06/01/2017
“I took a gap year after college, and I worked in a program at the Echo Hill Outdoor School in Chesapeake Bay, which was kind of like the place we go on our ninth-grade class trip. Then in the winter I went to Madagascar and taught English to the locals. There were forty people in our camp, and we taught English for three classes every day. There were three guys in the adult English class that worked at the lemur park, so they took us up for free. You put a banana in your hand, and the lemurs will crawl up on your shoulder and down your arm and eat it.
I was originally going to scuba dive and restore a coral reef, but I got strep throat two weeks into the trip, and they couldn’t treat it because they didn’t know how. And you can’t dive when you’re sick because then your ear drums will blow up. So, I switched to teaching English, and I’m really glad I did.
The culture is completely opposite of America. They live right on the beach, so everyone is just in flowy dresses everywhere. Very few people wear shoes anywhere. The school buildings are made of concrete, but all of the houses are made of thatched palm leaves and bamboo. There’s no lights in the houses or air conditioning or anything like that. Most people live on less than a dollar a day. Their motto is in their native language is “Mora Mora”, which is like take things slowly, relax. It’s completely different from America, where we just take things fast and you always have to have something to do. I loved it.
It was very hard to adjust back to living here. For probably a week after I got back, I would just leave the house without shoes on, because I didn’t wear shoes at all while I was there. And over there, everything that was green was really green, and the sky was really blue. A very deep, clean blue. The air pollution wasn’t as big of a problem, especially where we lived. There no roads, so there were no cars. There was one bicycle on the island, but no one knew how to ride it, so it just sat there. And the stars, oh my goodness. The stars were amazing. We were in the southern hemisphere, so the stars that we saw were different, and the water went down the drain the other way. It was very different.”
-Michelle Cane, Class of 2015