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Before coming to the MFA at Notre Dame, I worked as an ESL teacher in Berlin. It’s interesting to be on the other side of the classroom as a student and to experience first-hand certain topics and ensuing emotions that arose in my own classrooms in my B1 classroom at Goethe Institute. 

One afternoon in the classroom, the topic was “globalization” — I and another American, an undergraduate student from Michigan, were getting into it (lacking the precise words can often lead students of a foreign language into defensiveness when speaking about complicated issues) about the negatives of globalization and capitalism, as we have experienced them in the USA, citing the difficulties and inequalities that occur as a result of an intensely individualist society. Meanwhile I noted that most of the white, western European students had positioned themselves on the side of pro-globalization, citing the privilege of travel and multi-culturalism as first and foremost positives of the concept. I agreed that travel was important for the expansion of perspective and in some ways an antidote to ignorance. Yet — I also offered — not many Americans have this privilege, due to flight costs and the distance between continents. Instead, in the USA, we consume the corporatized and commodified appropriation of foreign culture, a tangible effect of global capitalism.

When the teacher came to our table to listen and discuss, she proposed her own opinion in response: “I hate when Americans come and study abroad and are so negative about globalization” — which felt harsh in the moment, though I can understand her pointing out the privilege that we as white US-Americans have to travel and study abroad. My sister, who was recently accepted to a Masters program in Berlin, also received the following treatment at the visa office in California: “You’re American, you’re privileged, you don’t have to worry.”

During the break, I discussed with another student from Palestine how the stark inequalities and extreme poverty in the USA feel to me often overlooked by western Europeans, who operate under a more socialist capitalism, and who, in general, have a little more trust in their government to provide for their basic needs — who have a more reliable relationship to health insurance or comfortable allowances for maternity leave, for instance. She said she had no idea what the USA was like, having never visited. Actually, she seemed a little skeptical.

In general, there seems to be a mixed view of Americans in Europe, and in the years I’ve lived in or visited Europe (2008, 2014-2022) I’ve noticed that the views have become increasingly negative post-Trump, distilling many qualities of our culture into those perceived in reality TV. One word often used in Germany to describe us is “oberflächlich”, or “superficial”, denoting the style of complimentary socializing — the exaggeration of small talk and yes-culture — done in American society. However, this also reveals a mistrust of positivity in Germany. I was once told that a compliment, in German society, is the absence of critique. 

Yet people interested in new-age spirituality, as a French friend of mine here in Berlin is, still look toward California as a beacon of promise, open-mindedness and self-realization, and as an antidote to the hyper-rational negativity of European discussion… Yes, many Germans I’ve met really love California. Maybe it’s a bit like a spa treatment, maybe even escapist.

And just like that, I find myself back in Spring Lake, Michigan. My time in Peru went by in “un abrir y cerrar de ojos”—in the blink of an eye. It is still a little surreal to be back in the United States after an extended period abroad. After speaking only Spanish for so long, I have to consciously think about greeting people in English, which I think is super cool.

I learned a lot during my time in Peru, and summed with my semester abroad in Chile, my Spanish skills have undoubtedly skyrocketed. A big part of this improvement has been grammatical and an increased vocabulary, but I think perhaps the most important improvement that I have made has been my confidence in speaking. Being immersed in a Spanish environment forced me to speak in Spanish all day, everyday. At first, I was a little bit hesitant, not wanting to make a mistake or sound incredibly “gringo” with a poor accent. Now, however, I speak much more freely—mistakes, gringo accent, and all—and have learned that speaking perfectly matters much less than being able to communicate effectively. This ties in to another important lesson I learned: what it means to be fluent. Coming into my SLA, my perspective of fluency was being able to speak like a native. However, as I progressed through my experience abroad, I came to realize that being fluent does not necessitate speaking exactly like a native speaker does. Rather, if I am capable of living my entire day in Spanish without issue—listening and understanding what people say to me, expressing what I want to say in response, asking questions, etc.—even if I don’t do it perfectly, then for me, that’s fluency. Of course, I can (and will) still strive to improve to speak more like a native, but achieving that level, for me, is a level beyond fluency. These were the two most important language lessons I learned in my time abroad: to speak without fear of making mistakes and the change in my perspective of fluency.

