Week 9 Impressions by Maura Walsh

Hello from London! Since this week finds the LC gang caught in the midst of term papers, final exams, and sundry other academic and internship responsibilities, I’d like to tell you what I did last week. I escaped the city’s bustle, consumerism, and jolting tube rides to spend nine days outside the quaint seaside village of Aberdovey, Wales.

If you’re a discriminate follower of the LC London schedule, you’ll know that we just ended our third week of internship placements. My internship is with Encompass Trust, an organization set up by an English family in response to their son’s death in the 2002 Bali Bombings. Encompass takes young people from Indonesia, Israel, the Palestinian Territories, the UK, and the US on ‘Journeys of Understanding’ (cheesy title, I know) in partnership with Outward Bound. The program goal is to bring a personal understanding to issues of global conflicts and injustices. The programs include daytime team-building adventures in the wayward and wild wilderness of the Welsh countryside, followed by evening discussions that confront participants with gritty issues ranging from personal identity to opinions about whether conflict in the Middle East deserves too much media attention.

My internship site supervisor realized that by stealing me away for the week, he would gain another American participant as well as someone to help organize both office supplies and evening discussions. Thus, I found myself staying with the 23 other high school and college students, at the crest of a steep hill, in an ancient red brick house whose floors creaked zealously and whose shower ceilings were black with mold. It was a difficult week, and a wonderful week.

To cite the ‘best’ parts of the trip is rather unfair, but seems well worth a try. To begin, getting out of London was literally a welcome breath of fresh air. I was transported to a lush landscape – where I got to go sea kayaking, hiking, and rock climbing – that made me quite nostalgic for the greenery and outdoor adventure of Portland. We ate lunch to the sound of a bubbling stream in a leafy gorge, rather than to the droning buzz of traffic on Gloucester Road. I was introduced to the brilliance of the flapjack*, which – judging from the British participants’ emphatic obsession – have an almost cult-like status in the British diet. I’m still not sure how I could have spent an apparently downright dismal first six weeks in London being completely oblivious to the wonders of the flapjack. I’m just relieved that my ignorance to the flapjack has now been reformed.

Besides learning more about British culture from the other Encompass members during my nine days in Wales, I had the opportunity to meet extremely inspiring individuals from Indonesia, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. I met a floppy-haired Indonesian whose agility and balance on the ropes courses was breathtaking. I met an atheist Jew who has an eerie resemblance to the French student my family hosted when I was thirteen. I met a goofy Israeli with whom I communicated in a hodge podge of gestures, Hebrew (of which I know none), broken English, and theatrical facial expressions. I met a homosexual Sufi Muslim who has a wicked sense of humor, an insatiable love for music, and who wants to be an artist but is bending to his parents’ will and studying IT instead. I roomed with a soft-spoken but fiery Palestinian who has lived in a refugee camp all her life, who hadn’t seen the sea for eight years because she is not allowed to travel from town to town without a visa, and whose nineteen year-old brother has spent the last two years of his life in Israeli prison for running an errand for his boss to a town across the border.

After the unique individuals I met, the new cultures I encountered, and the tiring days spent climbing around in the wilderness, it was rather disorienting to find myself back on Gloucester Road on a busy gray Monday afternoon. I’m still processing everything I learned on the trip – and before I know it, we’ll all be back on the road for a new set of adventures during spring break next week!

*flapjacks are a scrumptious brownie-sized chewy granola-honey-bar-esque concoction that can come graced with many different mouth-watering extra ingredients (such as chocolate, nuts, or toffee). Wikipedia points out how fatty and caloric the beautiful flapjack is, but I posit that (especially when doing strenuous physical activity on Outward Bound trips) the flapjack’s glory outweighs (no pun intended) its downfalls.