For you who have families/friends living abroad ;)

Last night I had a "chat" conversation with a friend in Indonesia. When we began chatting, he seemed trying to say that education abroad is a form of indoctrination. That way, when students from Indonesia go back home, they bring with them a whole different concept to apply (i.e. to re-indoctrinate) and that the application was (almost always) doomed to failure.

Of course I was furious with his statement. I mean, I understood that education was somewhat a form of "indoctrination," but education abroad was more than that. However, aside from being furious, I missed discussions like this since my discussion partner Rae moved to another state and I had been thinking about thesis and moving so that I never had late-night chats with my favorite virtual professor, Mer.

So, we continued the discussion. To put it simply, I said to him, that people who studied abroad usually went home after seeing the world in a different way. Plus, they experienced what experts called as "reverse culture shock" as they were already familiar with the cultures abroad so they felt that everything at home was "different," "foreign," and sometimes "bad."

The problem was, people back home only saw what happened on the outside. They thought every person who studied abroad went home becoming a different person, more selfish, acted as though they knew everything, "westernized," and so forth. They forgot to see the processes happened in the inside. They failed to engage this study-abroad person about what happened while they were abroad, what they experienced, how that other side of the world was different, how they adjusted, and consequently, how they changed. They did not want to give a chance for the study-abroad person to adjust back to the cultures of "home." They could not just listen and wait for the study-abroad people to speak about their dreams, the changes they wanted to see, their passions, etc. As a result (I gave examples), these were what came out from the study-abroad people that I have heard personally:

- When I tried to work hard, everyone around me just said, you were so westernized. At the end, I just returned to my old habits. I just became the same person as everybody else, because they could not receive me and what I got from my education.

- I used to like these places and people. I thought now THEY were the ones who changed.

- I had to be extra patient here (at home). I was surrounded by negative thoughts!

Then all of the sudden, my friend admitted that he didn't talk about education-abroad in general. His fiancee (whom I know) studied in the US for two years and she just went back home to Indonesia recently. He was talking about her and how he thought she is a different person (which, he complained). And so the conversation continued although I couldn't write about that here.

I was very thankful for our discussion and I was reminded again about the importance of having conversations and understanding that two (and more) people sometimes talked in different layers (metacontexts, Rae? haha). If I could not be patient, I would think that my friend was trying to "attack" all people who study abroad. When I listened and engaged him in that conversation, I finally understood that this man was talking about one particular woman, a woman that he loves. I finally understood about his fear, his feelings, his love.

Conversations helped a lot.