack I was eating. My family only spoke to her angrily, even my host sister. 

 How do you protest something like this, that you don't understand? I was the foreigner, a guest (even if I paid rent). I didn't know what was going on - it not only seemed to go against my family's nature, but against Georgian culture. All I knew was that I couldn't stand to keep seeing the grandmother so sad.

So I thought, I will buy her a chair and see how my family reacts. I could just imagine it - trouble would certainly erupt, but I felt like it was worth it. Although all my anthropology training told me to stay out of what I didn't understand, I did understand pain. And I wasn't going to (literally) sit by quietly in my nice warm corner of the sofa while a lady of 70 had to steal bread and sit in a stool in the corner. 

Then one day after I formulated this plan, a sister of my host dad appeared, smiling and quiet, and took the grandma away. No one said goodbye to her. They continued steadily ignoring her presence to the end. 

I hope she went somewhere better. 

My family continued to be unfailingly kind, patient and inclusive of me. We parted ways with sadness, and a promise to come to my wedding supra. I miss them still.

What would you have done in a situation like this? 

First Year Out

"August arrives, hot and breathless and full of all the things you held on to too tightly. and all the places that defined summer start to melt together, the sand that got stuck in your hair, and the bug bites you picked at too much, and the taste of every sunset that slipped through the open car window. somehow each summer is its own lifetime, we love and eat; and the sun will spin around us without fail." 

I have no idea who wrote that quote. I've searched, and I just keep coming up with anonymous. So, dear anonymous (who, according to Virginia Woolf, was a woman) thanks for that. 

Each summer has always felt like it's own lifetime. I have always defined my life in summers - "what year was that? Oh that was the summer I went to nerd camp/theater camp/New York social justice program/Oxford film program/DC internship/was a camp counselor/studied abroad".  During high school, anything exciting that ever happened to me happened in summer, usually at one of the myriad of programs I went to. Summer meant travel and learning and adventure and a summer crush. The end of summer left me nostalgic and a little bit heartbroken for the new friends I left behind.  In college, summer was a welcome respite, but I wasn't quite so sad when it ended - leaving behind huts in the woods for my air-conditioned university apartment wasn't the most difficult transition after months of bug bites, porta-potties and screaming children.  

August now doesn't mark just the end of summer, it marks the end of the craziest year of my life.  I spent this year in the rolling hills of the country of Georgia in Eastern Europe, on the beaches of the Dominican Republic, in the heat of Texas and sleeping it all off in my home state of Georgia. In one year I have been to five different countries (six, if you count Texas...). I have ridden buses and boats and airplanes and marshutkas and carritos and donkey carts.  I have jumped into cold mountain pools and been carried across flooded mountain roads. I have fallen in and out of love. I have slept in terrible hostel beds and taken bucket showers and used outhouses and made friends with lizards and spiders and Georgian grandmothers who hit me with their canes. I have sang '90s karaoke at a bar filled with smoke and cowboy hats and Texas two-stepping.  I have walked through blizzards, burned myself on motorcycles, and prayed in tiny mountain chapels, large city mosques, and dangerously foggy roads. I have felt rich and luxurious as I ate delicious meals in Greece, and hungry and poor as I found yet another can of beans full of maggots in the Dominican. 

I have been lazy and bitter and discouraged and scared. At times I have not acted, not connected, not reached out.  I've been humbled and I've been humiliated. I've been blissfully happy. I have learned the art of silence. I have relearned the art of dancing with new friends. I have counted people as friends, real friends, when all we could use was my few words of Georgian or Haitian Creole, dancing feet and smiles.  I have been very sick and maybe near death. I have had family members pass away. I have marveled in the rain and in the sunset and at the ocean and the mountains and at the grape harvest and at my students all full of the glory and wonder of the Creator.  And I have wondered, while holding a skinny, bruised child, at the plans of the Creator.  

I have been humbled by the kindness of strangers and felt unworthy and it was true and right to know I was unworthy and to accept the kindness anyway. I have been very angry. And it was sometimes pride and cultural differences, and it was sometimes valid, raw anger.

