Arriving back at Dartmouth after spending senior winter on the Kenya FSP, I soon realized just how much I'd missed. First I tried to get my mail, but my Hinman box had mysteriously vanished. I spent a full half-hour desperately searching the Hop for my registration card before I discovered they'd actually moved me OUTSIDE the building. I even have a new combination. Annoyed at having wasted three years of my life trying to memorize my old combo (I still forget it at the beginning of every term), I headed home to drown my frustration in Jeopardy. But when I turned on the TV, I discovered the second major event of winter term: my house mates got cable. We now get not only the Weather Channel, but three different evangelical stations.
Although three members of the Class of 1997 actually have future plans by now (me not being one of them), I've concluded that I didn't miss too much after all, not in comparison to what I got out of the Kenya program. Wandering around campus today, I kept having the same conversation, over and over again:
Random Acquaintance: "Oh, hey, Ellen. Wow, nice tan." (I do have a nice tan... I didn't notice it until I saw all these pasty, anemic Hanover winter survivors walking around campus.)
Me: "Yeah, I was in Kenya this winter."
RA: "Oh, really? How was it?"
Me: "Ummm... it was...um...(gulp)..."
I'm speechless. Do I try to explain how it was? Do they have five hours to kill? Do they even care? I decide they don't.
Me: "It was...amazing."
RA: "Cool. Okay, see you..."
I'm telling the truth, it was an amazing term, although a bit hard to explain in a thirty-second conversation in the Collis BlitzMail queue. But oddly enough, at the moment I'm finding Hanover equally incredible, or at least I have a new perspective on this snowy (arrgh! WHY is it still snowy??) little college town, where uncollected garbage doesn't pile up in the street and I can walk around downtown without concealing my watch. It's nice to be able to drink water right out of the tap without getting typhoid, and I'm finally recovering from my three- month bout of diarrhea (too many mangoes, but you didn't want to know that).
More than these obvious luxuries of life in the U.S., though, I'm appreciating some of the academic advantages and freedoms we have at Dartmouth. In Kenya, competition is stiff for opportunities to study in the States. It's no surprise that some of the brightest people I know at Dartmouth are foreign students. At Kenyan universities, students aren't given much of an outlet to voice their opinions. If they protest campus conditions, administrators just close the university down for six months or a year. While we were in Nairobi, a student leader, previously tortured by the police, was killed in a mysterious "fire." Were this Kenya, C&G would burn to the ground.
Most Dartmouth students have gone on an off-campus program, at least they've spent a term drinking beer in Germany or lying on the beach in Barcelona. But when you're actually at school, despite the ubiquitous Non-Western distrib, it's easy to forget there's a world beyond Dartmouth's dogs, girls in clogs, pine trees and fraternities. That's what makes terms like the Kenya FSP, Tucker fellowships and similar experiences so valuable: they push people like me, who grew up in small towns and city suburbs, out of our comfort zone. They shake us up a little and make us take another look at the world and the place where we've stumbled into it.
I'd like to think that I've come back from Kenya, well ... different somehow. That I have a better sense of reality, that I've rearranged my priorities, that I've becomes this fascinating, worldly person. But I'm still just me, with a tan and Maasai bracelets...a bit more aware of the world around this campus, a little more appreciative of a country in which things really work and looking forward to going back to Africa as soon as possible.
Life was definitely harder in Kenya, but I do miss the excitement; it's an intriguing place. Maybe that's why so many people start longing to go back as soon as they return. Maybe it's the fact that I haven't seen any giraffes frolicking on the green, or the incredible view of the stars from Mt. Kenya. I think I'd trade even the Weather Channel for those stars, and maybe a few mangoes.
