"So, were you happy with the election?"
"Huh?" My hands were shaking, my heart was still beating a little too fast. I was still trying to truly grasp what had just happened. I was in Villars, a quaint Swiss mountain village, and I had just landed from paragliding through the Swiss Alps. At one point Kristoff—my tandem paragliding partner—told me that we were 3000 feet in the air. A million thoughts were running through my head from the experience that I had just had and confronted by this question my first thought was…Wait, what election?
Luckily I recovered quick enough to avoid propagating the "stupid American" stereotype that every study abroad student tries to avoid.
"Oh.. yes of course, I was very happy. Were you?" I asked.
"Very much so. My family and I stayed up until Obama made his acceptance speech. I was very emotional and really very happy."
I have to admit that this comment took me back a bit. From the moment I arrived in Villars I had been mesmerized by the beauty that surrounded me. I've spent the past fourteen years living in the Dublin—Ohio, not Ireland—and although I love my hometown, I'll be honest when I say that Dublin doesn't offer much in the way of scenery besides cement cornfields and golf courses. That's probably the reason why I played so many sports in high school and was a member of entirely too many extracurricular activities—there really wasn't much else to engage my time. But Villars was different. You could go hiking, skiing, eat copious amounts of fondue—the possibilities seemed endless.
And yet, even amongst the infinite pastimes this man could employ to engage his time, on the evening of November 4, 2008 he was glued to his television with the rest of his family to watch the American election like so many other millions of people across the world.
Honestly, I just didn't expect it there, not in Switzerland, not when I was completely surround by such stunning sights. Not when I had just had one of the most amazing experiences of my life. On November 5, walking home from the London Centre down The Strand with friends for the sole purpose of stopping in every newspaper stand to buy any and everything that had Barack Obama's face on it—I expected it. It didn't surprise me when Brits on the streets would look at my arms filled to the brim with various newspapers, then look to my face, grinning ear to ear. Ever so slowly a smile would creep across their face as their eyes made contact with mine and for a split second we connected in acknowledgement of the fact that history had been made the night before.
But in a peacefully quiet, tucked away mountain village in Switzerland, for the first words when I landed after being 3000 feet in the air to be whether or not I was happy with the election—I didn't expect that at all.
And it was at that moment that I realized just how interconnected the world and the people that live in it are whether or not we choose to accept it. Being a child of Nigerian immigrants to the United States, I had always prided myself on the thought that I was globally minded. But I recognized in that instant that for almost twenty years it was as if I had been living with one eye closed simply because it was good enough. And suddenly, in the most unexpected of situations, an anonymous Swiss man kindly suggested that I try opening the other eye to get a complete view of the world we shared. It's not like I didn't realize the importance of the 2008 election, I had heard over and over again that the "world was watching" this election. But the idea didn't quite hit home until I was so far away from home.
I left Villars with great expectations of myself. It would be unrealistic to hope that I will return to South Bend, Indiana and begin every morning by searching for Swiss news on the internet. But I do hope that I combat the global apathy that I embodied before I came to London. To my credit, at times it’s hard not to be consumed by thoughts of tests, papers, and the possibility of graduate school. Generally, the welfare of people as far away as Switzerland who are anonymous to me never cross my mind. But I hold myself to a higher standard now.
I challenge myself to bring the global mindset that I’ve developed back with me to South Bend. I challenge myself to consider people not much different from the man who greeted me when I landed from my paragliding flight. People who although they are anonymous to me, may be affected by the actions of myself and the world around me. I can’t help but wonder if in anticipation of the election, my anonymous friend thought of someone not much different from myself, and hoped that I exercised my right to vote in an election that would change the way in which the world viewed the United States—hopefully for the better.
All images and text in this essay copyright Ezinne Ndukwe
