A World Winder exclusive from Guest Blogger, Tom Crandall.
During a Gap Year with Thinking Beyond Borders, You Learn about How to Learn, You Become an Ambassador of Change, and You do it with your Own Two Hands.
My decision to do a gap year started with my Dad. His biggest point about doing a gap year was that the opportunity was rare. When he was young, he wanted to race through high school and college in order to get a job. Now for many high school students, a gap year is a very viable option, and most colleges encourage gap years or semesters abroad. I attended a gap year fair in Hartford, CT in winter of my senior year as I was deciding whether or not to take the gap year avenue. I saw many different opportunities for gap years, including some to South America for Spanish language and cultural immersion, one to India with the opportunity to climb near Everest, and one with NOLS to do different outdoor oriented semesters around the world. But the standout program for me that night was Thinking Beyond Borders.
I sat on the idea of a gap year, initially swayed by my Dad because of the rare opportunity to travel the world, unlikely to have the chance again in the future. Yet I kept changing my mind- my Mom provided the perspective that it might serve as an obstacle to my studies, a roadblock or delay in my educational process. Students at her college also agreed that the program sounded overly elaborate and unreal, that “becoming an agent of change” as the pamphlet explained proved impossible and overblown.
My friends would also be at Colorado College waiting for me, and the temptation to ski and hike in the Rocky Mountain’s fourteen thousand foot peaks allured me. But for me the tipping point occurred sometime spring of senior year as I talked with my Dad again about the sheer opportunity I might pass up, the opportunity to travel the world and study in seven different countries all at the age of 18. At that point I realized that skiing and friends could wait, that the mountains would still lie in waiting, and that never would I have the opportunity to take a whole year to travel like this again. After the hefty application process and phone interview, I received the big white acceptance letter in the mail. Of the 150 or so in my graduating class, only a handful decided to take gap years.
A Gap Year with Thinking Beyond Borders
The program includes travel to seven different countries, including Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa, India, China, and Cambodia. It is an academic gap year program with the focus of teaching students how to become agents of change in the world, and how to create that social change.
On the trip are eleven students and three trip leaders, and the trip lasts about eight months, or an academic year. At the end of our last country, Cambodia, we will return back to the States to see our parents for a weekend, meet with some representatives at the UN and World Bank, and make our presentations of learning from the year.
Our core countries include Ecuador, South Africa, India, and China, each visit lasting about 4-5 weeks in a homestay during our work project. Each core country has a focus on a global issue pertaining to that area. In Ecuador we studied the environment and natural resources, in South Africa we are studying public health with a focus on HIV/AIDS, in India we will be studying education, and lastly in China we will be studying sustainable agriculture. All of the countries’ focuses include a global perspective, revolving especially around how we interact with the world and these global issues.
At the end of each core county we have an enrichment week, basically as a respite in between work projects. After Ecuador we went to hike the Inca Trail in Peru leading to Machu Picchu, and our enrichment week in South Africa will be a safari. Despite these amazing enrichment weeks, the program is academically challenging, in ways that high school does not address. Each country includes a media project, a group exercise meant to question the assumptions of the audience without coming off with a book report feel. The projects aim to create cognitive dissonance in the audience.
Work Projects for Voluntourism
In Ecuador the focus of our work project was helping the community of Atahualpa conserve its environment and enhance attractive qualities for eco-tourists. It was a small, rural mountain town with the main form of work farming or working on flower plantations. A few residents owned small stores on the main stretch in town, but other than these chances for work, jobs were scarce. All the food was relatively local, with some coming from nearby Quito, but the majority is grown on the town farms. I even got a chance to milk cows.
Our first work project entailed fixing a road up this mountain pass to make transportation to some of the houses easier, as well as creating convenient access to the mountain for tourists. We filled in holes and dug trenches on the sides of the dirt road for better drainage after rain. The next part included helping to carve and clean a trail to one of the town’s biggest attractions, a waterfall. Narrow, drop-off sections impeded easy walking down to the fall, so our job was to widen the trail for hikers. One day we even saw a man on a horse descending the narrow trail, which made us feel pretty proud of our work.
The final part of the project gave us the most satisfaction: building a greenhouse to plant local, medicinal plants. The project included digging trenches in which to grow the new plants, as well as building wooden tables to fit under the greenhouse canopy. All the materials for the greenhouse were taken from the nearby forest, and with the help of three locals with more construction knowledge we finished the greenhouse. After we left, we received a message from the leader of our project joyfully exclaiming that the medicinal plants, such as chamomile, were planted and doing well. The plants were part of an effort to rekindle the cultural practice of traditional medicine, a tradition that faded as the town matured and grew. My group’s media project covered eco-tourism as well as the complexities and impacts of traveling.
Each of our work sessions ended with frustration and confusion as to our direction and final project vision. The hardest part of the project included the challenge of not doing a book report, as well as identifying our assumptions on the topic and recognizing those as goals for assumptions we want to challenge through our media. Not to mention our final idea kept changing and morphing through our interviews, so we did not have a set destination. I really learned that the process of learning was not in the destination, but in the journey.
Tom is an 18 year-old native of Connecticut. He is currently finishing a year, studying outside the classroom with Thinking Beyond Borders. His gap year experiences and fantastic photos can be viewed on his blog, Tom Beyond Borders.
sending...