Study abroad can do students a world of good

This opinion piece tells how good it is for a student to travel and learn a language and another culture. DP

By Roslyn Ryan, Editor

powhatantoday.com: Though I have only been serving as editor here at Powhatan Today for about six months, there are very few things that really surprise me anymore.

Not that I think that’s a good thing; part of the fun of working in community journalism is the fact that there are so many opportunities to be surprised, amazed and/or completely befuddled.

Happily I can tell you that, last week, I was all three.

A Powhatan High School student walked into my office, politely introduced herself, and started speaking Japanese.

This would not have been shocking at all if Krystan Rillie was Japanese, but she isn’t. Her fluency came thanks to a year spent studying Japanese language and culture –literally immersed in it—in Shuunan City, Japan.

It’s no secret that the youth of today are more culturally aware, and more worldly than perhaps any generation that has come before them. The internet has opened windows on to vastly different cultures and allowed us to make connections—even if from afar—that we never could have dreamed about before.

What I found so impressive was this young lady’s devotion to learning about something so far out of her comfort zone. She took a giant step towards understanding something it would be just as easy, in this part of the world, to simply ignore.

Not only is she now bilingual, which will certainly be beneficial to her somewhere down the road, but she has, I think, learned a much more important lesson as well.

If Rillie accomplished nothing else on her trip, she is now so much better equipped to understand the experience of being an outsider, of having to struggle every day just to be understood. She now knows the value of a warm welcome, of a reassuring smile, and what it feels like to suddenly be the odd man—er, girl--out.

The empathy she now has for others facing assimilation into a foreign world, which she described to me the other day, is something that will serve her as well as anything she could ever learn from a textbook.

I hope that other students will see not only the bravery but the wisdom in her decision to study abroad and maybe even follow suit.

Rillie may have been the first PHS student to set out for the far corners of the globe, but I hope she won’t be the last.