It’s hot as hell crossing the desert in the middle of summer in a car with no air conditioning. This is dry heat, instead of the humid heat I grew up with, but it still scorches, and I am no stranger to the dangers. People die of heat stroke. I remember my dad’s old trick when we ran horses in the steaming tropics. So, all through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, I stop off at gas stations to fill little ziplock bags with ice. Back in my car, I wrap the ice in a towel and rest it on my head and the back of my neck to keep my body temperature down.
After a brutal five-day trip, I arrive at the ivy-covered halls of Georgetown University. As I walk across the well-manicured campus, past nineteenth-century Healy Hall’s gray stone walls topped with spires, I feel the history in this place. The stately architecture and wood-paneled interiors remind me of the majestic buildings I visited with my grandmother in Europe. I can hardly believe I’m here. I’ve made it! My heart speeds up, and I flush all over before the next thought hits: I’m an imposter here; I earned A’s grading on a curve against community college kids.
I continue across the lush green lawn to the large red tiles paving the ground in front of the modern Bunn Intercultural Center, a contemporary building mixed in with the old. Why did they only take the time to create magnificent architecture two hundred years ago? Shouldn’t we have gotten better over time, not worse?
I stare at the new students and their parents as they scurry to and from dorm rooms and campus offices and feel overwhelmed and a little envious. I know nothing about this elite world. And I am on my own. How can I possibly compete? I take a deep breath, raise my chin, and head to the admissions office to get my dorm assignment and figure out my classes.
For a sophomore transfer to Georgetown, I luck out. Somehow, through a glitch in the housing lottery, I’m assigned to one of the coveted campus houses: a cute little three-story building with a bedroom at the top, a living room in the middle at street level, and a basement kitchen. My roommate is a Palestinian woman who takes me to one campus party by way of introduction and then moves in with her girlfriend off-campus. Within a week, I have the whole house to myself. I’m twenty-five and living alone for the first time in my life.
I’m six or seven years older than most of my classmates, but I look eighteen. I’m constantly getting my ID checked twice by bartenders. After telling a couple of students my real age and seeing them pull back in shock, I just pretend to be the same age as everyone else in my classes. Let people assume what they will. I want to fit in, not create more distance. I’m already on the outside looking in.
I may look and sound like one of “them”—my accent is almost American—but I’m told that I speak differently.
“When you talk, it’s strange,” says one of the seniors who lives next door. “Like you’re reading from a book. It’s so . . . correct.”
There’s something strange about how I talk? How can I change that when I can’t hear myself?
I gravitate toward students who seem to be having an equally difficult time relating to conversations about sports and high school achievements. I often mispronounce big words because I’ve never heard them spoken, only read them in books. References to most music stars, bands, TV shows, sports, and popular products earn a blank stare. My substitute brothers in Monterey could take my pop culture education only so far.
For my first Halloween party, I dress up as Rebecca from the novel Ivanhoe, with a long deep red dress and a black net veil covering my face. This will be an easy one to guess, I think, smiling to myself. Nope. Not a single classmate has any idea who I am, even when I tell them. I’m flabbergasted. Surely, they read Walter Scott in school? I’m a century out of step.
Eventually, I make friends with a couple of geeky girls, Olga, a brusque Russian student who came to America for high school and stayed to attend university, and Bridget, a shy, big-boned Irish Catholic girl from Boston. One gift of growing up as I did is that I can see past social constructs to who people really are. I don’t feel as out of step with other foreigners and nerds, who are even more socially awkward than I am. With this small circle of newfound friends, I begin to experience a little of my missed teenhood—going to parties and dating, sharing study tips. But we are all serious students. I’m not here for a good time.
My tuition scholarship covers the cost of my dorm room and the required health insurance with federal loans. But it does not extend to food and daily essentials. The monthly $100 dollar stipend from Grandad helps me stock frozen dinners, noodle packets, and apples. I get even thinner, but I don’t have any pocket money for anything that isn’t essential to live. I take a twenty-hour-a-week work-study job that sucks up my afternoons, combined with a full class load in far more demanding courses than community college; I must work smarter, not longer.
At Georgetown, I begin to see America without my programmed filters. I’d grown up learning that America was the evil Babylon, the Whore, but now I see all these idealistic kids who genuinely want to make the world better. These are the people who plan to go into government, with high ideals about liberty, freedom, and justice. But I also see they have no idea about real life outside of America.
Despite the restrictions in the Family, we had firsthand experiences of how the rest of the world lives that most Americans never experience. We were not separated from what went on in the countries we lived in. We ate the cheapest local food, wore local clothes, and lived in local neighborhoods, not expat enclaves. We learned the local customs and languages so we did not offend people and could better reach them with the message of Jesus. We learned about their governments and politics to navigate life safely. We were on the ground, bringing humanitarian aid to the poor and disenfranchised. And we saw the friction created when foreign aid workers tried to implement their programs based on Western culture.
We were out almost daily talking about the problems and struggles of real people: government leaders, beggars, and even mafia bosses. I saw everyone has pain, and everyone wants happiness, love, and good things for their families.
Even the professors seem to be ignorant of the real world as they discuss shuttering the sweatshops in Asia. I know that in many of these countries, if you close the factory sweatshops, the young girls will be forced into prostitution. I’ve seen the young prostitutes on the streets of Thailand, where the Family has ministries to witness to rescued child sex slaves. Don’t be proud of closing Nike’s sweatshops, I want to tell the International Business professor. It’s better to create incentives for the sweatshops to implement humane conditions.
But even though they are commenting on policy from their US-centric bubble, their hearts are in the right place. I have not seen this kind of idealism and desire to help the world in the young people of other countries I’ve lived in. This is part of what makes America great, why so many people will do anything to come here, I realize, and I’m grateful to be among them.