Three weeks ago I noticed a flier in the Student Center advertising a travel abroad trip for interterm. I have lately felt that itch to get out and experience parts of the world that I’ve been reading about in books since I was young. So I took down the information and showed up for a meeting on a Friday afternoon.
I should have been surprised that the offer of such a trip did not bring hoards of college students trying to broaden their outlook and experience cultures beyond their own to the meeting. But, in a way that remains baffling to me, but nonetheless expected, I was the only one there.
I sat down with the two professors organizing the trip and learned about a truly once in a lifetime opportunity (pardon the cliché) to travel to the Kingdom of the Bhutan.
This was the basic idea: spend three weeks trekking through the rural villages of the Bhutan, in the Himalayas between Tibet and India, to learn about how the Bhutanese modernize and develop while conserving the natural landscape.
Here’s some things I learned: Last year 6,000 tourists visited Bhutan and only 1,000 were Americans; only one other school in the U.S. has taken a group of students there; in 1996, the Bhutanese passed a law stating 60 percent of the wilderness of the Bhutan is to be conserved from now until eternity; in 1999 they got television; and seven ULV students are being given the opportunity to go there.
Then I was walloped with the cost of the trip – $4,950. I’m sure my face sort of fell, but discouragement didn’t last long. I would make this work even if I had to have 50 car washes and write letters to all the businesses in my city.
So I took home an application. I looked at pictures on the Internet and started imagining what it would be like to be in such a place. I drafted a letter to Kiwanis asking for a donation. I estimated how many roles of film and how many tapes for my tape recorder I would need. I would be super-journalist/tourist.
Last Tuesday I turned in my application. The next day I got an e-mail thanking me for my submission but informing me not enough students applied and the trip was off.
Hello. Only seven students needed to sign up. That’s just not that big a number for an entire university to manage.
I think there is a general lack of something among students on this campus and I can’t identify what exactly. But something tells me our college educations have to go beyond what we do in the classroom. Walking around campus you can learn so much. I don’t think I would have ever heard of the Bhutan had it not been for one flier. There are possibilities right here for us, but we have to be looking for them for it to make any difference.
Remember when we scrambled around in high school trying to prove that we were, in fact, valuable for admittance into college because we were well-rounded?
We should not be waiting until graduation to start applying what we are learning in our fields of study or in our core classes. We should not only be motivated by job titles and paychecks. We can start now. For me, a trip to the Bhutan could have been amazing as an opportunity to set foot in a country so unlike my own and enhanced by looking at it through the eyes of a journalist and photographer in training.
Bailey Porter, a junior journalism major, is LV Life editor of the Campus Times. She can be reached by e-mail at porterb@ulv.edu.
