The Ethics of Traveling Abroad

Story and podcast by RAELYNN SHERIDAN

How a passionate leader and a willing group of students spend their summers on an ethical and culturally sensitive study abroad

https://soundcloud.com/klipsun-magazine/an-american-state-of-mind/

Western’s study abroad program to Gashora, Rwanda began in 2013 and has been running ever since.

Tim Costello founded the program and is the director of the Center for Service Learning at Western.

Each summer, 10 to 12 students fly around the world from the Pacific Northwest to Gashora, a small village two hours overland from the capital city of Kigali. They do an intense pre-departure orientation and then it’s off to Gashora; a place most people know nothing about except for the genocide of 1994.

But of course, Rwanda is more than that. Decades later Western students get to experience it firsthand.

Gashora is flat and clay-colored, with lakes all around. It’s agricultural and has no running water. It’s low-tech but beautiful nonetheless. The people are kind and warm just like a summer day.

La Palisse Hotel houses the students each year. The staff are welcoming, with warm smiles waiting upon arrival.

At night as one sleeps, white curtains billow in the wind and the chirp of morning birds become an alarm clock.

Breakfast is served. Sometimes it’s traditional Rwandan food and sometimes not. Class is held outside. As you learn the Kinyarwanda language and reflect, cows stroll by.

Heleana Lally went on the trip in summer 2014 after her freshman year at Western.

The trip shaped her entire undergraduate degree, and after graduating will now shape her graduate degree.

Before leaving for Rwanda she’d never been further outside the country than Canada.

Throughout the trip, even on the first day, she never felt nervous, instead she felt safe. The surroundings looked different from home but she felt peaceful.

Part of this might have had to do with the pre-departure orientation. Tim explained during this, students spend four days together in a classroom on campus, six to eight hours a day, learning about Rwanda and learning some of the language.

Heleana had never thought about researching a country before going. The pre-departure orientation did a good job of preparing her, and others, for where they were going. By the time they arrived in Gashora, she felt bonded to everyone; even the professors.

They had guest speakers, like a woman who taught them mindfulness and had them meditate in order to be more aware of their surroundings.

A student also came to speak. She spoke about her experience on the trip the year before. The student told a story that stuck.

She was walking with a woman and the woman asked for water. She had a hard time deciding whether to give her water and in the end decided not to. Not because she didn’t want to, or because she was worried about germs, but because if she gave the woman water, who would be there to give her more later? There may not have been much of an impact in that moment, but it’s an example of thinking about what you are doing and the impact it has when you’re gone. The things foreigners give to people in a community will eventually run out — and then what?

Heleana said the story opened her eyes and she thought to herself, “Wow, you are going into another culture and whatever you bring and however you act in it, influences who they are and who they will continue to be.”

That thought is similar to Tim’s goal.

A challenge Tim is faced with even after traveling to Africa 21 times since 2000, is the privilege he was born with, he said. He believes he has a responsibility to that privilege, as an American, as someone who works at a university, and most importantly as someone who is going into another country as a guest and having that experience.

“It’s almost like consumerism for me. You consume the emotions and the experience and the learning and the meaning — and you enrich your life — and go home…Well, that doesn’t seem fair to me.”

So how does he take that and turn it into a program? How does he allow college students to experience that feeling for themselves? How does he do so in a way that does the least amount of harm to the community welcoming the learners?

He builds relationships. He doesn’t build things. He aims to have a cultural exchange, not a cultural take.

Hassan Byumvuhore lives in Gashora. He and Tim met in 2013 at the community health center where Hassan worked and where the group had been invited to teach English to anyone in the community who wanted to learn. Tim was Hassan’s teacher and they built a strong connection over the summer. Hassan helps translate when students are in Gashora. He teaches them lessons in the morning, things like songs and language — and he’s funny!

When talking about first getting to know each other, Tim and Hassan erupt with laughter.

Their deep friendship led to Hassan coming to Western to study English and experience American culture, just like Tim and the students had done in Gashora.

But getting Hassan a visa wasn’t easy.

Hassan explained that they had a good connection, Hassan was interested in Tim and Tim was interested in Hassan. That’s why Tim tried so hard to get Hassan to Bellingham.

The first time Hassan applied for a visa he was denied.

Tim was told by the embassy that they almost never grant Rwandans visas to the U.S.

