My Times Abroad

Prague, CZE – Spring 2016

My sophomore year, I had the opportunity to study abroad for an entire semester. Simply, it was amazing, life-changing, and incredibly beneficial as a human being, a musician, a Christian, and a pre-professional. During that semester, I was finishing my music core (Theory, Aural, and History), but had so many opportunities to travel and work on my crafts (teaching and music). I was able to travel to a total of eight countries while I was there, meet a lot of new people, try new foods, start to learn a new language (Czech), and got my second tattoo.

I traveled to several countries and learned so much about different cultures, languages, and perceptions of Americans, Christians, and other people groups from people of different cultural groups. I spoke German with Germans & Czechs. I ate Italian pasta and pizza with Northern Italy. I saw and photographed so many European countrysides via coach bus.

In this time, some of the most important things that I learned are: 1) I love learning about new cultures in that culture’s language, 2) I love getting to know people over food, and 3) I cannot do this ~Christian-thing~ alone. Because of #1, I have started to learn a few new languages (Romanian, Croatian, Czech, Italian, and Spanish) despite the craziness of the second half of a university career. Because of #2, I’ve hosted several dinners allowing me to get to know those people I already know even better. And, because of #3, I have been seeking Christian community literally wherever I am (*cough cough* World Race).

It is safe to say that my semester in Prague and the NYU Navigators community were two of the most influencing factors of my decision to apply to go to Croatia this past summer (July/August 2017).

Zagreb, HRV – Summer 2017

Throughout my first three years at NYU within the Navigators community, I had constantly heard about this Croatia trip. After talking to a dear friend about his multiple experiences with the Croatia trip and others, I decided to apply last minute and eventually was on a plane to Boston to meet up with about half of the team that was going on the trip.

On the way to Zagreb, I flew into Boston and hung out with some of my teammates before flying out to London and eventually Zagreb. On the way through security in London Heathrow, I realized I had forgotten my passport on the plane. But, after realizing quickly and telling British Airway’s customer service counter I was able to get my passport back. Unfortunately, we had missed our connecting flight to Zagreb. So we went back to the customer service desk and rebooked our flight for the next day (there’s only one flight from London to Zagreb every day out of London Heathrow), which meant that we had about 24 hours to entertain ourselves and three of the four of us were in London for the first time & the fourth was our personal tour guide!

After finally getting to Zagreb, I was surprised by how familiar Zagreb felt even though I had never been to Zagreb nor Croatia previously. It was so nice to have our seven-person team reunited and having time to prepare for the unfathomable journey that had yet to ensue. We met two different families who were relationally and personally involved with Roma (the group of people my team would be working with and for during the focus of our trip).

The purpose of the trip was to aid in racial reconciliation between the Croatian and Roma people by helping host a week-long summer camp for Roma children. As simple as it may sound from an American context, this was truly one of the most challenging things I have ever done in my entire life.

During camp, I was a co-counselor for the little girls’ team (Rožice Tiím), along with two Croatian co-counselors and Croatian-speaking Welsh assistant counselor. With no help of a language barrier, I was partially responsible for 10 girls that absolutely hated me. In this time I experienced a lot of emotional and verbal abuse from 9- to 13-year old girls. To say the least, it was hard, and because of that about every few minutes to every few hours over the first three days, I had a recurring thought (to pack up all my things, hike down the mountain, and find somewhere to live until the camp was over). (Un)fortunately, I kept stalling and never ended up finding a good time to leave camp early.

It was around Day 4, that the camp leaders sat my team down and we talked about the team’s overall behavior (bad and disrespectful), my emotional state, and some of the girls’ emotional state (if they were willing to be vulnerable in front of emotional piranhas). (The girls come from a culture where it is a sign of weakness for girls to be emotionally vulnerable, so they tend to mock and bully those girls who are externally apathetic to most things.) By the end of the conversation, I felt seen & heard and had gained some insight into the people that I had been serving.

The rest of camp went significantly more smoothly than the first four days. I led arts and crafts, helped with a variety of other activities, played many (embarrassing) games, bonding with so many people went to the Croatian coast, and fell in love with an overlooked, underestimated group of people. By the end of camp, I had a complete emotional 180 turn, from desperately wanting to leave camp early to not being able to not being able to fathom leaving these people ever again. The turning point? A quiet time that I had during rest period on Day 4. I had been reading through the Bible and was going through the Epistles, and got to I Thessalonians. I read I Thessalonians 1, and was floored: