Study abroad students return to Carolina changed by the experience

Many people graduate from Carolina equipped with the confidence — and commitment — to change the world.

But undergraduates who venture off campus to study abroad in the middle of their college careers often have a different story to tell when they return.

Jennifer Melton, Lindsay Eanes and Pharen Bowman, for instance, each came home with tales of how the world had changed them.

The women were among the hundreds of Carolina students who last year participated in one of Carolina’s 300 study abroad programs offered in 70 countries.

No matter which country or continent, culture or cuisine, the destination point for these students turned into the window through which they saw some of the ways people around the world are different — and the many ways they are the same.

Eanes, who went to the Samoan Islands, came upon houses with no windows or doors, or for that matter, walls.

“Open homes,” they called them, or “fales” in Samoan. They feature concrete floors and end beams holding up the roofs. During a 10-day “home stay,” Eanes lived with a family in a house that islanders called “palagi,” which means white person. The family was Samoan, but had a son-in-law who was a builder and had the money to build what islanders considered a white person’s house.

The house had no indoor plumbing or air conditioning, but it did have electricity. And walls.

“Who knew walls could be considered a luxury?” Eanes said.

The lack of walls was her first clue about the communal traditions of this exotic place where the concept of privacy had never taken root.

Melton saw women at Place of Hope, a shelter for abused women and their children in the heart of Cape Town, who often face the same violence and exploitation that women face here.

After her freshman year, Melton volunteered to work with a family services program in Winston- Salem that called women who had been victims of domestic violence — and had taken out restraining orders on the men who had harmed them — to make sure they were safe.

Her interest in Africa was piqued, she said, when she was a senior in high school in Kernersville and traveled to Kenya through the Amani Children’s Foundation, a Winston-Salem-based organization that finds homes for babies abandoned because of AIDS.

Bowman, a Carolina Covenant scholar from Wilmington, had studied French in high school, but decided to take Italian when she got to Carolina just to try something different.

After three semesters, she said, “I fell in love with the language.”

Then, in fall 2006, a friend in her sorority announced she was going to be studying in Florence the following summer and urged Bowman to join her.

Bowman said she had always thought about studying abroad but had never gotten around to doing it. But now she would have a friend in Florence, a city filled with art and history and where she could speak Italian everywhere she went.

“A light bulb went off in my head that this is something I had to do,” Bowman said.

Thanks to her scholarship, she arrived in Florence in January 2007 where for the next four months she took a full course load at the Lorenzo de Medici Institute.

In her art history course, there was little need for a textbook. In the plaza outside the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of Florence’s government, Bowman posed next to the 13-foot- 5-inch statue of David that Michelangelo was commissioned to create in the early 16th century as a symbol of the Florence republic.

“I will never forget standing in front of the (statue) David,” Bowman said. “The statue is supposed to embody Michelangelo’s vision of the ideal man. He was not built to reflect reality. He is so huge. You stand there and feel two inches tall.”

A journalism student in the news-editorial sequence, Bowman jumped at the chance to join the school’s Writing Club. In fact, she was the first to sign up. Her first article was printed in the May issue of “ViviFirenze,” a magazine written by and aimed at foreign students visiting Florence. She also visited Rome and had “one particularly incredible” weekend in London, in Bowman’s words.

“There is something about sleeping in a hostel with people from places I have never heard of that has awakened the journalist in me,” she wrote in the April 2007 issue of “Carolina Communicator,” published by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

While both Bowman and Eanes took regular classes, Melton sought the kind of education she could only get staring across from someone who needed her help.

In Place of Hope, she quickly discovered, she found more than she had bargained for.

“It was overwhelming,” Melton said. “I have had some experience, but I am not a counselor and I was not equipped.”

And the handful of staff at the shelter had bigger problems to worry about than finding something useful for her to do. They wanted her to make use of her time — so she did.

Along with a student from Denmark, she started weekly discussion groups with women at the shelter to talk about issues such as how they could keep themselves safe when walking to and from work.

“I definitely had some issues trying to figure out where my place was going to be but because of that it was ultimately a much more valuable experience because I had to figure it out for myself,” Melton said. “There was nobody holding my hand. I had to come up with my own way of being effective and productive in that environment.”

Eanes, a Southern Studies major from Greensboro with plans to attend law school, wrote a research paper on the possible effects of a Samoan parliament land title registration bill on the traditional Samoan culture in which land is passed down through families without record or deed.

These ancient lands, held within families for generations, could end up in the hands of foreign investors who have no concept of the traditional cultural value in which land is held in Samoa, Melton said.

Worse yet, she learned while doing research last fall, most Samoans were not even aware of the bill.

Eanes does not know what the eventual outcome will be, just as Melton does not know what will happen to all the women she reached out to in the shelter in Cape Town.

“Even though I believe those discussion groups were helpful, I am under no illusion that I changed anybody’s life in Cape Town,” Melton said — except maybe her own.

“I don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I know I want to do something related to advocacy and to social justice in some way,” she said. “This experience has given me the confidence to do that.”