Coming Home

I know I never wrote about Brazil. I don’t think I will, either. It’s May 3rd and at this point, I will be home so soon that I can tell all of you (whoever you all are) directly about my wonderful time in Salvador and Boipeba. For now, I think I’d rather try to describe the strange sensation I feel when I think about being back in the United States so soon.

It’s eerie walking around the ship now that exams are over, and all that is left to do is pack up our cabins and exchange contact information with friends. I’m scrambling to copy photos from friends I traveled with over these last four months, and I’m realizing I don't really need to add to my collection of thousands of pictures. Today is supposed to be “Reflection and Re-entry Day,” but really it’s just another unstructured aspect to this long, ten-day good-bye.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Semester at Sea compared to any other study abroad program is that we spend half of our time on land, experiencing local culture, and the rest of our time taking classes on a ship. And this ship is kind of like a frozen-in-time version of America. We all speak English to each other, eat American food, dress (usually) like we would back home, and are still listening to the top 40 hits from January. (Has Lady Gaga come out with anything since Bad Romance? And are you all still singing “Tonight’s gonna be a good, good night”? ‘Cause we are.) In between immersing ourselves in cultures around the world, we revert back to our normal tendencies. So I want to know, how different will it really be to be back in the States?

I know I will come back to tons of questions and requests to see pictures, but I wonder how many photos or stories it will take for my friends and family to get bored or start rolling their eyes. And I wonder how frustrated I will get, knowing that telling people about my experiences just isn’t nearly the same as living though them in the moment. And I wonder how incredibly pretentious I will sound starting my sentences with “Well when I was trying to cross the street in Vietnam…” or “In India they wear the brightest colors…,” when really I’m just trying to add to conversations like anyone else. I’m going to miss how normal it is, here in my shipboard community, to say “I like that dress! Where’d you get it?” and be told nonchalantly, “Oh, Ghana.”

But mostly, I’m scared of reverting back to my old ways. I scared of being so caught up with the social gossip right in front of me, that there isn’t room on my plate to care about the problems in the rest of the world. Everyone has been saying that it won’t happen, but how can I be absolutely positive? And how can I, after forming relationships with people all over the globe, make sure that I will make a difference in their world. I want so badly to help in any little way possible, but I’m finding myself in the same difficult place that I was in January: there are so many issues to be resolved that I just don’t know where to start. What I do know now, though, is that it is possible to help. Helping people on a local level really does make the hugest of differences, even if it might not look or sound so impressive. If I have learned anything on this voyage around the world, it’s that "it’s all about the people." We all live in this world together. We make it the place it is, and we need to make it into the place we want and need for it to be.