Some Reflections As We Move Into the New Year
When you prepare yourself to spend a year abroad in volunteer service, you go in with the expectation that you will be changed by the experience. Transformed, even. What you can't prepare for is exactly how that will happen. Before I left home in September, many people asked me what my expectations were for the year. I often answered that I was trying not to go in with strong expectations, since I knew how likely I was to be wrong. All I knew is that I would be deeply impacted by my experience in ways that I would be unable to fully predict. At that point, I was thinking of change as additive : everything that I felt and knew about myself would remain true, with additional feelings, thoughts, and values added on top. I don't think I would have been able to consciously articulate that at the time, but looking back, that's how I felt. This is, of course, not how change works. I have wanted to live abroad for a long time. Ever since my first trip overseas with my mom when