Tonight I’m going out for tea with my friend C. I admire her in so many ways because she does the things I would never have the courage to actually do, I just like to dream that maybe one day I would. Last summer, she traveled to Ghana to teach village children English. She wrote home emails of how she cried the first week she was there, became accustomed to showering with cold water buckets and being hit up for money even by friends because she was white. She stayed the whole summer and came home with cool knick-knacks, photos and willpower. I have other friends that have traveled to Africa on exchanges and to work. I have even added Johannesburg to my growing list of places to visit. But that’s as close as I get to being courageous enough to venture out into the unknown. Because I don’t trust my own independence to stand the test of travel in a remote Africa village for three months, I admire my friend more.
This summer, while we crashed her pool, drank our weekends away and went camping, she was committed to be chained to her calculator. She recently resolved that she’d like to be an architect. Not just in a “That would be cool” way, that’s not her style. Instead she signed herself up for challenging math course over the summer so she would have the requisite admission qualifications to architecture school. We watched her cry, miss out on road trips and cut the swimming short (while we continued to bask in her own backyard oasis) so she could study and be tutored in calculus. Dedication I can only dream to possess.
And tonight, I am going out to tea with her, less than twelve hours before she boards a plane that will take her to South Korea, where she will live and teach for a year. All by herself, laptop and meager (OK, stuffed), suitcases in tow. (I won’t romanticize her any more than necessary, she is impressive enough on her own) She will be teaching and making some money to pay for architecture school next fall. A world away, for a whole year. I can’t imagine how isolating that is, nor how inviting she says the opportunity is for her. Communication with her will most certainly be written, though maybe we’ll all wake up at 2 a.m. or something to talk to her. (I just re-read that and thought, “C’mon, you’re writing about a girl who is moving to Korea to further her life dreams. You can surely muster up the energy to talk to her at an inconvenient hour.”)
So, I dedicate this post to my globetrotting, perpetually self-improving, ultra-ambitious girlfriend of mine. Happy travels, C.