Aug 24 / Orientation: brand new friends, brand new everything

Jetlagged, tired and loss of sleep. Those were three things we, YES students (I’m quite sure) felt very much in common in our first day of arrival in 4-H Conference Center for our three-day orientation in Washington DC. Those long flights and transits certainly plead guilty. Personally, I didn’t expect much out of the orientation. It was probably the same things they have told us in each of our own countries, I thought. I was wrong.

It was so much easier to put in theory then, about being understanding and learning to get along with other people from different cultures and backgrounds. I knew it was going to be slightly different but I figured, if I got the hang of it in Indonesia, it will pretty much be the same.

At orientation, I learned that it’s so much more than that. I got to meet people who were completely new, who I never dreamed of getting to know. Ever. It was exciting; being told facts about other countries that I’ve never learned in class before, or finding out that the Pyramids were next to a huge main road and so on.

It was mind-boggling. A couple of times, I got nervous too; opening up to people that I had just met a few hours before, sharing things about the way we do certain things in my country, etc. Someway or another, language didn’t really strike me as a problem for those three days, even though sometimes we had to communicate with body gestures and metaphors, we understood each other.

It may be because, we were there for the same reason. We are HERE in the U.S for the same thing. The same goals. The same hopes.

I have a feeling we’ll all be okay. Its going to be a great year.