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I’ve been an evangelist all my adult life, not just of travel abroad, but of living abroad, of really experiencing a community that is different from yours in a sustained way. This practice becomes ever more important. Unfortunately, current events are putting many of these programs in jeopardy, and with them the international relations and goodwill that they build.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

― Mark Twain
The Innocents Abroad

Bringing Travel Home

My grandmother dreamed of traveling. She and Grandpa considered seriously an opportunity to work for what is now Aramco in Saudi Arabia. My mother wanted to travel to France. When she was a senior in high school in the 1970s, they hosted an AFL exchange student, a young woman from Afghanistan, who would, years later, with a husband and two children, settle in northern Virginia as a refugee, where they would open a health clinic serving the uninsured in Washington, DC, mostly Hispanic workers.

My father participated in glasnost, USSR President Gorbachev’s program of rapprochement with the United States, by doing a marine biology internship on a Russian science vessel in the North Atlantic. By day, he counted plankton, but what I remember are his stories of dinner with the Russians. None of them spoke English, the only language my father knows, and he will always tell you that it’s amazing what you can convey without a common language. At dinner, the Russians would eat soup with a spoon in one hand and a head of garlic in the other, alternating between them, and washing everything down with plenty of vodka, of course.

My neighbor throughout childhood was the widow of a Peace Corps Volunteer, who conveyed to us his stories of living in a Muslim community in India, of the family that adopted him so fully that when he was alone in their home, the daughters were comfortable removing their hijab as if he were their natural brother. Some of his Indian friends had immigrated to the States, and occasionally they would visit, rounds of chapatti bread puffing up over the bare flames of the old gas range.

These travel experiences of my family and community members had a profound effect on the way I saw the world, well before I ever set out to see the world myself.

And you don’t have to travel abroad to broaden your horizons. Where I grew up in Pennsylvania dairy country, the family farms were centuries old, passed down from father to son. However, it was common for those farming fathers to insist that their sons go away for awhile before inheriting the farm – go at least a hundred miles away to college, see a community that isn’t ours before you decide to live the rest of your life in ours.

I like to recount a story from my freshman English teacher Mrs. Anderson, whose mother was from Texas and her father from Boston, and they ended up in the middle in Pennsylvania when little Amy Anderson was five years old. At a church picnic, she had a delicious piece of apple pie, and when she returned to the dessert table for more, the kind church lady said, “The apple is all, but the pecan is yet!”

“Excuse me?” said polite little Amy.

Slowly, like she was a little stupid, the church lady repeated, “The apple is all, but the pecan is yet.”

“Oh,” said little Amy. “Thanks.” And she went back to her parents with an empty plate and repeated what she’d heard. They didn’t understand it either. Neither did my parents when they first moved from Boston to Pennsylvania and heard folks say “It’s all!” (All what?), or as they say to small children, “All-y all!” Our family always felt a little like outsiders in our own country.

Later, living in Germany, I finally understood where this odd English came from. Germans say, “Der Apfel ist alle” (the apple is all gone) “aber der Pekannuss ist noch” (but the pecan is still/yet), exactly like a central Pennsylvanian. When I was an au pair in Dresden, the German parents would say to their toddler, “Alle alle!” and again, I heard the origins of Pennsylvania Dutch English.

While I was a Rotary exchange student in Switzerland, my high school hosted a Rotary exchange student from Germany. When I came home, one of my best friends told me how she’d come to a new appreciation of her mother’s Pennsylvania Dutch-isms like “Throw the horse over the fence some hay” or “Throw me down the stairs some clothes” because the exchange student confused his syntax in the same ways when he translated from his native German.

But it’s about more than language. My family calls my Mr. Fellow an exchange student without ever leaving the country by living in the Alaska interior, Arizona, and the New York City area. The culture shock of moving from the American Southwest to the Northeast can be as profound as the culture shock of moving to Utrecht or Bavaria.

New Perspectives

Spring of 2001, in my sophomore year of undergrad, I studied abroad at Universität Tübingen in southwestern Germany. I had a single room in a Wohngemein, a student housing collective. Most of my floor-mates were Germans, including a local boy who only spoke in Swabian dialect, but also among them were another American study abroad student, a Turkish German and a Chinese international student, all of whom I spent a lot of time hanging out with in the large shared kitchen and dining area.

In my second month there, an American military plane went down on China’s Hainan Island. The American government said it was in international waters; the Chinese government said it violated their territorial integrity. China said it was a spy plane involved in illegal surveillance; America said it was a routine, legal mission. My Chinese neighbor and I had many conversations about it in the kitchen, but what I remember most about the incident was arguing with my father about it. He insisted that the American press releases were accurate, and the Chinese statements were all propaganda, like China does … and I remember very clearly thinking, But my roommate is getting all her news from her German newspaper subscription! It was the first time I can remember viewing the American news media machine as having the potential for bias.

It was good preparation for six months later. I had been touring the Dresden Opera House with the man who is now my cousin’s father-in-law, and was on the commuter train back to the suburban family I was au pair-ing for, except they had left town for their annual Italian vacation. I got a text message from my sister’s friend on the other side of Germany, whom I would be staying with in a couple days as I crossed the continent for my junior year abroad in Norwich, England. “Are you seeing what’s happening in America?”

“What did Bush do now?” I texted back with a heavy sigh. She didn’t respond.

