..........I walked the streets of Saratoga Springs for the last time yesterday. Tomorrow, I will be at terminal 7 of JFK International Airport to board a Cathay Pacific 777 which will fly me to Hong Kong. From there a Dragon-Air Airbus A320 will bring me home for the first time in nearly five years. The total flight time - including layover in Hong Kong- will be twenty hours and forty minutes. It should be enough time to prepare to meet my immediate and extended family, and breathe in the hot, dry and dusty July air of the world's youngest republic.
..........But 'tomorrow' is the last thing on mind right now. As much as I am looking forward to going home, I have to admit I am already starting to miss people and places among several other things. For the most part, I usually glide over past memories and tend to concentrate more on the future. But today I can't help but churn out memory after another memory from the last five years I have spent abroad.
..........While growing up in Nepal, I had a fire in my belly to 'get to know' the world. It is difficult to put that emotion into words. I did not want to simply be a tourist, take pictures and collect postcards or souvenirs. I wanted to take in the culture of various nations. I wanted to live with and learn from different people in all kinds of strange lands. To some extent I have fulfilled it in the five years since I left Kathmandu for the US.
..........I left home to get an education - in its most traditional sense. I got much more than just a college degree though. The 'education' I have received in the US has brought about a significant change in me. I have done a whole of maturing.
..........As a 19 year old freshman in college my resume boasted not just good academics but an internship with a leading investment bank and a real job experience with a major business house in Nepal. I have to admit that I was pretty full of myself. I also personally chose to tutor weak and failing school-going students who managed to pass major exams in Nepal under my tutorage. All this added to my ego. Though it was not apparent from the outside, since I barely showed-off, I never missed an opportunity to mildly boast of my ‘accomplishments’ among peers and elders. Fast forward four years later, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business/Economics, my pride is gone, my ego has dwindled and in a cruel twist of fate I feel less educated and barely competent.
..........Let’s not jump to conclusions. I did not drink so much in school as to lose half my brain cells. But somewhere between drinking and skipping select classes, I came across many people from different backgrounds. A student from an African nation where the inflation rate is an unimaginable 1000%+, a 75+ year old African-American woman who remembers being isolated by fellow Caucasian classmates, a WWII veteran who can relate to Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, a reclusive art collector who travels to remote locations in Tibet, India, Pakistan & Nepal to collect indigenous Thanka art that would have otherwise been sold for less than $20, a single male nurse with a big, charitable heart who has travelled to more countries than James Bond has in his entire Franchise-life, several young adults my age from war ravaged countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and Sierra Leone who have suffered in ways most people only hear about in the news, and the list goes on………
……….Getting to know these people and listening to what they had to say was a humbling experience. It brought to life all the stories that I had witnessed through news and history books. They gave a human face to relate with issues ranging from hunger and terrorism in developing countries to dysfunctional immigration laws and changing environmental attitudes in developed ones. None of this could be put on my resume unlike my ‘work experiences’ before college. But it opened up my mind. This was my greatest learning.
……….During my rainy graduation ceremony an embarrassing memory haunted me. Way back in the 2nd or 3rd grade, when a teacher had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had said that I wanted to change the world. The entire class erupted to a laughing hysteria. I don’t recall how I had handled the situation. Somewhere along the growing-up process I relegated the ‘change the world’ aspiration to drug-infused hippies. On graduation day, however, I wanted to feel the same way again. I am not necessarily going to change the world but I want to do something that is more than just meeting my personal needs. Neither do I want to simply travel and experience places and things anymore. I want to interact with real people and help them with (if not solve) problems they face in their lives. It might sound lofty on first glance, but if one aims high, one might end up close to it, if not at it.
..........But 'tomorrow' is the last thing on mind right now. As much as I am looking forward to going home, I have to admit I am already starting to miss people and places among several other things. For the most part, I usually glide over past memories and tend to concentrate more on the future. But today I can't help but churn out memory after another memory from the last five years I have spent abroad.
..........While growing up in Nepal, I had a fire in my belly to 'get to know' the world. It is difficult to put that emotion into words. I did not want to simply be a tourist, take pictures and collect postcards or souvenirs. I wanted to take in the culture of various nations. I wanted to live with and learn from different people in all kinds of strange lands. To some extent I have fulfilled it in the five years since I left Kathmandu for the US.
..........I left home to get an education - in its most traditional sense. I got much more than just a college degree though. The 'education' I have received in the US has brought about a significant change in me. I have done a whole of maturing.
..........As a 19 year old freshman in college my resume boasted not just good academics but an internship with a leading investment bank and a real job experience with a major business house in Nepal. I have to admit that I was pretty full of myself. I also personally chose to tutor weak and failing school-going students who managed to pass major exams in Nepal under my tutorage. All this added to my ego. Though it was not apparent from the outside, since I barely showed-off, I never missed an opportunity to mildly boast of my ‘accomplishments’ among peers and elders. Fast forward four years later, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business/Economics, my pride is gone, my ego has dwindled and in a cruel twist of fate I feel less educated and barely competent.
..........Let’s not jump to conclusions. I did not drink so much in school as to lose half my brain cells. But somewhere between drinking and skipping select classes, I came across many people from different backgrounds. A student from an African nation where the inflation rate is an unimaginable 1000%+, a 75+ year old African-American woman who remembers being isolated by fellow Caucasian classmates, a WWII veteran who can relate to Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, a reclusive art collector who travels to remote locations in Tibet, India, Pakistan & Nepal to collect indigenous Thanka art that would have otherwise been sold for less than $20, a single male nurse with a big, charitable heart who has travelled to more countries than James Bond has in his entire Franchise-life, several young adults my age from war ravaged countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine and Sierra Leone who have suffered in ways most people only hear about in the news, and the list goes on………
……….Getting to know these people and listening to what they had to say was a humbling experience. It brought to life all the stories that I had witnessed through news and history books. They gave a human face to relate with issues ranging from hunger and terrorism in developing countries to dysfunctional immigration laws and changing environmental attitudes in developed ones. None of this could be put on my resume unlike my ‘work experiences’ before college. But it opened up my mind. This was my greatest learning.
……….During my rainy graduation ceremony an embarrassing memory haunted me. Way back in the 2nd or 3rd grade, when a teacher had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had said that I wanted to change the world. The entire class erupted to a laughing hysteria. I don’t recall how I had handled the situation. Somewhere along the growing-up process I relegated the ‘change the world’ aspiration to drug-infused hippies. On graduation day, however, I wanted to feel the same way again. I am not necessarily going to change the world but I want to do something that is more than just meeting my personal needs. Neither do I want to simply travel and experience places and things anymore. I want to interact with real people and help them with (if not solve) problems they face in their lives. It might sound lofty on first glance, but if one aims high, one might end up close to it, if not at it.
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2 comments:
so, how is home?
i started my blog when i first went home after years overseas...wonder how much our trips "home" will correlate.
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