A Bigger Doorstep: The Importance of Living Abroad

I participated in Model United Nations all through high school. I was one of the more active delegates in our program, never missing a conference if I could help it. Over those four years, I accumulated binders and binders of research on the topics I found myself debating most frequently. I could tell you the details of conflicts going on all over the world. But I never felt like I was connected to them. I was far enough away to be objective, and as tragic as all of it was, it wasn't happening on my doorstep.

The past few months, I've been realizing that my doorstep is a whole lot bigger than it used to be, and for a pretty simple reason: I spent a year studying in another country, and I made friends with people who had done the same.

When the earthquake hit Japan, one of my friends had just returned from a month spent traveling there. Another friend had previously lived there for six months through a study abroad program.

When terrorism hit Oslo, my Norwegian friend -- whom I met while she was studying abroad for a semester in Berkeley -- had just left Norway to spend another semester abroad, this time in Australia.

And when north London broke out in riots, I heard about it on Twitter and Facebook before it was on the news, because I studied there for a year and most of my friends live in the areas most heavily affected.

When I searched Twitter looking for news of any disturbances in Mile End, the London neighborhood where I used to live, I found this picture of the Budgens grocery store where I shopped when I was too lazy to make the walk down to the Sainsbury's in Whitechapel. I found that the houseboats that usually moor along one side of Regent's Canal switched over to the other side as a way of avoiding riot damage because, to access that side from the street, you need to get past the security guards sitting behind the gate into the campus of Queen Mary University of London. That campus is where I lived and studied. This is my doorstep.

A lot of adults (and a lot of college students, too) seem to think that the point of taking a semester or a year abroad is to goof off in a foreign country where the academic expectations are low and the drinking age is lower, where any misbehavior can be excused by saying, "I'm an American!" This isn't why I decided to live in London for a year. But even those who sign up for study abroad programs with the expectation that it will be one big party have the chance to stumble across the lessons I've learned from it. No matter your intention, if you spend enough time somewhere else, you'll find yourself connecting with people in a way that animates the places they live, the struggles they witness, and the hardships they suffer.

It's one thing to talk about globalization and large-scale human interdependence -- it's another thing entirely to feel it within the network of your friends, spread out across the globe. The earthquake in Japan becomes something that could have happened to Kat or Natasha; the bombing in Oslo is something Sidsel just missed; and the London riots are going on walking distance from where Cara and Kaite and Alastair and Abbi and so many other friends live. It hurts, sometimes -- but that's because I'm connected, and because I care. And I'll take that over the world-weary "more bad news as usual" any day.