I have had more awkward moments then should be allowed in anyone's lifetime. 

This was my first year out - outside of an institution, outside of the protection of family or school system or university. And what a year it was. 

There is an image in my mind, more like a five second movie clip, of a little boy in the Dominican, my neighbor, four years old, wearing nothing but dirty yellow undies, running down the street with his arms spread like wings in the sunshine, laughing his head off.  And for some reason when I try to package my past year this clip always comes to mind.

 I have not done anything terribly different (a lot of new graduates teach abroad) and I have not done anything terribly conventional. But somehow I know, after all the great times and the hard times and the awkward times, that I did what I was meant to do. There were things I needed to learn and to see and to live. 

And so August arrives. And so August goes, and in My Personal Calender it is the start of another year. 

Chemi Megobari (My Friend)

Today’s article is written for the Reach To Teach Teach Abroad Blog Carnival, a monthly series that focuses on providing helpful tips and advice to ESL teachers around the globe. The host for this month is Jamie Phillips. I'll be posting a new ESL-related article on my blog at the start of every month, and the carnival is always published on the 5th by that month's host. Check back for more articles, and if you'd like to contribute to next month's Blog Carnival, please contact Dean at dean@reachtoteachrecruiting.com, and he will let you know how you can start participating!

Friendships on the road are interesting things. Everything is moving quickly, and the person who was a stranger one second survives a careening bus nearly slamming into your shared taxi the next and you are suddenly best friends! But these friendships can sometimes fade away just as quickly, when after a night of wine and deep conversation in the hostel your new friend leaves for Istanbul in the morning and you head to Yerevan.

Longer term stays abroad give you more time for building friendships. They also give you more time to build up immunity to blatant staring, mistranslations, and exciting animal parts for breakfast. 

My best friend when I lived in the country of Georgia is someone I'll call James. Her name isn't actually James (and she is actually a female) but the Georgians called her something like that, so we'll go with it. James and I roomed together during our teacher training, were assigned to villages not far apart, and used our little Nokia phones to talk every single day. You would think we didn't have enough news to talk every single day, but we did. Chickens fought, teachers tried to marry us off to their sons, confusion arose. She came over to my host family's house for my 23rd birthday, when we had only arrived a week before, barely spoke Georgian and had no idea how to act. We were awkward together. We went to Batumi, the city on the Black Sea coast and got hopelessly lost and still managed to have a lovely time. 

James is from a small town in the northern mid-west and she's traveled almost every where. She saved cats in Guatemala and studied hallucinogenic drugs in Peru and went to math class in Germany. At least, that's how I remember the stories. James didn't take crap from nobody, and that's the kind of person you want to travel with.

We exchanged ridiculous text messages to get us through hour long supras (the toasting feasts of abundant alcohol). She took it in stride when shirtless Russian men approached us, or when she had to travel solo to meet us far in the mountains. James was a mastermind behind the great Mattress Carrying Caper. James stayed calm at all kinds of border crossings. James rejected the hands of Georgian suitors. 

During my time in Georgia, I also fell head over heels for a foreign mountain man and spent the majority of my time traveling with him and James. He and I were one of those obnoxious couples, but James was always chill about it. James gave us our space without rolling her eyes and cut our hair in a hostel in Armenia. The three of us did Christmas together in Istanbul and then just James and I went on to Greece, while Mountain Man returned to wandering mountains. 

We grabbed a bus into Athens and then found ourselves outside the bus stop, no Euros in our pocket and no place to exchange our money anywhere in sight. We were in the gray, asphalt wastelands of what I term the Athens Bus Desert, a place that chills the most Greek-loving soul. James remained calm and some kindly Greek people helped us. 

We took photos of each other at the Parthenon and made our way to Santorini, one of the Greek Islands. We took a hundred photos from the ferry and had a small giggling, squeal fest when we were actually on the shuttle up the cliffside. And we aren't the giggly types. We reveled in our inexpensive, gloriously clean hotel room and the views of the ocean. The next day we were stranded by the unreliable island bus system, and left to walk for hours along the road until we were picked up by a nice man who spoke to us about rabbit hunting.  We ate octopus by the sea. We saw waterspouts weaving through the ocean. I remember Santorini for its strange off-season abandoned feeling, the smell of the sea, and the beauty so striking it stung. 

