Why Am I Here?

Becoming a "cross-culturally immersed global citizen" is something that sounds like the ideal achievement of a study abroad experience (Zemach-Bersin, 3). However, I do agree with the author that becoming this type of citizen is a very complex process and is not fully attainable within the boundaries of education.

In my opinion, an individual cannot learn everything that is necessary to be a global citizen, but instead must experience it. I thought that learning about Indigenous Australians and about other facets of Australian culture would allow me to be a better global citizen. Granted, it has helped and has opened my eyes to a lot.

However, I think that I have grown more as an independent person living in a different country and experiencing different lifestyles, hardships and other changes daily.

I faced one generally negative experience here that could be labeled as "Productive Discomfort."

In Townsville, there is a beautiful public pool that screens movies for free often, so I decided to go with some American and Australian friends. We were greatly enjoying swimming and watching the movie and all was okay.

Townsville Public Pool

We had left all of our belongings on a table because the lockers were full and everyone else had their belongings on tables as well. However, one of my American friends got out of the pool to use the bathroom and everything she had was gone. Someone took her entire bag including, her phone, GoPro, wallet, keys, and even passport (she was using a different bag than usual and did not realize her passport was in there). We were not on any sort of organized outing and were just 3 Americans and an Australian alone in town. We knew that it was vital to handle things calmly and without getting upset. We found a security guard and called the police to file a report. Fortunately no one was hurt, and everything important was replaced. Weirdly enough, no one else had anything stolen.

We made the necessary calls to cancel credit cards, and lock her iPhone but we knew that it was a long shot that anything would be returned. Fortunately, the passport, IDs and keys did eventually turn up and the thief took basically just some cash, the phone and GoPro, but that was all replaceable.

For me, this was a huge learning experience. It would have been easy to call the International Student Emergency line or get emotional, but we knew that we did not have a lot of time to make decisions and needed to act quickly and with intelligence. For me, this was a very important learning experience and I not only learned about how to be safe with belongings in a public place, but also how to handle unexpected incidents.

Zemach-Bersin, Talya. “American Students Abroad Can't Be 'Global Citizens' American      Students Abroad Can't Be 'Global Citizens'.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Commentary          54.26 (2008): A34.