The school is equipped to respond to the students’ unique position as refugees. Teachers are careful to identify potentially triggering material, and a counselor is on staff to address the traumas that the students likely sustained when fleeing from conflict. The school also provides students with free lunches and snacks to address poverty affecting many refugee students which can create barriers to learning such as lack of nutritious food. Because the school is a specialty middle school, it is able to place students in “forms” based on literacy level and not age.  In an article for Gather Good, two former GVP students credited their success in college to attending the GVP. One student acknowledged the power of learning alongside other students “who are in the same boat with you.”

The school aims to help students process their trauma by integrating visual art and music into all areas of the curriculum, drawing on research which suggests that arts-based interventions help refugee students to process and express their emotions. The GVP has an arts coordinator, an artist in resident who writes songs especially for the GVP chorus, and the school partners with organizations such as The High Museum and the Synchronicity Theatre for field trips. I noticed one student in particular who struggled to engage in most of the class activities, and who often did not turn in work, light up whenever the students were asked to produce artwork in class. She often put the most time and effort into the drawings out of all the students in the class.

Despite the efforts of the school to create an affirming and healing space for students, there remain many challenges to this type of work. The teachers must be aware of the values which students’ families bring with them across the border. Parents might be nervous about the reproductive health curriculum taught in the health class, however the school also has an obligation to prepare students to enter high school as teenage girls. Another challenge is finding culturally responsive literature for the classrooms. Children’s’ literature is a predominantly white field, and most of the books in the GVP library feature white children from the west. In recent years there has been a greater push for diverse children’s literature. Activist efforts such as #1000blackgirlbooks  and We Need Diverse Books are pushing for greater diversity in publishing and access to books which reflect students identities and experiences. The GVP has not yet caught up to this wave by having a rich collection of books written by and for the communities they are serving. Finally, the very structure of the school raises problems. With an almost entirely white board of directors and staff, the school maintains the power over resources and curriculum building. In this way, the school mimics and upholds the very structures that it professes to resist. It raises important questions about most non-profits serving non-western communities of color: in what ways do they generate power with, and perhaps power over the communities they are serving?

Even with these unsolved dilemmas, it is impossible to deny the joy, learning, and friendships which are fostered every day at the GVP. While the students have different nationalities, dress, diets, and religious practices, they are able to find commonalities with one another. They love to play games, and they know which girl is best at picking words for hangman, or playing the guard in “the statue garden.” They share music with one another, and half of the students have binders sporting the pictures and logo of the popular K-Pop group “BTS.” Many of the students share a deep connection with their families, and agree that their mothers are their heroes. Even the category of “girl” seems to be meaningful across national borders, and the students find solidarity together in that identity.

The “Author’s Teas,” or showcases which the GVP puts on for donors and parents twice per semester, highlight the very best of the work being done by the GVP to preserve cultural identities while creating cross-cultural community. Students are all assigned short lines in English, and many voices shake as they struggle not only with the nerves associated with public speaking, but doing so in a foreign language. At the last Author’s Tea that I attended, students in small groups also sang verses in their native tongues. A mother’s face in the audience shone with pride. At another Author’s Tea, the students sang “This Land is Your Land,” which made my eyes tear up. Underneath the benign cuteness of the children’s choir was a radical assertion that no matter what the political discourse says on the matter, this land belongs to them, too.

Image taken from the Public Domain

Before I came to Agnes Scott, I traveled to take nice pictures and find a relaxing respite from everyday life. Any other way to travel had never occurred to me. Then I was assigned to the Journeys class to Trinidad. As a class we read  A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid, and I began to interrogate my motivations and privilege when I travel. We analyzed the social, economic, and political factors which have shaped the national context of Trinidad and Tobago. By the time I boarded the plane, I was prepared for far more than a week long Caribbean beach vacation.

The journey itself was a whirlwind of museum visits, nature treks, and steel pan performances in the capital city, Port of Spain. We attended the annual International Women’s Day March and we were even invited to perform a song we had written as a class on the main stage.

