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Here is how to push away the precious tangibles of home, friends, love, familiarity, and comfort for vague repetitively drilled ideas like ‘perspective’ and ‘horizon’:

Here is how to wrap your shaking arms around the trembling body of your loved one and whisper uncertain words of what you hope is perceived as optimism before you pass through airport security:

Here is how you explain that helping people you don’t know and quite frankly aren’t sure will even appreciate your help is more important than spending time with those you love:

Here is precisely how long you hold moist eye contact:

Here is how you step in front of a classroom full of street children sitting in desks and eyeing you suspiciously and chattering to each other about you in their impenetrable native tongue, and convince them you have something important to impart:

Here is how you realize that most NGOs and their putatively selfless leaders have motives that are far less altruistic than they might want you to believe:

Here is how you handle realizing your NGO might be one of them:

Here is how to keep your head low during a shitstorm:

Here is how to rip your hair out in frustration at the ego driven single minded narcissistic omnipresent attitude that gorges on the resources and passion of your students, displayed by the very individuals who purport to be said students’ champions.

Here is how you realize that the NGO sector is not the paradisiacal world of unified objective, humble cooperation, and fierce resolve you had imagined:

Here is how to persevere and refuse to demarcate lines and focus on your children who are what it is all about underneath the complicated hierarchies and official titles and corrupted salaries:

Here is how to grip the bony shoulders of a close friend and look deep into his dulled eyes hours before he is expelled back into the squalid poverty he grew up and will now die in:

Here is how to love your students like your own children:

Here is how to let them go:

Here is how to sit at your desk paralyzed from the all too familiar fear of poverty’s relentless awful undertow dragging your students back under into a world of desperation, the paralysis bringing just that fear closer to realization as your students wave confused hands before your glazed eyes as the plastic hands of the classroom’s clock tick off the first minutes of English class:

Here is how to Overcome:

Here is how to walk to avoid stepping on needles while walking through a mountain of rubbish while visiting the former homes of your students:

Here is how to control your tears:

Here is exactly how hard to hug the skeletal frame of a developmentally challenged student whose mother faced starvation while he was in the womb and apparently stopped growing (the student) at age 8.

Here is how to handle the violent hallucinations that come with the extreme fever and dehydration wrought by severe dysentery:

Here is how to get struck down by illness and hospitalized for a week while realizing your body is just a puny vessel that is made to shit and piss and vomit and will one day wither away and die like the rest of them and how there’s nothing you can do about it:

Here is how to realize you are just a speck of dirt inside a giant’s eye:

Here is what depression feels like while absorbed with that implacable whirlwind of human suffering that ravages your host country, twisting and raging, knocking daily on your students’ lives, threatening to suck them back into the depths of dangerous poverty, their precious fragile hopes and dreams that have been so carefully nurtured by you and co. between its canines, now snapping them with one fatal snap, leaving them to die only after being tortured by desperation and starvation and commodification of their bodies and the ravages of disease:

Here is how to wake up every morning and help others anyways:

Here is how to never lose hope:

Growth

Recently submitted to Union's Study Abroad Journal:

Working in the NGO sector you hear much discussion regarding the value of vague intangible terms. Broadened horizons. Expanded perspective. Global citizenship. The merits of altruism. Personal growth through sacrifice of the same nature.

These terms are thrown about haphazardly. What are my horizons, and what are they being broadened to encompass? What’s wrong with my current perspective, why the expansion? What exactly am I growing into, personally? Individuals irrefutably return from service work larger in some abstract sense; let’s try to ground these abstractions.

First, it should be stated that the expansion of perspectives etc. ad nauseam hurts, the psycho-spiritual equivalent of some serious growing pains. The most difficult part of these pains, and the very root of the most severe pangs of culture shock, is the realization that certain actions, values, emotions that we imagined as inherently human are merely culture-specific. All the goose-bump stimulating beauty of that perfect combination of musical notes, the careful brushstrokes of a brilliant artist, the beautiful and moving intricacies of a novel, the happiness exuded by a radiant smile, all the things that strike a deep resonant note in your being; this note resonates so strong partly because we feel we’ve stumbled across some universally recognized essence that transcends all barriers between us. It is an essence we take as the root of our humanity, and we expect others to recognize it as such.

We all know the disappointment felt when, after showing a close friend something you find tear jerkingly fantastic, and even after he tries hard to share that transcendence of experience, he can only shrug his shoulders and apologize. Real culture shock is when you’re surrounded by such apparent apathy for what you perceive as the root of our common humanity. Realizing that what you envisioned as distinctly human is not so, rather ensconced within your own culture’s hidden walls, is real culture shock, and the first step in personal experiential growth.

This growth blooms concurrent with the waning of culture shock when you realize that these aspects of our culture that we identify as universally appealing are merely surface level extrapolations of the genuinely universal qualities. Friendship. Compassion. Beauty. Love. Altruism. These are the real qualities that are the essence of humanity, we just mistake our attempts at conveying them for the qualities itself. The song, the novel, the painting, the smile, are all culture-specific vehicles for these qualities that we mistake as the qualities themselves. The qualities are there aplenty; it is the release from our restrictive mode of thinking and the subsequent deeper investigation of what you have heretofore viewed through a lens crafted by personal culture that allows you to recognize that the qualities themselves are indeed ubiquitous.

That’s real growth.