The Hawk

Issue date: 11/17/06 Section: Features

The quiet of a still apartment in Madrid is broken as a page is torn from a FoxTrot calendar and a soft chuckle welcomes the new day. On the other side of the city, a pair of awakening eyes take notice of a small Mexican flag sewn to a backpack, their very first sight of the morning.

And hundreds of miles to the north, a hand comes to rest on a New York Giants jersey and, after deliberation, removes it from the closet to be worn on an unseasonable London day. In the same moment, three lives are touched by previously inconsequential items and are all reminded in a different way of the same thing: home.

Many college students know or remember the difficulty of transitioning from high school to college, of leaving one's home and family for the first time and setting up in a new environment with new norms and expectations, separated from home by a distance of as few as a hundred miles, but feels like ten times that length. But, for the student spending a semester or year abroad, the seeming distance from home that confronts the freshman is actually thousands of miles, an abyss often separated by sea and always separated by unfamiliar customs and daunting new cultures.

Overnight, one is not only expected to immediately dive into classes and extracurricular activities, but also deal with potential language barriers and cope with an awareness of being an "outsider" forced to integrate into a culture and society completely distinct from one's own. As such, the parallels between the freshman coming to college and the student studying abroad are superficial at best; at least the freshman can call home at a moment's notice, a luxury which the student abroad may lack.

But in addition to all of its obstacles and challenges, this new environment has a transformative quality, and one that changes the simplest of things into sudden and meaningful reminders of home. Every freshman who has ever experienced homesickness knows that phone calls and photographs play an important role in closing the gap between life away from home and the past that one has left behind, but for the student studying in a foreign country, such things take on an even greater importance, and the things that one might not even consider in casual, day-to-day thought, suddenly possess a new significance.

Of course, photographs play an important part in reminding one of home and combating the ever-looming threat of homesickness, but other things, some of them as insignificant as a shirt or a notebook, can sometimes be even more effective, taking on new significance in response to an unfamiliar and changing environment.

Continued...

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