For her junior year, Remy Hill, a Harriton senior, had the amazing opportunity to study abroad in  India. The year-long program, YES Abroad, is sponsored by the US State Department and sends American high schoolers to countries with a large Muslim population. Her time in the small city of Anand, Gujarat, was a “really positive experience” and the Harriton Banner had the chance to sit down with her and hear all about it.

HB: Why did you choose your junior year to go away?

RH: My freshmen year I won another scholarship to go for ten days to Costa Rica, and it was a really incredible experience, it was free money to travel which is awesome. Ever since then, I had been searching student opportunities for scholarships and stuff like that and I came across YES abroad in my sophomore year. Happenstance, I went my junior year.

HB: What was learning in school like?

RH: Very different from the U.S. [education system]. It was a lot more memorization and learning from a textbook, but I was with all local Indian students which was cool. My school was relatively poor and pretty old, so I got to see some very different Indian institutions which was an interesting learning experience. I made some very close friends in my class and I had some really great teachers who taught in English, so it was nice.

HB: How did you deal with the language barrier?

RH: Language is tough there because the national language is Hindi and the unofficial national language is English, but the English they speak is very different from American English. It’s British English, but it’s just [changed] a lot and mumbled. My host family was from West Bengal, which is very far away from the place I was living in, so they spoke Bengali, which was their first language. They spoke Bengali in the home, spoke English to me, and then spoke Hindi to everyone outside their house. So there were a lot of languages floating around. My youngest host brother, Aditya, who was four when I got there, spoke four languages already fluently, which was crazy.

HB: What was your host family like?

RH: I had my host mom and my host dad and then my two younger brothers, Aditya and Aryan. They were funny, they were a little crazy. They had never hosted an American student before, but they had hosted a German boy. They were not expecting to host me, but then with some complications with my other arrangements they ended up with me.They were cool, I learned a lot from them, but we were very different.

I went into the program with a lot of naive expectations, thinking, ‘It’s India but it’s just America in another place but with Indian people and hotter sun.’ So I was shocked by how different we were and how much of a cultural shock I had to experience, although they were really understanding, well-meaning, and optimistic.

HB: So you talked a lot about cultural shock. What were some of the biggest cultural clashes between India and here?

RH: I think the most obvious, and I hate to bring this up, because I don’t want to promote any stereotypes or generalizations – there was a very big difference in the standards for women here versus there. Not that America is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I did experience a little bit of shock at how little they had expected of me sometimes.

In America, I’m fortunate to have parents that are super understanding and very liberal with how much freedom they give me. They let me go to India by myself, so I’m very accustomed to being allowed to do whatever I want within staying reasonable. But that was not something that was the same there. I was expected to go straight to school, come straight home, always be in contact with my host family, never really go out by myself. I would cover my head when I went out alone, especially in the start of my stay when I didn’t feel so comfortable.

One unfortunate experience that I had, during close to the end of my exchange there, when I had about three weeks left, I went on a run outside. I really missed running, I hadn’t been able to run at all that year and I just really wanted to do it. So I went running, on my own through my host city, which is not a thing there. You see runners all the time in America, but there it is not a thing. So I was feeling great with my headphones on, like ‘Oh, yeah, look at me running in India,’ and then a person in an auto, which is the equivalent of a taxi but open on the sides, started following me and videotaping me, which was just really degrading and demeaning.

So I guess sometimes just the lack of respect, I think, not only because I was a woman, but because I had far lighter skin so I obviously was very foreign looking. I think that that was one hard clash that I never really got used to or did it get much easier.

HB: What’s one of your favorite things about India?

RH: You can learn so much from every person that you interact with about India. But everyone is so vastly different in the experiences that they have – coming from different states, having lived in different places, practicing different versions of Hinduism or Islam. So there is such a vast combination of experiences but they all represent India so fully. When you go, you get to go into a big city and interact with people.

HB: Did you like your experience overall and do you think that you would go back?

RH: Yeah. I am very happy that I went to India and that I was there and did the program. I don’t think that I knew what it was going to be like. I was very homesick for a large part of my stay, and it was the first time that I really had been outside of my comfort zone. This was very different being without my parents and living with people who didn’t automatically like me was weird, just because I am really close with my mom and really close with my dad. So having to work for that was really foreign to me.

But yeah, I am really glad that I did it, coming back I definitely see how much I changed from when I left and came back and how much I learned. Overall, really positive experience and I would recommend it to anyone. Going back? I love India. It’s an amazing country, awesome place to travel, amazing food, really nice people, such a diverse culture. Yes, absolutely I would go back, maybe not to live there for a whole year just because it was really out of my comfort zone. Although yes, I would love to go back.