The World Becomes Your Classroom
Lieselot Whitbeck, SIT Fiji: Multiculturalism and Social Change (Fall 2006)
Flipping through my pictures from my time abroad brings back so many memories. There is the picture of the albino Fijian woman who challenged the way I thought about race. There is the picture of my host mother from the village of Namosi, who challenge my ideas about hospitality and family. There is the picture of a man from Ovalau who taught me about sustainability and arboriculture. These are all pictures of life in Fiji; pictures of markets, villages, friends, and flowers. Looking at my collection of photographs, one might think that I spent my entire semester climbing mountains and eating mangoes. I was supposed to be studying abroad, not vacationing abroad. Where are the teachers? Where are the lecture halls? Right there. Those men and women, they were my teachers. Those villages and fields, they were my lecture halls. When you study abroad, the world becomes your classroom.
About halfway through my collection, there is a picture of me on top of a pile of luggage in the back of a truck with a huge garland around my neck. That truck, bumping along a rutted dirt road, was, for a few hours, part of my classroom. It was on that pile of bags that I first realized the fallacy of one of my expectations of Fiji. I thought that in Fiji, the problems facing the rest of the world would be simpler. With a population of 800,000, how bad could things be? How wrong I was. In Fiji, these issues are not simplified, they are concentrated. With a small population, they are more subject to the whims of the global market than bigger countries, since they can produce so little themselves. Fiji is the recipient of a lot of international aid and is highly reliant on the money brought in by two industries, sugar and tourism. Even when you are off in a village in the highlands, you see the impact of development and tourism changing lives. That day, in the back of that bumping truck, far from a lecture hall or traditional classroom, I realized that the Fiji’s size is important to its interactions with the world, but not in a way I expected.
In Fiji, educational experiences like this, far from a traditional lecture hall, happened every day. When you study abroad, education is about the people you meet on the street, like "Crazy King George", a man who lived next door to me and liked to tell me about how he knew the Prime Minister (which in a place as small as Fiji, isn’t that unlikely). It’s about getting to know people like my host grandma who would stand on the porch waving good bye to me every morning as I walked to class, or my host mom who liked to yell at the politicians on the news. Education is about walking down a sand dune and picking up fragments of 2,000 year old pottery. It’s about learning how to navigate a new city on my own, figuring out how to bargain for pineapples, and learning the trick to choosing the best mangos.
When you study abroad, you meet people who at first seem so different from you, but with whom you share so much. Like 8-year-old Fijian girls, I grew up playing hand games with my friends. Like the youth of Fiji, I am trying to find my way in a world that is changing in front of my eyes. Like the people of Fiji, sometimes I am worried about world events, global warming, rising costs of living, and local politics, but sometimes, I just want to have fun. Despite coming from almost the opposite side of the world, through the common experiences of living, laughing, crying, worshiping, loving and playing, I found how much we all share.
In Saint Louis, I get my education through books and lectures. In Fiji, I got my education through conversations and adventures. I learned about religion by listening to my host father entertain a group of bishops. I learned about multiculturalism my seeing native Fijians celebrating an Indo-Fijian holiday. I learned about conducting anthropological fieldwork by doing fieldwork with Indo-Fijian farmers. I learned by doing things I never thought I world or could do. I learned by living.
One more anecdote:
One night in Fiji, I got a new name. My class had taken a field trip to Namosi, a village in the highlands of Viti Levu. At the village, we were all taken in by host families and one night, my host mom decided it was time for me to learn how to weave. Weaving in Fiji is an essential part of a woman’s life. Women use pandanus, or voivoi, to make mats for the floor, bags for carrying goods, and various ceremonial objects. Since my host mother was not a master weaver, after teaching me the rudiments, she took me to her mother in law, who oversaw my work. My host grandma also happened to be hosting a small get together that night, so as I worked, bent over the mat I was making, lots of women came to visit, and one by one, they asked about that the foreigner, or palagi, over there weaving on the floor. I was introduced with the phrase “Sa Lisalot, ay.” When you say that phrase over and over again, it quickly slurs together into “Salote”, the name of the old Queen of Tonga, and after that night, my new name. Over the next months, that name helped me become a part of island life. I wasn’t just a foreigner anymore. I was Salote. I belonged.
Lieselot Whitbeck is currently a senior in Arts & Sciences majoring in Anthropology and Immigration Studies.