To anyone who is even slightly considering applying for an SLA grant or for any study abroad program, for that matter, I would absolutely encourage you to do so. Spending any significant amount of time in a new country, culture, and language is an absolutely enriching experience that cannot be replicated in any other way. Experiencing a new style and perspective of life will give you a new appreciation for the diversity that the world contains, and, as I have learned upon returning to my corner of Michigan, it might give you a new appreciation for your own home. 

To the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures, the Kellogg Institute, and the many individuals from Notre Dame, Máximo Nivel, and Cusco who helped make my SLA experience unforgettable, thank you. I am incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to spend part of my summer in Peru, and I know that what I learned from this experience will serve me for the rest of my life. ¡Muchísimas gracias! ¡Viva Perú! 

The past couple weeks have been awesome!

First of all, one of the best experiences I have been having so far has been helping out with the Collateral Repair Project, a local non profit organization that seeks to help refugees and victims of war. Thus far, I’ve helped out with kids ranging from ages 10 to 17. I will admit that I haven’t a huge help as of yet; the program is largely in Ammiyye, the local dialect, which is very different from the Modern Standard Arabic we’ve learned in class. Nonetheless, I’ve helped out with fun activities and even giving small presentations. Speaking and interacting with the kids has been an excellent opportunity to work on my Arabic. More importantly, though, giving back to the community and helping out children who have been displaced from their homes is a really crucial thing that more people ought to participate, especially considering that the organization is short on volunteers. I’ll be sure to update more in the coming weeks!

In a totally different vein, I’ve also had the chance to explore parts of Jordan outside Amman. I visited Mount Nebo, an extremely important historical site for all Abrahamic religions. The view up there was incredibly, and walking through the old church was a genuinely humbling sight. The following day I visited the dead sea, followed shortly thereafter by Wadi Mujib. Floating in the dead sea was awesome! I had always heard about the ease of floating in the super salty water, but actually experiencing it was a whole different experience. As for Wadi Mujib, it was a beautiful sight to behold. Marching in between canyon walls upstream had me genuinely captivated, a sight unable to be done justice with pictures alone.

As time goes on, the reality of how soon I’ll have to return is starting to dawn on me. I’ll be sure to make the most of my time while I still have it!

– روي

Unfortunately, my summer time in Brazil has come to an end. I did not realize how much I was going to miss Brazil. The Portuguese language actually has a word for the feeling of missing someone or something: saudade. It came from Portugal’s colonizing era, where the family members of colonizers and colonists would feel a certain longing for their loved ones who were at another part of the Empire.

Words cannot properly express how much I learned and benefited from this SLA experience. I did not expect my Portuguese to improve as much as it did. My original goals included being able to be proficient enough in Portuguese that I could navigate daily life with minimal complications and to be able to understand and discuss social and political problems. To this extent, I was very successful, because the last three weeks I was able to do both with very few problems. One of the most insightful things I learned about language-learning is the importance of immersion. You have to focus on your language all day, from the start. I walked into my first day of Portuguese classes with barely any Portuguese, only Spanish (which contrary to popular opinion, is actually an OBSTACLE for properly learning Portuguese), and definitely struggled for the first two weeks. To continuously work on my language, I participated as much as I could in class to speak more confidently. What I realized was that when you do an immersion, the first few weeks are always hard. But there comes a point where something just “clicks” and you start speaking more proficiently, even if with errors. That’s what happened to me, and it’s the most wonderful feeling to have that click. Afterwords, you start speaking more naturally and even adapting your language’s filler words as you would in English.

Still, what I am most grateful for is the culture. What makes Brazil is the Brazilians. While I am certain that few places in the world match Rio’s natural beauty, I think it was the people who made my time there so special. I made strong relationships with my professors and with different friends of my age who are Brazilian. I felt cared for, loved, and immediately included everywhere I went. I was met with a hospitality and warmth I had never before seen, and this allowed me to explore different parts of myself and grow as a person with new people.

