An International Tradition

Message from the Assistant Provost

June 10, 2006

The month of May took me on a site visits to students around the world, and the prognosis in general is bright.  Notre Dame students seem to thrive in any soil where they land, and to soak up the offerings of classes in Australia, Italy, and Austria as readily as they do on campus.  But there is one aspect of the study abroad experience that needs improvement.  Cultural integration, we call it in the business, and it is the simple act of making connections with local people, places, and things.  Consistently, repeatedly, intentionally.  Until you start to belong in a new place, and it starts to belong to you. 

Yes, I know students are sometimes only on-site for five or six months.  I know they like to travel, and enjoy the new friendships they make among the ND group.  But I also know that without integrating a local community, one can enjoy at best an impoverished existence, a kind of cultural limbo…  Consider the following, adapted from Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: 
 
“The man who is often thinking that it is better to be somewhere else than where he is excommunicates himself,” wrote Thoreau. The metaphor is religious: to withhold yourself from where you are is to be cut off from communion with the source.  One cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one; one cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place. 

In belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, at-homeness, a knitting of self and world.  This condition of clarity and focus, this being fully present is akin to what the Buddhists call mindfulness, what Christian contemplatives refer to as recollection, what Quakers call centering down.  There is only one world, and we participate in it here and now, in our flesh and our place.

We in the Office of International Studies are already exploring ways to make students more aware of the opportunities that await them in our programs abroad, and to insist that they take an active role in joining local communities through internships, service, sports, or spirituality.  We will likely have them sign a contract for community involvement, and report their activities each semester.  We will do so willingly, and deal with the resultant paperwork with good faith.  But we know that no amount of paperwork can open a person’s mind, or force one to make a friend, or create ties to a new place. 

We will help, but each individual has to find his own way to live a grounded life. 

May it happen to you.    

Sincerely,
Julia Douthwaite
Assistant Provost for International Studies