I have never been a tourist in Latin America, or any primarily Spanish speaking country. My international travel has largely been to India for visiting family and going on vacation so the Nicaragua CCESP will be a very new experience for me. I know that a lot of people in this class have had to navigate their feelings about tourism versus volunteer work and grapple with the effects of it in their personal lives, but I’ve never had this problem. Because I am of Indian descent, and stayed with my extended family for the most part during my visits, I rarely felt like a tourist in India. Even when we went to vacation locales with the family, I took cues from my family who lived in India about how to behave with staff and locals and everything seemed like the normal and appropriate behaviors. The only issues I had were when we went to areas where I didn’t know the language and thus had a limited understanding of what was happening and what people were saying around me but people in India are generally very welcoming and I was always taken very good care of by my family.

One of my trips to India was more of a mission trip so this diversified my experiences a bit. I toured India with a group and we played classical Indian music and sang hymns in gurudwaras which are the sikh places of worship. While we toured we also performed service in the gurudwaras because many tenets of Sikhism are based on service and generosity. However, this service is not really comparable to what we will be doing in Nicaragua. I, and all of the others in my group, are Sikh so despite being in another country we knew exactly what we should do and also had the cultural and social awareness to navigate any potentially uncomfortable situations (none of which arose). We were also seen as one of the community, rather than people from the outside with different skills and knowledge, so no one felt any personal conflicts about the meaning and implications of our service. We were simply there to help with our hands and our time and, as far as I know, there were no long-lasting, far-reaching, effects to a few extra hands in the kitchen on those days. Overall, the Nicaragua CCESP and the preparation that we are doing this term for the trip are totally new territory for me. I am excited for the challenge of going to a new place and doing service, but also the personal challenge of confronting some of these service debates that we’ve been having in class head on and I hope that I come out of this experience at peace with what we’ve done.