The country has a young population due to the 1994 genocide. Many of those young people don’t have anything to come back home to; they might not have land or a job. They might not be married or have kids. They are viewed as a flight risk according to the embassy.

However, after trying a second time and with some hard work on Tim’s part, Hassan was granted a visa.

“He knows about my culture and now I know about his culture,” Hassan said, “We share food, I stay with him and he’s taking care of me and when he’s in Rwanda, I try and take care of him.”

People are very interested in other cultures, Hassan explained, they want to see what other people look like, how they write, the color of their skin. Both children and adults share this curiosity.

And I think for most of us, that is true. However, we have to decide what to do with that curiosity, if anything, and how to do it.

Zi Zhang, a Fairhaven College student, also went on the trip. He went in 2014, the same year as Heleana and the two are now roommates. Like Heleana, he went during the beginning of his studies. He’d been outside the country once, in eighth grade, to visit China. Other than that, he hadn’t traveled.

After his trip to Gashora, he went on to study abroad the next year in Cape Town, South Africa and then was awarded Fairhaven’s Adventure Learning Grant. The grant allowed him to spend one year abroad, alone, researching a topic of his choosing, going to any country he saw fit.

Zi used his experience on the Rwanda trip; all the planning, all the reflection, all the mindfulness, to plan his year abroad. He said he would have approached it differently had he not gone on to Gashora.

He said he learned from Rwanda to recognize where he goes and what kind of a place it is beforehand.

“When you’re not on a study abroad like that [Rwanda] and if you don’t have a specific intention, it’s really easy just to wander around and do whatever,” said Zi, “Tim brought a really nice structure to the way we spent our time.”

For Heleana, the biggest impact was realizing how much of an influence the U.S. and its citizens have on other countries. It made her more aware of her presence in the world, the presence of the U.S. in the world and the effect we have on other countries.

One particular experience stood out to her.

There are many children in Gashora. Each day, a little boy Heleana had come to know, walked her from town to the hotel gates. Holding hands as they walked the familiar path, they would play a game. She would point to something and say in Kinyarwanda, what’s this? The boy would respond and then she would teach him the same word, but in English. One day on this walk the boy was very quiet. She thought, “What’s wrong, is he sick? is he sad?” At the end of the walk, when they reached the hotel gate, she received a note from the boy. She didn’t read it until she was inside. The note went something like this, “give me shoes, give me camera, give me paper and books…” She was sad to read this. She didn’t want the relationship to be this way.

“I remember I was so bummed. I didn’t want it to be this relationship with him of, I’m here to give you something, I’m the white person that’s here to give you something — because that’s what tourists had done to a lot of communities, not just that one,” Heleana said.

Tourists of all ages had arrived during the group’s stay. They came for two weeks. They gave the kids money, clothes, candy and water. There was a stark difference in how the kids interacted with her and others from Western culture from before the tourists came, to after.

The tourist group had come through an agency-run volunteer program. It wasn’t the first time they had come either.

Some people might call it “voluntourism.”

The things the tourists built while there were oftentimes never used by the community. For example, the women at the basket weaving co-op in town, Covaga, had a fruit drying rack that the tourists had built one year, but the women had never used it.

It lay in the corner, a memento of people with good intentions coming into a community different from their own. Not asking, or stopping to think, what the people that called that place home needed, or wanted, and what would happen when the tourists returned home to their industrialized lives. What do they leave behind when they go?

Heleana said it was humbling, and embarrassing, to watch the tourists. Not long before she had been like them, until someone [Tim] had pointed it out to her. He taught a different, more informed and culturally sensitive way to interact with other cultures.

It was frustrating to see the impact the tourists had left on the community.

Tim explained a big aim of the trip is to build relationships with the community but also to take a step back and reflect, constantly.

“How can we make, in such a short time, the most sense of a culture that’s very different from our own? All of our students and instructors bring their own knowledge… there is room at the table for all of that.”

But it’s tough, and it’s a process.

“We’re looking through the prism of our own American cultural lens, to try to make sense of another culture; that’s a risk,” Tim said, “So, we ask a lot of questions and try to find a pattern in what we’re seeing, doing and learning. To develop skills in ourselves to be able to be in another culture, which we are in all the time. Increase your skills and bring them back into your own culture.”

The program leaves for Rwanda on July 1 this year — with a new group of students who may just find that their lives will be changed when they touch down on the Seattle tarmac, six weeks later.