Illinois in fall 1999, the reality wasn’t quite as I expected. Majoring in speech communications, I enjoyed my classes and quickly made friends. But the opportunities I’d imagined, the chances for freedom and to find an exciting new path didn’t come as readily as I’d hoped. Student life was fairly mundane: classes, studying, eating pizza and watching movies with my dorm-mates, overeating at the residence’s all-you-can-eat buffet to the point that I gained nearly thirty pounds. It was actually kind of a letdown.
One day I stopped to read one of the many flyers I’d seen around promoting something called Birthright Israel. The purpose of this international organization is to inspire young people to explore their Jewish heritage. They provide anyone born Jewish the experience of visiting their faith’s spiritual home, all expenses paid, to help them to learn about their cultural history.
Birthright Israel seemed a blessing: an easy, low-risk way to break out of conventional expectations and get far away. Spots for their trips were very competitive, so I signed up without a second thought that I might actually be selected. Truthfully, I felt I barely qualified because of my family’s relatively relaxed approach to our faith.
As it turns out, given recent events—I applied shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and during a peak in the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict—travelling internationally was widely seen as reckless, even dangerous, so very few people had signed up. To my surprise, I would be on my way to Israel that December.
I immediately called home. I hadn’t spoken to my parents in a while, so I was eager to tell them about my plan. When my mom answered, I was prepared to gloat.
“Oh, Robin!”
I could picture her in her bedroom, idly watching television before nodding off to sleep. She called to my father. “Tony, Robin’s on the phone!”
I heard him pick up the kitchen extension.
“Robin!”
I readied myself. “Guess what I’m doing over Christmas vacation?”
My mother sounded overjoyed. “You’re coming home? Oh, Tony, she’s coming home!”
“Ma, stop,” I said, instantly annoyed. “I’m going to Israel.”
I could almost hear their jaws dropping. They were of course thinking of terrorists and suicide bombers, the violence reported in the news every day. To them, this trip seemed insane.
They didn’t really know what to say, and the conversation ended abruptly. I learned that in the following days they’d discussed my proposed trip with various family members. My aunts and uncles, all the family, all told them, “She is your daughter. She is your responsibility. If you need to tie her down to a chair, that’s what you need to do. But you can not let her go.”
But by then my parents were learning they couldn’t tell me what to do. So they did the best thing they could. They both individually came to me on campus to privately discuss my plans. Why was I going so far away? Why couldn’t I just come home? Why didn’t we use this time to work on our family?
They asked with such sincerity, such intensity, I thought for the first time I could speak the truth and air all my feelings. But the truth was I didn’t know why I wanted to go so badly. So I brushed off their concerns, still concerned with nothing other than my need to break free.
I promised my parents I would search my soul about exactly why I’d signed up for the Israel trip. So one gloomy evening, I showed up early to one of the nightly practices of the residence’s Ultimate Frisbee team I had joined in my second year of university. With no one around, I sat under an awning against the cold stone of our dorm building, curled up with pen and paper in hand.
I had journalled since high school, but now something stirred inside me, yearning to be articulated. I felt on the verge of understanding what it was, but it was so big, just a jumbled mush, tied up inside me. Slowly I felt the knots loosening.
I started thinking, why? Why did I want to go? What would this trip mean within the larger picture of my life?
Just as I felt words approaching, my pen hovering above the page, the dorm hall’s doors flung open and my Frisbee friends burst onto the field.
“Robin!” they called, “Let’s go!”
One of them threw the disk long and the others chased it upfield. I instinctively moved to follow, then paused. Instead, I told them I’d catch up later.
As a soft rain began to fall, my pen raced across the page. I’d wanted to express these feelings for years, to scream them out, but never knew the words to use.
I feel tied to this life. Bound by decisions I never made, decided by people I have never met. Greeted with an outcome, beginning with an end, I am struggling to free myself of an upbringing I did not choose ...
I don’t remember if I went back to practice that day, but I do remember filling most of that page, then returning to my room in Allen Hall to type it out into my laptop. By putting my feelings into words, I knew I was closer to some sort of conclusion. I needed to go as far as possible, to do as much as I could. And, for better or for worse, the first step would be this trip to Israel.
Eventually, my parents gave me their blessings for the trip. Not that I was waiting for their approval, but I was glad to receive it nonetheless.
It was a fascinating two weeks. We visited the Western Wall on New Year’s Eve at midnight and scaled Mount Masada at sunrise. We explored the old and new cities, repelled cliffs in the Negev Desert and swam in the Dead Sea. I was humbled by a visit to the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem and later had the chance to meet both Israeli and Palestinian peers for long discussions of the region’s longstanding cultural conflicts.
I was deeply moved by how attached these people felt to their spiritual lives. And while it didn’t encourage me to pack up and move to Israel to become a devout Jew, it did remind me how fiercely I longed to break out of this Western mindset and find something else. But what that something was precisely, I still didn’t know for sure.
When my parents picked me up at the airport upon my return, I could tell what they were thinking: Phew! That’s out of her system! Now we’re done with that.
Unfortunately for them, relief didn’t last long. A few days later, I sat them at the kitchen table and told them exactly what they were most dreading: Israel was just Step One. I didn’t want to just visit Israel, or any other western country, for only ten days. I needed to find a place far away and for an extended length of time. A space where I couldn’t rely on technology or other people, customs, norms, language—somewhere far from my current reality.
“If this first trip was a big deal for you,” I told them, “then get ready, because this is just a warm-up for what I’m really going to do with my life.”
I initially considered three possible destinations: South America, Asia and rural Africa. As a university student, I figured the best route would be to study abroad for the upcoming semester, and I was pleased to find there were programs available in each of these places. I quickly ruled out South America, as all the programs I found required previous fluency in Spanish. I considered several possibilities in Asia, but they required the desire to learn an Asian language. Then I found several programs in which one could study in Africa with only English or French. Within English-speaking Africa, Kenya struck me as the most appealing. It was that simple.
Well, almost. In each of the programs I explored, participants would be surrounded by English students or placed in a cosmopolitan city—the very situations I hoped to avoid. I eventually discovered a program offered through the University of Minnesota that connected students with a contact in Kenya, who would then provide a link to a host community in a rural region. I’d be required to do a great deal of months-long groundwork at the University of Illinois, then develop a research topic and conduct field studies while in Kenya. I also had to convince the dean and college at my current university, the University of Illinois, that my Kenyan excursion would be worth an equivalent year’s credit and