"Hélas la Tunisie!" by Kayley Ronnkvist

    Studying abroad takes a lot of planning. Studying abroad in a pandemic takes a lot of planning, then replanning, then replanning. My name is Kayley. I’m a third year student at Grinnell College currently writing from the airport to Tunis, my home for the next four months. I’m excited to share my journey living, working and studying in Tunis this semester, but before I go forward, I want to acknowledge the time, energy, and frustration it took to get here.

    I grew up in a small, snowy town in Minnesota and wanted to experience big city life after 17 years in rural America. Unfortunately, I toured a small college in rural America and fell in love with it. My compromise to myself was that I would go to this college, and study abroad in a major city in order to make up for its rural location.

    I've studied French since a young age and am a French and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies major, so I knew I wanted to study abroad in a French speaking city. I am also a second generation Swedish immigrant, and wanted to be able to travel to Sweden during my study abroad. I considered several locations in France, but the summer after I graduated high school I had already lived in France with a host family, and the French language curriculum at my college is largely focused on France. I felt that studying in France would be a missed opportunity to explore a new culture, history, and dialect. Taking this into account in addition to proximity to Sweden, I thus decided to study abroad in Brussels on a program focused on European relations rather than French literature and history. It was settled.

    And then bam! pandemic. My college shut down, and all discussions of traveling abroad disappeared. At this point, I was just hoping that I could return to my campus. But that didn’t happen: my college remained entirely online for more than a year. I was devastated to be away from campus for so long and, even though the opportunity to study abroad returned in my third year as originally planned, I was unsure if I wanted to spend even more time away from the people and college I love. There was also a big question of stability. The number one thing the pandemic took away from me, and from most people, was stability. I could no longer predict where I would be in one week, one month, or one year. Just when I felt like I was getting some stability back once vaccinated, did I really want to shake up my life again and forgo the stability I had so craved?

I ultimately decided to compromise and go abroad for one semester instead of a year. While going abroad in a pandemic is scary, there was no guarantee that my life if I stayed in the US would be any more stable. I began to think more. If my central reasoning for spending a semester abroad was to learn about a new culture and language in a way that I wouldn’t easily be able to later in life, was I cutting myself short by going to western Europe, a region I was already quite familiar with? Didn’t I want to make the most of studying abroad and fully immerse myself in something new? To top it off, I had also begun studying Arabic and questioning why I hadn’t considered going somewhere Arabic speaking. I thus decided to forgo all my pre-pandemic plans and spend the semester in Rabat, Morocco, with Amideast’s program, where I could regularly practice French and Arabic with native speakers and be immersed in a culture more different from the one I grew up in.

Making this decision changed my educational course. In order to prepare to live in Morocco, I not only continued taking Arabic and French, but I enrolled in classes that focused on topics relevant to North Africa, including a class on Islamic Law which affirmed my love of socio-legal studies, and frequently used Morocco as a case study in my interdisciplinary coursework. I now have a concentration in Studies in Africa and the Middle East.

    I took my language placement test, requested courses, purchased flights, registered for the Department of State’s Safe Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP), underwent the tedious process of getting a four month supply of prescription medications, and was a little over a month from departing for Rabat. Uncertainty grew, however, with the onset of the omicron variant. Several of my friends’ study abroad programs had been canceled. And then. I woke up to a notification from the STEP program that Morocco had closed all of its borders. I knew this was possible from the start of the pandemic, but after my year and a half of preparation for this experience, I was crushed. A few hours later, Amideast reached out and offered to switch me to their program in Tunis, Tunisia, but I knew very little about Tunisia and was fearful of traveling to a place I was so unfamiliar with. I questioned if at this point studying abroad would be worth the stress and uncertainty, or if I should wait and find a way to live in North Africa in future years. I was terrified of going with so much unknown, and reached out to many people whose opinions I value in order to validate these feelings. But every single person told me that I should go. Again, there was no promise that moving abroad would be any easier next fall, next year, or next decade. Even if I am sent home shortly into the program, at least I was there to begin with. Even if online, taking classes through Amideast instead of through Grinnell would be a great opportunity in itself to learn about North Africa from new perspectives.

    Switching to Tunis took several hours on hold with my airline to rebook, a lot of fear of contracting COVID before leaving, and the stress of finding a PCR test that was available during a widespread shortage in my region. The universe sensed my fear though, and on the day of my departure, the proctor of my COVID test happened to have lived in Tunisia for 12 years. This was exactly the good omen I needed to reinstate my hope. And now, I am here, leaving for Tunisia, a country I know very little about. After a year of sitting at home, now I have a grand adventure where I will be immersed in foreign languages, food, health care, politics, and people. This city has so much educational and personal growth to offer me, and so much beauty that I get to explore. Though still nervous for what is to come, I am grateful for the instability that has brought me here, and am so excited to see where all of the unknowns take me.