Indiana... India. The words are only 2 letters apart, but the areas of the world they define are half a world apart. My flight is booked for November 16, and I am counting down the days until I'll be embarking from the Land of Cornfields that is Indiana to the Land of Diversity that is INDIA!
posted by Melissa @ 5:33 PM
3 comments
Hello! Hola! Konnichiwa! Bonjour! Salaam! Ni hao! Namaste! Tashi delek! In case you couldn’t tell by my multilingual greetings, I am fascinated with foreign languages. My 6 year-old self’s proclamation that “I want to be an anthropologist when I grow up” was met with no shortage of raised eyebrows from skeptical adults. Since then, I've continued with a life of passionate fascination with world cultures. After graduating from a public high school in rural Chesterton, Indiana, I went where no CHS student had gone before: I took a gap year (a what? This phenomenon, while virtually unheard of in the Midwest, is popular in other parts of the world: basically, taking a year off between high school and college, most often for work and/or travel) to go beyond the Land of Cornfields and spend 6 months studying and traveling in India. Now, as a student at Indiana University, I’ve charted my own course of study- Inter-Cultural Arts Programming & Performance- through IU's Individualized Major Program. And I'm charting new territory again: as part of working towards my goals, I'll be spending the next year studying abroad in China & (situation permitting) Tibet.
