The last six weeks in India have been the best of my life. The learning that I have done here both personally and professionally are once in a lifetime and the friends that I have made through this experience are some of the strongest bonds I’ve formed. As we piled onto busses to carry us away from Mussoorie and into Delhi for the last leg of our global experience, while everyone was misty eyed waving goodbye to our teachers, it dawned on me that my time abroad was actually coming to an end. At the beginning of this trip, surrounded by people I didn’t know and in a brand new environment, I was a tad concerned that six weeks might be too long away from home; however, it was clear after the first week that I would want to stay forever.
The thing that surprised me the most on my global experience was how welcoming the people in India were. In the United States, people can be kind or nice, but being those things is not a core pillar of our American culture. In India, nearly every person we came across, from sales people to taxi drivers and even neighbors, each person truly wanted to share all that they had with you. On the train from Mussoorie to Delhi, I sat next to an older Indian woman. By the end of our six hour ride, she had given me her phone number, invited me to her home for dinner, and told me that next time I was in the country I was welcome to stay with her. Kindness and generosity are so commonplace, that nobody thinks twice about welcoming near strangers for chai or a meal.
I would advise future students going on any study abroad trips, but especially ones outside of the Western World to do their best at recognizing their implicit biases and shelving their preconceived notions. I went into this program with a pretty set idea of what I believed the program was going to be, and as soon as I stopped trying to fit my experiences into that notion, I was able to have so many more meaningful and impactful learning moments. Before this program, I loved travel and wanted to incorporate it into my career, and now, after this program I know that I want to participate in a travel nursing program and potentially the peace corps.
