Finding the Perfect Program: How to Scope out an International Experience
Wed. 25 2009 | Anita Joseph
Three months out of high school I told my parents I wanted to travel to Latin America by myself. Reasonably, they were a little shocked. When I decided to take a gap year before attending college, they knew I would be leaving home. However, this was a bit extreme-outside of North America I had only ever traveled to India, and that was always with plenty of family around. Nevertheless, they consented to let me go (and fund my travels) as long as I could prove the safety of my destination. With their permission in hand, I set out to find a project I wanted to work with, in Latin America. I ended up teaching twenty-two captivating fifth graders for four months at a Honduran bilingual school. Later during my gap year I traveled to Indonesia and taught at a public school. I then went to Zanzibar, off the coast of Tanzania and taught at a tourism training institute for three months. All of these experiences were amazing and transformative; I couldn’t ask for better.
However, choosing these specific places and programs was not an easy or simple process. Not only did I have to fulfill my parents’ safety condition, I also wanted to make sure that the place and organization I picked were right for me. Many students sign up for a study, intern or work abroad program without truly looking into it. They fly on the basis of friends’ opinions and various brochures. This is no way to contribute to the success of your trip! Choosing an international experience should involve considerably deeper thought, similar to the process used to vet potential college choices. You need to rigorously consult a variety of resources and people to pick a place and organization that suit your personality and goals.
The first major choice students wishing to go abroad must make is where to go. Some students may already have a specific country in mind, others only a desire to live in a place where people speak a certain language. Nevertheless, language and culture are only the first traits you must make choices on. Do you want to live in a poor neighborhood or a wealthy neighborhood? Can you fall asleep to a city soundtrack of traffic and music? How ethnically diverse of a neighborhood do you want to live in? Such constants we take for given in a familiar environment, but they are often thrown wildly off-balance abroad. It is not enough to set your sights on a country or culture. Within these boundaries there will be extraordinary diversity, and therefore an extraordinarily diverse set of international experiences.
In order to get a true picture of what life in a certain location is like, you have to discuss with another student who has lived there. I found my Honduran school, Cofradia’s Bilingual School, randomly on the internet. It looked like a great project; volunteers go to Cofradia, a town outside Honduras’s second-largest city, San Pedro Sula, and teach a grade at an English immersion school. The website boasted giddy pictures of smiling teachers and students in a sunny, green place. Then again, you can’t trust everything you read on the internet. I emailed the project director, and asked him to put me in touch with some students who had taught at the school before. He gave me a list of people as well as their contact information, and I emailed all of them with detailed questions. Through the subsequent correspondence, I found out that one of the former teachers, Stephanie, lived a few hours away from me. Bingo! One weekend I drove out and met Stephanie for dinner. She told me that Cofradia was a dusty, poor town that sweltered half the year and was merely scorching the other half. The teachers lived in a house on the main street of the town, so it was often noisy at night. Nevertheless, she said, for a Spanish-speaker it would be easy to become acquainted with gregarious townspeople. This hardscrabble but hopeful portrait of Cofradia convinced me that this was the place to which I wanted to go. Additionally, Stephanie, herself, was petite like me and more soft-spoken than I am, and I thought, “if she can do well there, so can I.”
Additionally, to find out how you would do in a situation, go to an environment analogous to your potential destination but closer to home. For example, to see whether you could handle living in a poor town abroad for several months, you might want to spend a day in a poorer town in America. If you are unsure whether you could tolerate living in a city center, you might want to spend a night in the city center of an American city. These experiences won’t be perfectly parallel, but they will give you some ideas of the ups and downs of each environment.
The second major factor you must determine is which organization to go abroad with. Program leadership should be willing and able to provide you with security and a safety net at the level you desire. I know of one girl who landed in Ghana expecting to meet a representative from the well-known NGO she was going to volunteer with, only to wait at the airport for two hours before anyone bothered to pick her up. She promptly returned back to America. In another case, a well-traveled Dutch friend of mine was not met at the airport by the Central American NGO she planned to work with, but went ahead and blithely organized her own transportation to the project site.
These two girls had two very different expectations of how much they would be guided in their international experiences, and unfortunately, one’s expectations did not meet reality. If you want to be guided a little bit more in your international experience, you have to research and make sure the organization you select has a reputation for this. If you want your study abroad program to take you on cultural excursions, or if you want an internship program to give you a new placement if you don’t like your original one, it is unlikely that you will be able to make a previously hands-off program change its ways for you.
The best way to find out how a program operates for real is again, to contact previous participants. When I was exploring study abroad and work abroad programs in East Africa, I emailed an organization that placed teachers in a Kenyan village. The director of the organization quoted me a high price for the program, while the former participant he put me in contact with told me that he had not paid for anything more than his lodgings. When I pointed out the discrepancy, the director abruptly quoted me a much lower price. This type of back-and-forth did not give me a good feeling for the program, and how it would treat me as a participant. I wanted some degree of organization for my East African experience, my first in Africa. I felt the program would not provide this, so I didn’t do it.
For more information on this subject, the internet is a great tool. Web search the organization’s name and go through every single page of searches—if there’s dirt to be found, it will be on somebody’s blog or comment. Also, if the program you are exploring is several years old, it might be a good idea to post a request for reviews on a popular travel website. This sleuthing will give you at least a feel for how an organization operates, and help you develop a sense of how you would fit in there.
In the end, you have to concede that some factors will be out of your control. Maybe your neighbor will play annoying music or perhaps there won’t be any good places to run. Small surprises and inconveniences are part of any new living situation. However, the basics, a suitable place and a suitable program, are under your control and should provide a foundation for a safe, enlightening experience. With these two factors in place, smaller quibbles will face to insignificance.
