I will admit, winter break is one of my favorite times of the year. We are halfway through the school year, so everything seems less daunting: friends that didn’t come home for Thanksgiving will be finally coming home for a month, winter is always pretty no matter where you live, and being home with family over the holidays is always an amazing experience. However, I wanted more from my winter break this year than just being home, so I decided to go on the BC service trip to Israel and Palestine.
Though I’m only one of 28 students that went on this specific trip, there were many other trips that BC students could of gone on this past winter break. I know people who went on Arrupe, the MEDLIFE trip to Ecuador, and the Mississippi Delta trip. For a variety of reasons, we decided to leave the comfort of both BC and our hometowns and venture out into areas that are drastically different than anything we could of imagined. We had amazing experiences, met some of the nicest people in the world, and really understood what goes on in different regions of the U.S. and the world.
Our first day in Jerusalem, easily one of the most beautiful cities in the world
And then we came back and had to return to our every day lives.
My professor calls the process “re-entry”, and the first time she used that term I thought she was crazy. I was coming back from the West Bank, not Mars. Obviously Israel and the West Bank are different from Hermosa Beach, California or Boston College, but re-entry? I thought it was too strong of a term.
And then I realized it wasn’t.
I can’t speak for the people that went on Arrupe or the other winter break trips, but I can’t stop thinking about my experience. I talk about it in class all the time (sorry guys for constantly bringing it up), I can’t help but read every newspaper article I find about Israel and Palestine and the violence in Jerusalem, and there is a really small part of me that wants to go back. But here I am, back at school, living my normal life, and I have to somehow lower my trip on my list of priorities and start focusing on school, on who’s office hours I need to visit next, what party I’m going to on Saturday, and what I’m doing for Easter.
The skyline of Tel Aviv
It’s been really hard for me. Two weeks into class, and I haven’t stopped bringing up examples of my trip that somehow fit into whatever we are learning. But maybe that’s a good thing. I think the biggest disservice we as BC students involved in some sort of service/immersion/political trip can do is forget or ignore what we experienced. We went through something amazing, something we can proudly talk with our parents and our friends for years to come. It would be unfair to bottle up all the emotion and everything we learned because we are back at school. So go ahead! Talk about it! Bring it up! Re-entry is hard enough, don’t make it worse by keeping everything in.