It rained during one of our walks around the island, but James was prepared with an umbrella. 

James may get upset with Georgian manners and capricious children, but the only time I saw her truly angry was New Years Eve, which we celebrated in an Irish Pub in Athens with a bunch of Canadians. We followed the Canadians to a club and it was a terrible, crowded expensive place and James was angry. Rightly so, James.

We had to say goodbye the next day, I feeling sickly and exhausted,  heart aching from loss of the Mountain Man, boarded a long bus to Istanbul and then Tbilisi. James prepared to travel solo to Thessaloniki where she met a Peruvian man and they got married. That last part isn't true, but I would have been only slightly shocked. 

There are some people that come to define a time in your life. James was my person for my four months in the Caucuses. We drank wine in chilly nights in the mountains, stayed in countless hostels together, and forgave each other for lack of showering. James rapped Kanye's "Gold Digger" in the streets of Yerevan around midnight. It was oddly inspiring. 

Mountain Man came and went in my life, but it's James who I still send weird articles to about Georgia. And when I think of those months in the villages, I see myself walking down my town's main road, kicking up leaves and hoping a dog doesn't chase me, talking on my little Nokia phone to James. We were probably discussing our scores on the Snake game or planning our next trip. We were also likely complaining about strange food, cold bedrooms, and tummy troubles. 

I miss those days.  

How Living Abroad Makes You a Better Person

Today’s article is written for the Reach To Teach Teach Abroad Blog Carnival, a monthly series that focuses on providing helpful tips and advice to ESL teachers around the globe. I'll be posting a new ESL related article on my blog on the 5th of every month. Check back for more articles, and if you'd like to contribute to next month's Blog Carnival, please get in touch with me at dingleym@gmail.com, and I'll let you know how you can start participating! 



"What is my life?"

I asked myself that a lot when I was abroad - not in an existential "meaning of life" sort of way but in a "how did I end up riding in a purple van down a country road in Eastern Europe with a bunch of drunk and singing locals at 2 am on a Wednesday" sort of way. The happy, the awful, the ridiculous, it all piled together into bright colors and voices and the smells of city streets, cow poop, homemade wine, ocean breeze, coca tea. I wondered what my life was, and how I would tell these stories. I didn't wonder, not nearly as often as I should have, who I was. Who I was becoming, the person I was creating by choosing this life of travel. But it has shaped me, for better or worse, and I think mostly better. 

I am a huge advocate of travel, for everyone. Whether it be the next town over or the next continent, travel teaches us about humanity. Not to pull an "AP essay trick" but I'm about to quote a famous but mostly noncontroversial American author-  Mark Twain once said:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

More specifically than just traveling, bopping around through hostels or booking a vacation once a year, living abroad can truly change you. Some people say it's not living abroad unless you are there for a year. I think it's being anywhere for a month or more where it's not vacation - somewhere you have a job, get a paycheck, have responsibilities, habits, daily schedules, connections. When you budget down to your very last peso to make it until your next payday and know exactly which colmado has the cheapest black beans, when you pick which path to take back from school depending on whether or not the cows are being herded yet or you spotted that crazy neighbor on her porch. Certainly, the longer you stay the more living you did. But living isn't only counted in time.

I've gained a number of strange quirks from traveling, and I certainly have not exorcised all my bad habits (like talking about myself too much - oh wait, I have a blog...helpful redirection or indulgence?) but I believe I have become a better person by living abroad, and I'm sure many other travelers would back that up. Some ways that I believe living abroad makes us all better - 

1. Humility 

When you are in a culture you don't fully understand, speaking a language not your own (or not speaking it), you might as well be five years old. It's humbling (and sometimes humiliating) to be spoken to like a toddler, left out of decisions because you won't understand, depending on the goodness of others for even the smallest of tasks. This came out the most when I lived with host families, first in Peru, then in the country of Georgia. They held my hand to cross the street, did all the talking for me, told me to change clothes when it was cold and chuckled at my attempts to assert my maturity. It's worse in places where you don't speak the language, you can't argue your point, defend or explain yourself or give any retort when they look at you with a face of condescension and pity. 

