Seems like in my neighborhood—the Upper Northwest quadrant of D.C.—all the college-age kids have fled to other countries. My own daughter, a junior, is doing a fall semester in Paris, where she can rub elbows with the kid who lives across the alley (doing a gap year) or the twin brother of one of her best friends, who lives a few blocks away (in D.C., that is). Not all the neighborhood kids are in Paris. Yesterday evening I ran into a neighbor who casually mentioned that her daughter, a senior, had spent the summer in Madagascar.
Of course, this phenomenon isn’t limited to my neighborhood. It’s become de rigueur for college students to do a summer, a semester, or even a year abroad. My daughter could easily hopscotch around Europe bunking with her high school and college friends (actually, this does seem to be her plan). I suppose I could adopt the curmudgeonly attitude I heard expressed the other evening by an acquaintance, who complained that his daughter had “wasted” her time in Paris and Florence while she was an undergraduate. On further inquiry, though, it was revealed that her sloth had consisted largely of wandering through museums, which, given the fact that she was an art history major, was perhaps not a total waste of time.
So far my daughter seems to have spent more time on walking tours and at wine-tastings than she has in class (although I’m sure that will change), but I’m not one to begrudge these kids their fun. Living in another country—even a highly developed Western European country—is often an education in itself. And taking college-level classes in another language while living with a non-English-speaking host family, as my daughter is doing, is no piece of cake.
My generation, including that curmudgeonly dad, may be a bit jealous. When I was in college in the seventies, the administration’s attitude was, “You want to go abroad? Fine, have fun, and maybe there’ll be a place for you here when you get back.” No academic credit, no programs providing support, certainly no fifty-page handbooks warning you about going down dark streets alone at night or advising your parents on how to Skype. (All we had back then was snail mail—and in Europe, the postal carriers were more often than not on strike.)
I did manage to go to Europe for a year after college, on a fellowship, but I chose the least exotic country of the bunch—in fact, it’s not even clear it’s really in Europe. Having majored in English history and literature, I embarked on a master’s program in … England! I thought it would be like coming home. Instead, that year taught me (in addition to some stuff about English history) how truly American I was. A valuable lesson, even if it wasn’t part of the curriculum.
I’m even more in awe of the kids who head off to places like Madagascar (feel free to substitute Mozambique, Mongolia, or any number of places it never occurred to me to go to when I was in college), often to do community service. I do take a little dig at such programs in my forthcoming novel, The Mother Daughter Show. One of my high-school-age characters asks her parents if she can go on a summer program where she’ll stay in a Ghanaian village hut with no running water or electricity and help build a school. When her parents ask how much it costs, the girl says vaguely that it’s “something like four thousand dollars,” or maybe five—plus airfare, of course. Her cash-strapped parents are aghast.
It’s true that there may be more efficient, and cheaper, ways of building a school in a Ghanaian village. (Such as maybe sending money to pay some Ghanaians to do it. They could probably use the jobs.) But there are also valuable intangible benefits to such programs, like fostering cross-cultural understanding. I imagine that a privileged American kid who spends a summer, or even a few weeks, living in a Ghanaian village will emerge with a different perspective on the world.
But in The Mother Daughter Show, the girl’s father suggests that if she wants to help people she doesn’t have to travel farther than Southeast D.C., where she could, for example, tutor some needy kids. (To make the experience more exotic for her, he offers to disconnect the electricity and put the bathrooms off limits.) And the sad truth is that there are parts of this city that are almost as foreign to the denizens of Upper Northwest—in language, culture, and general standard of living—as certain underdeveloped countries. Some very talented people are working hard to close that gap, to make us all—as our Mayor’s slogan would have it—“One City,” but there’s a long way to go.
There’s another way to have a cross-cultural experience without leaving home. Washington, like many other American cities, has seen a huge influx of immigrants in the last twenty or thirty years. Residents of my neck of the woods may not cross paths with them often, and we may not notice them when we do—they tend to be busboys and hotel housekeepers and other people we often take for granted. But I’ve been teaching English to immigrants for the past eight years or so, and getting to know them and hear a bit about their lives and customs has been as valuable an educational experience for me as I hope learning English is for them.
But while it’s true that you don’t need to go to Ghana—or Paris—to have a meaningful experience of another culture, it’s also true that it’s fun to go to Paris. Or Ghana, I suppose. But my daughter is in Paris. And even though I’m now way too old to pass for a college kid, in a few days I’m going to join her, at least for ten days or so. And I won’t be surprised if I run into one of my neighbors there, doing the same thing.