I told one of my Brazilian friends that my favorite Portuguese word was “apaixonado.” Coming from the word “apaixonar-se,” the term can metphorically mean to fall in love with someone romantically, but its usage tends to emphasize a process that is sudden and uncontrollable, becoming passionate or inflamed about something with strong (positive) feelings. I love it because this is how I felt about Brazil. I developed such a strong love for the country and its people who were so welcoming to me. When I left Brazil, I felt apaixonado for the country because it inspired such strong and loving feelings. I hope that one day, soon, I can come back.

(Week of July 10)

Last week, I took advanced Portuguese classes, meaning that I adopted more vocabulary to speak with Brazilians about social issues and movements (which was one of my goals from the beginning). Reading the literature on Brazilian social history was helpful to conceptually understanding its social dynamics across race, class, and religion, but nothing is as helpful as speaking to Brazilians themselves. This week during my immersion classes — where I spoke one-on-one with a professor all day and went into Rio to explore the different neighborhoods — I made it a point to speak more proficiently on these questions of race, class, and religion to hear them from Brazilians’ perspectives. I tried my best (but obviously, never entirely successfully) to leave behind the subjective mental schemas I bring as an American student who goes to Notre Dame.

One fascinating topic is race. I learned in class a few months back about the myth of Brazil’s “multiracial democracy,” the idea that Brazil was so “mixed” between Portuguese, African, and Indigenous peoples — as well as waves of immigrants — that the concept of “race” was not as strong or potentially discriminatory as it is in the United States. Based on both what I read and what I heard, though the category of race functions differently for everyone, some patterns were more prominent. For instance, most people I spoke with — some of whom identified as Black or “pardo” (a category that is akin to “mixed-race”) — acknowledged that race still plays a prominent role in many Brazilians’ socioeconomic standing, even if it was not always consciously acknowledged, pointing out that favelas were mostly populated by the descendants of formerly enslaved (Black) persons while wealthier neighborhoods tended to have a higher concentration of white people. Some saw Brazil as a majority-Black country based on data that showed that up to 54% of the population has African ancestry, while others repudiated American notions of race as too — quite literally — black and white. Some insisted that while race and racism is an issue, it is not the same as in the US, and that racial categories are far more fluid and difficult to neatly draw lines. For instance, in the US, a legacy of the one-drop rule relied on blood quantum to decide if a person was white or Black “enough,” while in Brazil, different categories existed that relied both on a person’s ancestry but also on their phenotype. When I paid attention to street art and graffiti, I noticed that many tended to be forms of resistance that in some way or another referenced race. Sometimes they honored the victims of police brutality and murder, and sometimes they even used the Portuguese translation of “Black Lives Matter.” When I asked if the BLM movement had been strong in Brazil as it expanded outside of the US, one person told me yes, but Brazil had already had a strong history of resistance to racism. Another person mentioned that Brazil had made some legal progress with regards to racism. When we passed by a wealthy shopping mall, they told me that if someone at the mall, for whatever reason, used racist language against them because they were Black, and they caught it on film, they could sue the person or potentially press charges. This was extremely interesting to me because to them, the notion that there should be limits on “free” speech did not seem that controversial; it was a way to protect them. They were actually shocked that in the US you were “allowed” to be racist verbally (which prompted some reflection on my part as to what free speech really protects).