We traveled to the remote town of Matelot, where the DORCUS Women’s Group hosted us and guided us through a community lead service project building a library. At the end of the stay we had a lime with our hosts: dancing, laughing, and playing limbo.

During the trip, things often did not go as planned, however our trip leaders encouraged us to embrace our flexibility. When we felt resistant to the many ways in which we were being stretched, we challenged ourselves to set our defensiveness to the side. Journeys changed who I am as a traveler.

This experience taught me that learning does not happen passively, it is an active and engaged process. The most valuable moments were staying up late into the night with my co-travelers working on our song for the march, and standing side by side striking into the earth with our shovels where the library was going to be. We could easily have watched from the sidelines, and played the tourist. But we did not, and for that I am grateful.

It also taught me the value of reflection. On the trip, many experiences were puzzling, or nagged at me in ways that I could not express in the moment. The post-trip classes were the time that I used to bring up these moments, and talk through both the most joyous, and the most difficult parts of the trip with my co-travelers. There were difficult moments of confusion, privilege, and racism on the trip which were sticky to de-tangle, but we stuck with it. To my surprise, this reflection was as vital as the trip was itself to enhancing my understanding of Trinidad and Tobago, as well as aspects of myself. I have carried on this reflection into a weekly process in my everyday life. I keep a journal about my relationships, goals, and struggles. This reflective practice allows me to care for myself and my emotions, and work through things until they seem more clear.

Travel has not always been important to me. My Journeys trip to Trinidad is what first forced me to remove my American blinders. This radical new way to think of myself within the global context was jarring, but it was also captivating. Ever since I have been finding ways to return to that space of uncertainty, humility, and excitement. It has remained in the back of my mind in all of my subsequent travels from rural Georgia to rural India.

“So, how was India?” they ask me, smiling, unaware that their well-meaning small talk has just thrust me into an impossible position. Try as I might, I have yet to find a way to condense every breathtaking, and confounding moment of my five month study abroad semester at the University of Hyderabad into a thirty second elevator pitch. How can I impart to my curious ambusher that my life in India was so much more than curries, Bollywood music, and festivals of colour? There was also struggle, disorientation, boredom, and homesickness, which all impacted my experience in crucial and meaningful ways.

If I had to choose one moment which best encapsulates this magical combination, it is this: a few weeks into my semester, I signed up to go on a day trip to the Nagarjunasagar Dam with an club on campus. It was to be an eight hour day trip which would return in time for dinner. Twenty-three and a half hours, two dance parties, a sing along, a missed ferry ride, an animal sacrifice, and no dinner later, I was still packed in the bus with 30 other equally bedraggled students.

At the peak of my miserable exhaustion a girl turned to me and asked “So what do you think love is?” I was astounded, and I considered telling her to leave me to sulk in peace. Instead we had an earnest conversation about our different perspectives on love, family, dating, sex, my queer identity, and arranged marriage. It transpired with the kind of delirious honesty that can only be fostered on a sweltering bus in the Indian countryside at 4 AM. I learned more about gender and community in India from that conversation than I did in my courses at the university. I had stumbled onto a nugget of pure travel gold: knowledge and understanding I could never have absorbed from a book.

My long interest in global topics has lead me to aspire to the global specialization through SUMMIT, courses with a global focus, and study abroad. I believe that by expanding our  understanding of “community,” and embracing the concept of global citizenship, we begin to combat the “us vs. them” mentality which stands in the way of justice, both locally and internationally. This is what drives me to want to explore global learning as a potential career path.

I know that I will continue to be a lifelong traveler. I want to guide other people to unlock the atypical but rewarding approach to travel which has the potential to be transformational. I know that these nuggets of travel gold are not handed to you in a coconut at a beach resort, they are uncovered by intentionally unseating yourself in the unfamiliar. To quote a piece of art on the rooftop of my dorm at the university, you have to do what you are afraid of. I wish to inspire others to excavate their own nuggets of travel gold: making connections, seeing the value in discomfort, and destabilizing their understandings of the “best” way to do things or exist in the world.