For the last ten years, I have been working for them both as an administrator and a field instructor on summer and gap year programs for high school and college students. During this time, I spent another year in Senegal, more than three years in India and made trips to Madagascar, Rwanda and Nepal. I have trekked across the Himalayas in Nepal and India with groups of students and on my own. I started learning Hindi in India and Wolof in Senegal. I went on my first ten-day silent meditation retreat in 2013, and have been attending annual retreats and cultivating a daily meditation practice ever since. I try to orient each of my days around engaging my curiosity and continuing to learn from the world and the people around me.
And now, I’m writing to you from Italy. Why Italy? I realize that Italy may seem like a bit of a tangent from the story that I have been telling you. But we humans are nuanced and multifaceted, and Italy has its own role to play in my story. My great-grandparents immigrated to the United States from Italy more than 100 years ago, and I was raised with the remnants of Italian-American culture as it filtered through three generations. Several years ago, I applied for Italian citizenship and now hold both U.S. and Italian passports. I was keen to return to the country of my ancestors and put the Italian language skills I had learned in college to the test. While COVID slowed down my travels, it provided me with more time, so I applied for another Fulbright to come here to study migration.
Why migration? In India, Senegal, Bangladesh, Guinea and the other places in my story, I have received abundant hospitality and a warm welcome.