Even harder though was having things that were respected back home get nothing but a shrug. Did my neighbors in the Dominican Republic care that I had traveled, did well in university, held competitive internships? Nope. They just looked down on me for not being able to cook traditional Dominican food, not growing out my hair and not having a man. Feminism, independence, degrees and my tricky swing dance moves that got me invites to parties back home meant nothing to them. 

The most humbling was when I argued with my host family in Georgia about being sick. They didn't believe in germs, didn't listen to my warnings about spreading my throat infection, told me it was due to me showering at night, thought I was ridiculous for missing a party when I was shaking with fever and ignored my attempt at "I told you so" when they got sick from sharing unwashed water glasses. So even my elementary grasp of basic science leads to nothing but derision? How's a girl to get respect around here other than marrying the next door neighbor who wears Bill Cosby sweaters and making lots of Georgian babies?

 But it isn't all frustrating cultural stories - staring up at snow-capped mountains, wandering in perfectly built ancient cities, feeling lost in the majesty of the Hagia Sophia or in the midst of chanting in a tiny chapel - this is humbling. Realizing the plethora of music, poetry, art that I have never even heard of, the great stories I have never known. My stories, culture, childhood is just another among billions – nothing says that more than a foreign country, proud in its ancient history of conquests and kingdoms, that can’t care less that you do things differently. Opening up to their story is humbling in a healthy way. We are one of many, and many have gone before. 

2. Resourcefulness

Living abroad, whether it's in a posh apartment in Paris or in a hut in South America, draws on your resourcefulness. You must be resourceful in communicating, in doing all that pesky visa paperwork, in making new friends cross-culturally. I spent a lot of time in Georgia communicating via broken Georgian, hand-motions, google translate, photographs and random Italian and Spanish words. Long conversations were exhausting. 

Throw in a developing economy and somewhat shaky infrastructure and resourcefulness multiplies. We built a "sofa" in the DR out of mattresses and old sheets. One of my culinary creations was from Ramen noodles, onion, and beef jerky snacks someone gave me. (When you are on a budget...) (The Haitian kids I taught were even more amazing - creating toys out of discarded suitcases, old tin cans, scraps of wood.) Living abroad draws on sources of creativity that you never had to tap into before. 

3. Independence

Living abroad, especially at first, you are often totally dependent on the goodwill of those around you. But at times you must strike out on your own without the support system you are used to, often without the language you are used to, the cultural standards you are used to and definitely not the traffic rules you are used to. Living abroad helps you be independent in many ways, and figuring out transportation, whether to cross borders or just get across town, required the most independence I've ever had to muster. By the time I could use the Tbilisi metro without checking the map fifty times I was so proud I could burst. (Don't worry, I was humble again when I realized I had been taking the wrong marshutka, the one that required me to walk half an hour home, for a month. I could have been dropped off nearly at my door). Figuring out Peruvian micros and mototaxis, Georgian marshutkas, Dominican carritos - it all took a huge leap of faith, and a lot of getting lost and asking total strangers for help. But now, as I have just moved to a new city I feel confident enough to drive around, get lost, attempt the buses, explore. Public transportation isn't for the faint of heart, especially when you can't even fully pronounce your destinations name, but it will breed in you a feeling of freedom and independence like no other. If you can figure out how to get around, then you're free. You can come and go as you like and no matter how much of a child you feel in your Georgian village, a wide world awaits you and no one can stop you from going. 

Living abroad forces independence on you, taking you far from your support system and throwing you straight into the jungle. And that independence has to hold too - the support network may be waiting back home, but they will never truly understand your experiences when you return a different person. And to me the first step to independence is getting on that grimy, half-broken piece of machinery they call a bus and taking it where you will. 

