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It is very hard to travel outside your home country and come back the same person. Most likely it will happen to you, and you will not realize it right away. When you do, you will try to think back and try to put your finger on when exactly you started to change, but you will never recall when exactly it happened-you will just know, you are different now.
When you come back home after your time abroad, after you have finished answering all the questions from your friends and family about your experience, you will retreat to your bedroom, to just be alone.
While you lie on your soft, warm bed, and gaze up at your ceiling, you will remember the aboriginal children playing in small communities the government built for them in Australia. You will remember how your heart skipped a beat when a local on the street flashed you the most beautiful smile in Africa. You will remember the rickshaw ride when you almost ran into a sewer lagoon in India. You will remember your visit to an orphanage, for deaf and blind children in Vietnam.
Remember when the orphanage director told you that just a small touch makes these children's day? You did not believe it. But as you turned around to make sure no one else was looking, you leaned down and touched one of these children and saw that, indeed, you made their day. How could something so simple mean so much? The memories will soon flow like the river Nile you visited; the sights, the smells will all come back to you.
You will tell your friends back at home about your trip to the orphanage. "Were they deaf, blind, AND dumb?!" they will say and think it to be hysterically funny. Just at the moment your friends start laughing, you will turn your head to the side, your eyes will focus on your friend's face and narrow ever so slightly, and you will not be able to help but think how ignorant people are.
Ignorance is bliss; with knowledge comes sadness. And you cannot help but pick up amazing experiences while on you travel abroad trip. Yes, while you lay and look up at your ceiling, in your nice warm bed and remember that there are billions of others sleeping on mats, in the streets, or with their belly rumbling because they are hungry, you will feel sad.
In a couple of months, you will be your old self again, hardly taking heed of your experiences and memories gained while you were abroad. You will joke with your friends about the homeless woman on the corner. You will pass a playground and not even remember the little one's day you made at the orphanage. Or will you?
You have two roads you can travel that night when you are lying in your bed. You can push it all away, into a corner of your brain, as an experience where you took a lot of pictures, learned a bit, and that was that. Or, you can put your study abroad experience to work in your life.
"What can I do?" you will ask yourself if you choose to take the second, harder road. "I am just one person, and I cannot change anything in this world by myself", you will say to yourself. You are one person, one lucky person. One person who marveled at the constellations at night while walking on the beach hand and hand in Australia, and witnessed a lion tackle a gazelle in Africa. You can do anything you want.
So what do you do then? That's for you to figure out. Whatever you do though, it is all up to you. Just promise one thing though. In five, ten, or thirty years from now, when suddenly something reminds you of your time abroad that your sadness will not reincarnate as sadness because of the knowledge that you did not do anything with your traveling experience, but rather happiness, because you did.
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