Educational Experience essay

Riley Stueven

Educational Experience Essay

At the end of the day, you have to look back on everything you’ve accomplished. The majority of people would simply look back on what they succeeded in finishing, while others would look at the actual experience they went through in getting those things done. Most don’t realize this, but life is a journey, not just a destination. Every action you go through alters your being in one way or another, for better or for worse. Some might even argue that the process of accomplishing your goal and the experience you get from that is more important than achieving the goal itself. However, it all depends on the situation.

My greatest learning experience came from traveling to China with my youth group the summer before I went into ninth grade. I remember being excited for the trip many months before we actually had to depart. I had never left the country, so the thought of just jumping straight into a country like China seemed like a perfect opportunity to experience something new.

The first thing our group did was to take Mandarin classes together. We didn’t take very many of them, but the classes were sufficient enough to give us a sense of the dialect over there. Not many phrases have stuck with me, the only notable ones I remember being “No thank you, too expensive”, and “Where’s the restroom?” That was the first time in my life that I had begun to learn a foreign language, and it was difficult to say the least.

Packing for the trip was also a new experience; I had only previously packed for shorter trips around the country, but this warranted a smaller suitcase, clothes that I wouldn’t be afraid to lose, and passports and foreign currency. The plane trip was very interesting; it was a twelve-hour non-stop flight to South Korea, and on that flight had to learn new ways to keep myself from getting impatient.

After the plane trip, we spent the next day in South Korea before we took another, albeit shorter, flight to China, and boy was that a culture shock. Everything from the hundreds of people speaking a language I didn’t understand to the crowded streets and odd sights of the city threw me off guard. For the first time in my life, I was the stranger in a strange land (at least it was a strange land to me). We didn’t spend very long there, but I got to try my first taste of real Asian food: It was beyond delicious, but didn’t taste like anything I had eaten previously in my life.

The next day, we headed to China, and I can’t remember ever being that jetlagged before. As we wandered the city streets, it finally dawned on me that America wasn’t the ‘norm’, and other countries weren’t ‘foreign’. The world is such a huge and infinitely interesting place with so many interesting people in it, I finally decided to just bask in the diversity. I was suddenly trying foods I had never dared to eat before, and joining in events that I would’ve been embarrassed to participate in before.

That trip was also the first time I had ever had an interpreter in my life. In the majority of my travels, most people I had met spoke English. Now I was in a place where very few people actually spoke English, and even fewer spoke it well. I never realized how difficult it was to convey a message when you don’t know the language, and body language and speaking louder didn’t help the situation. I now have a deeper appreciation for other languages, as I find many to feel almost more poetical and beautiful.

Half the group that I went with I had also never met before, so it was interesting to try to get to know them amidst all the confusion. There was frustration abound, yes, but at the end of the day, everyone had to really work together in order to accomplish our goal. Our group’s goal was to help people in need, but I didn’t find out what we were specifically doing until halfway through the trip. Our goal was to help paint an old Chinese schoolhouse in one of the region’s more poverty stricken areas. This was the most eye-opening part of our whole trip. The village we traveled to was one of the most dilapidated areas I had ever seen. There was no plumbing or electricity, no motor vehicles, essentially no modern conveniences of any kind. Staying in that place for a few days and helping them paint their school made me appreciate all the things we have here in the western part of the world.

There was also the group of Chinese students we met. They were from the city, and we had met earlier that day. We were simply going to paint the school with them, but it was decided earlier that it would be a good opportunity for us to meet and get to know each other. They were all high school students, and they all conveniently spoke English (and rather well I might add). Meeting them was a very surreal experience. They were our same age, and they had many of the same interests and hobbies as us, despite living half the globe away.

They showed us around to all of their favorite places; restaurants, opera houses, arcades, bike rides, we did it all. But just as we were interested to learn about them, they were eager to learn about us. They thought everything about our culture was fascinating, and most of them wished to see our country. One interesting thing is that when we all went to paint the old school, they were just as surprised at the poverty in the area as we were. We got to know them all pretty well, and since the trip, I know many of them have actually started to go to school here in the states.

All of the scenery and sights in China intrigued me to no end. The forests almost had a mythical air to them, seeming to hide ancient secrets and knowledge. We visited the Great Wall, which pictures don’t do justice, and saw many buildings and structures which were older than our whole country. The interesting thing was that there was no graffiti of any kind on these structures; there was a sense of respect for these monoliths, and no one felt the need to desecrate them with modern slang or spray paint. It essentially made me feel very small in the world. These structures were made long before I was brought into this world, and they will remain long after I’m gone.

The trip was a revelation; it allowed me to see that all countries and continents are so varied in their cultures, and I shouldn’t look at foreign people with disdain; they’re not weird, they were just born in a different place. We should respect other peoples’ ideologies and traditions, rather than thinking they’re inferior to our own simply because they’re different.

I haven’t had the chance to travel the world since then, but I happily anticipate the day where I get to travel once again and experience the culture of another land. This experience will stay with me forever, and I feel like I’m now a better person because of what I’ve seen and learned.