“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
French novelist Gustave Flaubert wrote those 15 words more than 100 years ago. His words are always in the back of my mind when I’m exploring new places around the world, as I have found them to be true on every trip that I have ever taken.
I found myself thinking about Flaubert’s two sentences two Saturdays ago — not because I was traveling someplace new but instead because of taking a trip vicariously as I read colleague Holly Gaskill’s fantastic feature about a Bluffton High School student who spent her junior year living overseas.
If you missed Holly’s Page-1 story about 17-year-old BHS senior Leah Brown, be sure to either open the Saturday, Aug. 10, e-edition or stop by our office to pick up a copy. You’ll enjoy a wonderful story that chronicles Leah’s 10-month experience living in Thailand as part of the prestigious Rotary International Youth Exchange program.
The exchange program is for 15- to 19-year-old students and allows them to live overseas with host families, as Holly explained in her story about Leah.
Leah’s experiences in Thailand I’m sure will be with her for a lifetime. Traveling to new places just has that impact on you, especially when you’re a teenager and you’re living some 10,000 miles away from home in a new culture.
I had the chance to travel to Spain in 1997 when I was 16 years old with Bluffton High School’s Spanish Club. It was a two-week trip and we were only 4,000 miles from home, yet that time in Barcelona with my friends and teachers sparked in me an interest in travel that is still going strong today 27 years later.
I didn’t know about the Rotary Youth Exchange Program when I was in high school. I’d like to think today that I would have considered applying for such a program when I was Leah’s age; however, I would not have been brave enough to do what Leah did for 10 months when I was her age back in the late 1990s.
Instead, it took me until I was a junior in college in 2001 to have the courage to pack my bags and move to a small city on the southwest side of Puerto Rico where I studied abroad for a semester. Three years later, I packed my bags again to live in South America for six months.
Those trips and every one since then has reminded me of the tiny place I occupy in the world. It’s a humbling feeling.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
My hope is that more people — especially students Leah’s age — will have the desire to want to travel to new places. Such trips not only expand one’s horizons but also let others around the world get to know who we are as Americans — particularly when we show kindness, integrity, empathy, respect and compassion to those we meet.
jdpeeper2@hotmail.com
