From Sipping Tea to Downing Coffee: Life After SST

Five seconds after I’m awake, I check my phone. I respond quickly to the most urgent emails, scan my 12 appointments for the day, down a quick cup of coffee and bike to my first class at 8:30 a.m. I’ll be leading design processes, teaching directing for the stage, organizing rehearsals and planning projects for the next 16 hours, before getting a little sleep and doing it all again the next day.

I am in my first year of grad school. Life wasn’t always like this.

Five and half years ago, I was sitting on a bamboo mat, looking out across endless rice fields in Cambodia’s poorest province, Prey Veng. My service days included glorious hour-long moto rides across vast fields and sitting for hours at a time listening to conversations I couldn’t understand. I was living a life supremely different from the one I am now.

Out of the Classroom, Into the World

In his opening remarks at a service-learning conference a quarter century ago, Goshen College president emeritus J. Lawrence Burkholder said he claimed only one credential for speaking at the event: He was a “born again” believer in international education.

As one who has co-led nine SSTs — in Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Cuba, China, and Cambodia — I write today as one similarly reborn. And in the spirit of some Dominican evangelicals, I’ll testify to a series of rebirths during my years of teaching in a small, Mennonite, liberal arts college — recommitments to graceful living as well as to international education, and to service or experiential learning. God knows, I’m a believer.

But even back when I was a pagan, in my undergraduate years at a college that had no international education program, I intuitively recognized the need for and value of cross-cultural education and experiential learning. In my sophomore year, a friend and I spent six weeks of the Christmas break and January interterm backpacking and train-hopping our way through western Europe. We lived off of oranges and bread; toured museums, cathedrals and other historical sites; bedded down in the homes of any family that would take us in, or in youth hostels; and communicated in our halting French and German, smiling and gesturing profusely when we traversed Italy and Spain.