Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat.
And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures."
I love that quote. I thought I'd start the first blog post with it because it describes seizing opportunities, which is kind of the overall lesson of this post. It's also here because I love Julius Caesar, but I suppose that's another story for another time.
Anyway, my name is Kyra and I'm 17 years old. This summer, with the help of the NSLI-Y program, I will be travelling overseas to Oman to learn Arabic and experience the culture. Needless to say, I'm absolutely thrilled.
I feel like it's obligatory to keep a blog about this kind of thing, so here I am. Even though I'm months out from leaving, I wanted to give a bit of background and also talk about events leading up to actually leaving, thus this early start.
To begin at the beginning: I've always wanted to learn Arabic, but have never really had the resources to do so properly. I mean, my dad was in Iraq in 2003-2004 and Afghanistan in 2008-2009, so I grew with this foreign culture and language in the back of my mind. We have all of these artifacts from the Middle East around my house and in my room, and I've always had to observe from a distance. I've never had the opportunity to take a class on Arabic or Middle Eastern studies, and self-learning this language is difficult. I let my ambition brew beneath the surface and kept my eyes open for ways to learn Arabic. When I heard about NSLI-Y my junior year, I knew I wanted to do it. I knew that the program embodied everything I wanted to do all in one: it offered the opportunity to learn the language, which I could apply to my future career, and also allowed me to study the culture, something I had wanted to do for a long time. I also knew I was under-qualified. I have never studied Arabic, and my attempt of learning another language (Spanish) had been squashed by an semester-long internship my Senior year. So not only did I not speak the language, the only other language I had taken throughout high school, I had dropped. I didn't think my chances looked good. So I quietly applied for this program, and became a semi-finalist. This wasn't comforting at all, because I figured they may make this decision based on some factor that would've gotten me to this round but wouldn't qualify me beyond this. Which is why, when the finalist nominations came, I was surprised. And grateful. And terrified.
Moving forward, after I received my finalist notification, I had the worst time worrying if all of the documentation got in correctly. They give you 7 days to turn in a scanned photo of your passport, a hard copy of a form, and the emailed copy of that form. I had recently renewed my passport, and had forgotten to sign it, so they emailed me back to tell me to sign it. That whole thing was stressful, including not knowing if they got the hard copy of the form. I was so worried I'd be disqualified because of improper documentation turn-in procedure. But I think it worked out because I then began receiving emails regarding the program from AMIDEAST, the program in direct control of what we'll be doing this summer. By "we'll", I mean the other girls doing this. I think there are 14 of us.
Anyway, I hope to be able to have quality conversations in Arabic by the end of this. I think I read somewhere that they want you to have a presentation, in Arabic, at the end of the program for, I believe I'm correct on this, some members of the consulate. At this point, I've only ever been out of the country once, and it wasn't for long. Giving a speech in front of consulate members is such a foreign concept. I suppose all of this is a foreign concept.
I've received a lot of emails recently detailing a lot of what's going to happen, and I'm excited to talk about that later, but you can only write so many run-on sentences before you just need to give it a break. So I'm just going to cut this off here. This is the end of the first official post, and the beginning to a Summer in Oman.
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