Being abroad means distancing oneself from all that defines students during their four-year college tenure. Through my student-worker position at Elon University’s Global Education Center, I have encountered all the excuses that students generally resort to when brushing off the idea of a study abroad experience, especially that of a semester-long program. Only occasionally are there valid reasons to stay within the red-brick walls of Elon.
I have become one of the well-marketed 72 percent of Elon students who study abroad at some point in their undergraduate careers. I believe that there is an indispensable aspect to one’s education gained during a prolonged period abroad.
Before I traveled to Istanbul this past summer, my friend leant me a copy of Mark Twain’s “The Innocents Abroad”. I highlighted a particular line of Twain’s narrative describing his journey to the Holy Land,
“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,” Twain wrote.
I doubt I could better state my shared opinion that the importance of being immersed in an unfamiliar culture is that it allows us to re-evaluate our preconceived notions of the human condition challenges our assumptions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and acceptance of the expression of all, which we have previously regarded as foreign. Students must temporarily become uprooted from the botanical garden of Elon to gain such knowledge through experience.
A closer-to-home example for Elon students is observable in the cultural stereotypes regarding the southeastern United States. As a part of the Elon minority raised below the Mason-Dixon line, I am all too aware of certain negative associations that the rest of the world may have regarding this region, stereotypes amplified by modern media in the form of television shows like “Duck Dynasty” and through such controversy as that sparking North Carolina’s “Moral Monday” protests.
As many students who travel the United States and even the globe to attend Elon will observe, it is narrow-minded to assume the southeast is a cultural boondock, undereducated and formed exclusively by dirt roads and dirtier bigotries. The mountain-lined region, with all its complexity, is the homeland of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams.
The southeast today still produces great minds, cultures and a renowned reputation for hospitality, not to mention soul food. Despite all hardships and negative associations, which this region has faced and continues to face, no person should judge this or any other location until they have observed the region firsthand.
Such direct experience is crucial to achieve an educated understanding of what defines a region or culture. One must observe the beauty and the human element that a region possesses, as well as be able to perceive how areas are attempting to redefine themselves by fighting against the darkness of the past in order to preserve a more diverse humanity. For places like Syria and Egypt and, in a far less extreme sense, for North Carolina and the southeastern United States, this is the hope of many.
Travel allows us to witness such hope, as well as to partake in a ubiquitous struggle for a better world and hopefully to experience hospitality and a universal humanity. After such an encounter we are able to better observe our fellow man, as preconceived notions are replaced by open-mindedness and acceptance and we no longer isolate but can identify the “foreign” within ourselves.