Rice University Nourish International Service Project Internship 2016:
We are members of the Rice University chapter of Nourish International. Our organization's goal is to empower students to learn about ways to reduce poverty around the globe. Each year, we work with grassroots, community-based nonprofits around the world to conduct sustainable development projects. This year, we're going to Dindigul, a small town in Southern India where we will be helping the MEERA Foundation with health evaluation and education efforts surrounding tuberculosis (TB).
Visiting another country is like trying a new food for the first time. It's cool and great and sometimes completely exhilarating, but ultimately it's ephemeral and fades into the dredges of long-forgotten memory within a month, tops. Traveling is a privilege, it really is, but it's like very few things can truly impact us anymore. This cathedral looks the same as that cathedral, the tumultuous history of this country sounds vaguely familiar to the history of another. Connection is a difficult thing to really attach to a foreign place.
I'm not all that well-traveled, but even I feel the disconnect and vague wonder at each new place. I'm only half listening when a tour guide describes the origin of the masonry, and really just taking pictures for the sake of taking pictures of some grand site — pictures that I'll likely never look at again.
The Nourish International trip isn't just about service. It's also about me and what I want. As obvious as that sounds, I think people tend to think, "Oh yeah, a service trip — so you're serving others?" and the assumption is left at that. A service trip doesn't just aim to enrich the lives of others; it can do most likely volumes more for yours. And I've never done something like this. When I interviewed for this opportunity, I told the executive board members that all the significant volunteer work I've done over the past two years has been largely remote. And while I could say I learned some things about nonprofits and what they do, I wouldn't say I felt anything, nor gained anything real from those experiences. In fact, I would barely call them "experiences" at all.
To me, those issues are still faraway things. I'm still an outsider. Or rather, I'm an outsider living in an outsider bubble. I know that it's likely I'll never truly escape that bubble — my upbringing has ensured that. I'm not resentful of it, because obviously it's much better to be in this position than the one on the other side of the spectrum. But I can't keep pretending that I know this or that about the "real world" while staying sequestered, cloistered in my own little world. Saratoga was a bubble, and so is Rice. Wherever I go, the bubble will likely follow.
Yes, I want to help people. But I also want to help myself. My parents may have been right when they said that public health technically doesn't make much sense for an English major, that English education would be the much more obvious choice for me. But I don't think college should always be about forging a one-dimensional goal, that we should barrel along a narrow alleyway-type path toward one specific endpoint.
I want to see what the other side of the world i slike. I will probably never, ever have the chance to go to India again. But would I ever go there recreationally? Sure, I would love to, but whom would I even go with, and what are the chances that would happen? At least, this is "for a good cause." I'll meet actual families living in the Tamil Nadu, as well as other adults who work with them on a daily basis. I'll meet people who dedicate their lives to eradicating tuberculosis, to helping people who are far less privileged than they are. Those are people who chose to do this, and continue choosing to do so every day, and to me there's something so powerful about that.
These six weeks are probably one of the rare periods of time when I will actually be selfless. And even then, I won't be completely selfless, because every encounter on that trip, every experience and every kernel of insight gained, I will store away for my own benefit, so that I can write about them later, or draw upon those moments to create deeper metaphors, to plum the depths of personal connection with potential readers.
I think some things like this, the types of things where you apply on a whim without deeper thinking or vacillation, which would normally mark a hard-earned decision, are things that are really what we want. Bhangra was one of those whims. I went to tryouts without thinking, and now I can't imagine what my college life would be like without this team. Everything else was a calculated decision in some way — the school newspaper was predetermined, as was the literary magazine, as are classes, and even some friendships. And that just seems so inorganic. Nothing makes me happy the way dance does, and I would never have known that if I hadn't just gone for it.
It's obviously important to forge career goals and make sure to really beat that all home, to show experience and worldliness, but at the same time, there are so many choices there. But we center basically our whole lives around that, and then pretend like we don't have time for anything else. Things like this, service and travel and personal interaction with people completely different from us, can't be bought nor gained any other way than personally experiencing it yourself.
I will likely never do this again. And I should do it once, at the very least, even if it's just to say I did it.