5. Skills

Maybe you would say skills don't make you a better person - then I would say, ok, but if you were stuck on a desert island who would be the better person, the really nice guy or the guy who knew how to make fish hooks out of his toenails? Who would be saving the lives then, huh? While you might not learn life saving techniques abroad, you will pick up skills, some that you might have never known you needed. The skills I can add to my Resume of Life (which is waaaay more interesting than my Resume of Work) are Traditional Georgian dancing, cooking rice the Haitian way, hand washing bedding in a bucket, rejecting men in various cultural contexts, chasing away dogs, chickens and (gently) children, drinking wine out of a ram's horn and looking good without much opportunity to bathe. And if nothing else, you pick up great stories to tell at parties.

 But seriously, living abroad gives you many skills, such as language skills and, really just as important, the ability to perceive cross-culturally, to live in multiple perspectives. The history of the world is littered with tragedies from interactions in which different perspectives and cultures were cast aside like so much garbage. And I'm not just talking that whole "we don't believe entire continents have a legitimate culture" tragedy from our sordid past, but more recently, when swaths of my own country can't speak to each other, or even about each other, without being spitting mad because no one can sit down, stew for a bit in a culture different from there's, pick up some new rhetoric and perspective, and start a different sort of conversation. 

Being able to live cross-culturally is something that many people come across the hard way, perhaps growing up on the move, or being children of immigrants - "third culture kids" feeling like they don't entirely belong. But they are also blessed, as we all can be, by the ability to lift themselves out of one culture and into another, the ability to be on the inside or on the outside and to understand multiple viewpoints. That can make better people of us all. 

4. Courage

We could all use an extra dose of bravery - to intervene in that awkward situation, to stand up to that intimidating person, to speak out from a place of vulnerability. I know I gained most of any courage I do have from living abroad. Because it's scary. Danger scary, like riding in careening marshutkas or hiking down a Peruvian canyon in the night in a thunderstorm. Socially scary, standing up in front a bunch of kids who you can't understand and they can't understand you. Coming down to try to talk to your host family when you would rather hide in your room. Reaching out to people who may not want to befriend you because of your foreign accent. Taking a risk. Getting up to dance. Stepping on that plane.  

I returned home from the Dominican Republic shell-shocked. I had been very sick, and I retreated inside myself into a small space where I felt forced to go from the stares, the shouts from strange men, the poverty I felt helpless against, the sickness I couldn't stop. I went long days without talking. I avoided crowded areas. I was pushed back out of my shell when I went to my summer job in Texas and I found that I wasn't so scared as I once had been, no matter the situation my demanding job often threw me in. I have ten minutes to come up with an activity for a group of forty kids to last two hours? Hey, at least they speak English – bring it on. And now, facing a new life in New Orleans, feeling like I've bitten off a bit much, I'm not afraid. The end is never really the end, and when I feel scared I remember being lost in Istanbul, stranded by the road in Greece, shaking in a Dominican hospital, in a wrong mototaxi in the wrong side of town in the most violent city in Peru. I'm not saying those were places where I showed remarkable courage, but I learnt courage. Those were places where the kindness of people and, I believe, the kindness of God, kept me safe. Strangers pointed me in the right direction, gave me rides, fed me soup. 

Yes, I can say, when the going is tough "I survived x event, so I can survive this!" and nothing is wrong with taking courage from memories of my own tenacity. But I can also say that there is great kindness in the world. And these both give me courage, and that serves me well every day. 

So go. Travel. Live abroad - for a summer, a season, a year. Work odd jobs and be bad at them. Work great jobs and be fabulous. Live with intensity, but also just live - with bills and habits and routine. When I felt bored and restless in Lima was when I really knew I lived there. Live with friends whose language you once barely spoke and who now you can guess their next words. Live with a favorite corner store and bus drivers you recognize. 

Live so that when you are ancient, you remember a hushed afternoon buried in winter's first snow up in the Caucuses and it fills you with peace. Peace and courage and humility and all of the bits and pieces of other places and people you have picked up. So go.