I arrived home and turned on CNN International just in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center. There’s a lot to be said about being in Europe at this time in history, but among these is that the news I got in England over the subsequent nine months, and especially the commentary both in media and on campus, was very different from what was being said in the United States. And when I returned to Baltimore the following August, even on the notoriously liberal, then mostly women’s Goucher College, my view of the world and the so-called “War on Terror” was not like most of my contemporaries.

This disconnect only increased when I joined the Peace Corps and arrived in Jordan for the first time only a few months after the 2003 invasion of neighboring Iraq. The way I see conflicts and other events in the Middle East will never be the same as someone who never lived cheek-by-jowl in these culture and political landscapes.

The Danger of Withdrawing

Much has been written about the demise of USAID and how it hurts our standing in the world, and I have a lot to say about that at another time. Very little has been written to date about the dismantling of all foreign language and study abroad programming at the Department of Education last week.

Every extended stay I’ve had in the Arab world – Peace Corps Jordan, 2004-2006; Critical Language Scholarship, Jordan, 2008; Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Cairo, 2010-2011; Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award now – was funded at least in part by the American people. With the exception of Peace Corps, which is under the State Department, all of these programs were at least partially administered by the Institute for Foreign Language Education (IFLE) at the U.S. Department of Education.

I’ve published rather extensively about what these experiences abroad have taught me, how they’ve made me a better person, and the lessons I’ve brought home to my American family, friends, students and neighbors. I want to share one more story about how these intercultural exchanges can change international relations.

After my Peace Corps years in Jordan, I returned to an MA program at Indiana University in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. To jumpstart my social life in this new community, I joined the Unitarian Universalist Church of Bloomington. One of the first people I was introduced to by greeters at the church was an older woman named Elizabeth who had been, for years, coordinating an annual Ramadan Iftar for the Bloomington Muslim community. While there was a small mosque in Bloomington, it didn’t have the space to host the whole Muslim community to break the fast each night in the month of Ramadan, and churches of all denominations across Bloomington took turns hosting Iftars for their Muslim neighbors. I volunteered to help Elizabeth coordinate ours, which mostly meant answering emails from the woman at the mosque who coordinated the food and their community.

The Iftar brought more than a hundred UUs and Muslims together in our sanctuary, where the minister of the church welcomed our Muslim neighbors, and the imam of the mosque said a few words about the significance of Ramadan and the Iftar breaking of the fast. Then the call to prayer was made and the UU community was invited to observe the Muslim community in maghreb prayer, before we retired to the fellowship hall for mountains of food donated by a local Muslim-owned restaurant to eat and socialize. It was an easy, spectacular success.

A few days later, I got an email from the woman coordinating at the mosque end. Several young Saudi men had approached her after the Iftar with the UUs, she said. They had only been in the U.S. for a couple months, studying at the university, and it hadn’t been going well. All their negative stereotypes of Americans, they said, had been reinforced. Then they went to Iftar and met some of the UU congregants, who asked open-ended questions and really listened to the answers, who were open and accepting and welcoming, who really wanted to know these young men. For the first time, they said, they were starting to think positively about the American people.

When I remember this Iftar experience, I also think about the 20th century Egyptian religious and political thinker Sayyid Qutb. He travelled to Colorado for university in the late 1940s, and in his attempt to understand Americans, he attended some events at a large local evangelical church. At church dances, he observed chaperones insisting that students dance at arm’s length (“leave room for God in between!”), and then he watched those same students canoodling uninhibited outside of church. He came home to Egypt disgusted by the hypocrisy of Americans, and went on to write a number of philosophical treatises believed to have inspired Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. How might history be different if Sayyid Qutb’s study abroad had been more like the experience of those young Saudi men at the Bloomington Iftar?

What You Can Do

Study abroad changes lives. Not just the life of the student, but a whole ecosystem of lives they touch while abroad and upon returning home.

Last week, the Republican Administration and the unconstitutional DOGE team fired half the Department of Education, including the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) that helps kids learning English, and the Institute for Foreign Language Education (IFLE), which includes my Fulbright and other study abroad funding. I can find no reporting on the closing of IFLE except this op ed:

The dissolution of IFLE within the Department of Education will lead to countless lost jobs and educational opportunities, and an educational landscape denuded of possibility—the possibility of learning a new language, seeing a new place, understanding a new point of view. It is stealing from generations of people.

A Department of Education Office Changed My Life. Now It’s Been Cut
by Lydia Kiesling

However, I can tell you that, in addition to the jobs lost in the department, this closure is upending the lives of thousands of American students abroad and international students in America. My funding is secure, but many other students in the U.S. and abroad don’t know if they will get a stipend next month that they depend on, despite their programs’ statutory and Congressional mandate.

I have scoured the Internet for advocacy resources that address the elimination of the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) and the Institute for Foreign Language Education (IFLE), but while I’ve found some resources for protesting the former, I’ve found nothing defending the latter.

So, I’m imploring you to come up with your own appeal.

You might start by modifying this script from 5Calls.org. If you haven’t studied abroad yourself, think about a time when you were influenced by someone else’s experience abroad, or by an immigrant or visitor to the United States. Keep it brief, but make it personal.

5 Calls’ location finder will give you contact information for all your electeds, and they suggest that you start with your federal representatives, whom you can reach through the United States Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

If you’d like to share your script in here in the comments, maybe it will inspire someone else.

And if you are affiliated with a language teaching program, study abroad program or other relevant community organization, please encourage them to do the same.