Posted by Ryan on September 5, 2005, 9:54 pm, in reply to "MY STRUGGLES AT HOME AND ABROAD" After I graduated from high school, I took on a part-time job working for a charity organization—and at the time, I never had any idea what an effect that job was going to end up having on me, my whole life long, after that. After I had worked for a while with the charity organization, a friend from high school and I started attending community college in the mornings, working part-time in the afternoons. Later I rose to a higher position, and I began to take a look at the other available work positions. One of them was doing fieldwork, which meant traveling overseas to the countries where the charity work took place and performing a number of jobs there, including the distributing of the food to the needy people. I thought that sounded like an interesting and exciting job. You would actually get to travel and live abroad, with the company paying for it. What an adventure, I thought! You may not get to travel in luxury or anything, you have to go on the freighter ships, and the pay wasn’t really all that great, but what the hey, you still got to go. If I were able to get a position like that, I figured I could take some time off from school, do it for a while, and then come back and continue my studies later. I went and talked to the woman in charge of that department. She told me there weren’t any positions available overseas at the moment, but that there might be some the following year. She asked me if I had ever lived in a foreign country before. I hadn’t. I had never been out of the country in my life, except for a few daylong trips into border cities in Canada and Mexico, but that doesn’t really count as having been out of the country. Canada, for all practical purposes, is identical to the U.S., and the Mexican border-cities were just daylong novelties, like going to the Old West sections of Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm, and then when the day is over you have to come back to reality again. She told me living in Third World countries wasn’t like living in the U.S. There were a lot of amenities we’re used to here that aren’t available, living there. I asked her, “Could it be worse than going camping? Some people can’t stand going camping because you don’t have all the comforts of home, but some people love it, even though it means living in a primitive way. I go camping all the time and I love it. I don’t care if all the middle-class luxuries are missing. I think I’d like it living there.” She asked me if, by any chance, I spoke the language of the country in question. I said no, but I could study and learn it. “Well, THAT’ll take a few years. Learning a language isn’t as easy as it may sound if you’ve never done it.” Now I regretted that when I was in high school I had never studied any foreign language. I could have. Then I’d be able to say I had and I handled it well. I suggested that since I’d have to wait about a year or so anyway, in the meantime I could enroll in a course in it at college and start learning it. She told me to think it over very carefully during that time, and that it wouldn’t hurt to start learning the language if I was really that interested, but that I wasn’t being guaranteed anything. But the more I thought about it the more entranced I became with the idea. The next quarter I enrolled in a class at school to learn the language, and began studying it enthusiastically. I progressed rapidly and was learning it well. I tried out what I had learned on the students at college who were from there. They complimented me and said I was pronouncing it well. Link: Post a response
Message modified by board administrator September 6, 2005, 9:50 am
(Originally posted November 7, 2003, 6:43 pm)
Maybe I would call it serendipity, but serendipity means accidently discovering a treasure when you weren’t even trying to, and it may not be setting the most wholesome thought pattern in my mind to think of it that way.