Another interesting dynamic was the religious one. Brazil is currently a very religiously and spiritually diverse country. While the majority of Brazilians identity as Catholic, the concentration of Catholics varies by region. In recent years, as in much of Latin America, there has been a growth of Evangelical and Pentecostal practitioners. I spoke with many people about this phenomenon, and most tied it back to some political question. Most people I spoke with had negative attitudes towards Evangelicals. Some cited their religious beliefs themselves (such as opposition to LGBTQ rights or intolerance for African-descending religions like Umbanda or Candomblé), and almost all were concerned about Evangelicals’ growing political presence. Like in the United States, a coalition of conservative Evangelical voters is credited with fueling far-right political candidates, which has been one of the greatest comparisons between Trump’s right and Bolsonaro’s right. One person was outraged that the Evangelicals had a caucus in Congress, which they insisted should be completely secular. Another said to me that Evangelical pastors emotionally manipulated people in poverty with a “health and wealth” Gospel (the idea that if you give money to the church, worship God, and fully believe, then you will be rewarded with material gains. The people who made these points to me tended to be Catholic or nonreligiously aligned, though some still had Evangelical friends. I did still meet Evangelicals who identified with LGBT-affirming churches or centrist political opinions. Sometimes when they revealed themselves as Evangelicals to me, they immediately said something along the lines of “but a chill one” or “but not for Bolsonaro” to separate themselves from this seemingly-popular notion. I found Catholic voters to be fascinating too. While in the US, Catholic politics is often marked by discourse on social issues like abortion (which places the church in a far more conservative camp), the Catholic voters I spoke with in Brazil usually supported the left-leaning PT and strongly identified with the Church and the PT’s materialist politics and economically-left politics, focused on poverty, material redistribution, etc.

It is fascinating to me how much I was able to understand and take away from these conversations. I want to emphasize that none of the above views are necessarily my own nor “general” from Brazilians; they simply reflect individual conversations I had in Portuguese that could be indicative of larger trends. They reflect how some Brazilians see themselves through a specific social group. These types of conversations made me more appreciative of Brazil’s rich culture and diversity, and they especially fueled my interest in how social identities influence politics.

Being abroad, it is sometimes hard to remember that many Peruvians—in fact, the vast majority—have never been to the United States and have a limited knowledge of what life is like in our country. Experiencing this has been humbling, and it has made me realize that I also have a very limited understanding of what life is like for the billions of people who live outside of the U.S.

At various points throughout my time here in Cusco, the topic of the United States has come up in conversation—with my professor, my host mom, various tour guides, and other foreign students who are neither Peruvian nor from the U.S. These conversations have been interesting because a few common themes came up, indicating what many people (or at least the subset of people I interacted with) think of when they think of the United States, but what caught my attention more was that almost every person brought up a topic or asked me a question about an issue in the U.S. that no one else did. This diversity of interests and questions reflects, I think, the unique position of each individual; as might be expected, a person’s interests and experiences are likely to influence what they consider most important.

I’ll start with the common themes that repeatedly arose when any discussion turned to the U.S. First, politics. During every conversation about the U.S., questions and comments about the political climate were a constant, and opinions and knowledge varied. Many people expressed more support for the current administration than the previous, but many more were relatively uninformed and were keen to ask questions. Second, COVID. Unsurprisingly, people were curious about the pandemic in the U.S. and the impact that it had. Many were surprised about and against the masking policies and compliance. In Cusco, it is still mandatory to wear masks everywhere; almost all of the cusqueños (people from Cusco) wear their masks diligently, while the majority of people who don’t are tourists. Third, immigration. Though there are relatively few Peruvians who immigrate to the United States, they still seem to express interest in the issue given the large number of Latin American citizens in general who do immigrate. Many acknowledged that the U.S. needs to address its immigration policy.

Now, the topics that were brought up by only one or a few individuals. There are many, and I won’t have the space to go through all of them, but I’ll describe a few and list the rest. First, gun violence. I had a fascinating conversation with a student from England and another from Italy, and they both shared their unapologetic disapproval of the way the U.S. handles gun rights and violence. Second, I had another fun conversation with my professor about professional and collegiate sports in the United States, and she liked the idea of having many different popular sports to watch instead of just one (soccer). Other specific topics that came up include religion, food, and technology.

Over the course of my time in Peru, I have learned much about its history and culture, but what I didn’t expect to learn was much about my own country. However, being surrounded by people who have never experienced being in the U.S., I have gained a new perspective of our country. The wonders of travel.