SCOTS AROUND THE WORLD

Study-abroad experiences return with trips to Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Iceland and Singapore

After nearly three years of cancellations and concessions caused by the pandemic, travel lanes for Monmouth College study-abroad experiences fully opened in 2023. Four student groups took advantage during the first half of the year, traveling to Australia and New Zealand, Greece, Iceland, and Singapore.

Three of those trips followed the close of the spring semester, while the Greece trip was taken during Christmas break.

Led by classics professor Bob Simmons and communication studies professor Lori Walters-Kramer, a 17-student group rang in the new year in Olympia, the town that hosted the ancient Olympic games.

That location was one of the highlights for classics major Todd Fowler ’23.

“Being able to actually travel to the original sites that you admire so much and study so often was a real treat,” said Fowler. “It was almost like we were living history. For example, running on the original track at Olympia as the first Olympic champion would have also competed. Another example is walking the same path to the Oracle of Delphi as Alexander the Great once did.”

Ben Dorn ’24 came away from the trip with a new plan for his finances.

“While traveling to Greece, I was trying to figure out what to expect,” he said. “I remember sitting on the flight just in shock that I was traveling the world. When I landed in Athens, it was a dream. The whole week felt like I was in heaven, and that one week in my life was the best. After taking this trip, I won’t buy the most expensive car or house. I’ll use my money to travel the world. There is so much out there.”

The place that leaves Walters-Kramer in awe is a spot just down the hill from a major tourist site in Athens.

“A lot of people like the Parthenon, but my favorite place is just below it — the Agora, which is an ancient marketplace,” she said. “A lot of dialogue took place there. Socrates would walk through there engaged in discussions. There’s a small, raised area there that was a speaker’s platform. So the Agora is the place that moved me the most, just knowing you’re on the same ground as Socrates.”

Iceland

Biology professor James Godde has led students abroad in every calendar year since 2006, often to warm-weather destinations in Latin America. But this year he did some- thing different, leading 11 students on a previously postponed trip to Iceland.

Clockwise from left, part of the Monmouth group is pictured at the Parthenon in Greece. The Monmouth group poses on the Sólfar, or Sun Voyager, sculpture in Reykjavik, Iceland. The Monmouth group is pictured on Clark Island in Sydney Harbour, Australia. Jacinda Garcia points to the spot on the map where a team of five students and two faculty members spent most of June. Also pictured are, from left, Michael Andal, professor Jialin Li, Kylie McDonald, professor Marlo Belschner, Addison Cox and Ethan Forsberg.

“Better late than never,” said Godde of the trip, which for roughly half the students was the culmination of a 200-level biology course on the wilderness. “We focused on the many different natural areas of the country. We talked in class about how barren Iceland was in most places, and that was not incorrect. ’Bar- ren’ was pretty straight on.”

“Better cold than never” was an alternative way to look at the trip, as Iceland’s climate, which has typically started to warm up by late May, was behind schedule.

“We only had two sunny days, but we made it work,” said Godde. “The rest of the time it was clouds, probably rain, sometimes snow, and always wind. Before we left, I told the students they’d need to dress in layers. They listened. Nobody froze,” despite a typical day being in the low 40s with winds gusting from 15 to 40 miles per hour. “We kept hearing from people, ‘This is not normal. It’s supposed to be a little better than this.’ But we caught it when it wasn’t.”

Australia & New Zealand

Once-in-a-lifetime experiences and new perspectives on business practices and cultures were among the highlights for 24 students who headed “Down Under” in May.

“Globalization, of course, is so important,” said business professor Tom Prince, who led the trip along with two of his department colleagues, Amanda Cleland and Mike Connell, and psychology professor Joan Wertz. “One of the things we did was look at practices across cultures — how businesses culturally adapt their offerings. We studied the business practices toward Aborigines in Australia and toward Māori in New Zealand.”

Grace Goodrich ’25 said she was impressed with how the two nations’ business communities work with native citizens.

“Instead of turning a blind eye any longer, some businesses in the tourist industry approached the (native) people looking to see if there were opportunities there,” she said. “I thought it was really interesting to see how these businesses chose to learn and try to help show these cultures instead of stealing from them.”

Learning about the native cultures was also key to the psychology portion on the trip, said Wertz.

“The purpose of the ‘Cross-cultural Psychology’ course is to help students develop a better understanding of other cultures, as well as their own,” she said. “We were able to observe and learn about the Māori and Aboriginal Australians, and the students drew a lot of connections back to how Native Americans have been treated in the U.S. They also commented frequently about how friendly people are in those countries.”

Singapore

Jacinda Garcia ’23 was part of the Aus- tralia trip, and she barely had time to get settled before leaving the country again, this time as one of five students who spent the majority of June in Singapore to gain a broader and deeper understanding of the everyday lives of migrant domestic workers in the nation of 5.5 million people.

Professors Jialin Li and Marlo Belschner led the trip. Li brought a background in sociological training, while Belschner helped make the trip possible through her knowledge of working with different grant agencies, as well as her background in feminist theories and issues and in transnational feminism.

In Singapore, migrant domestic workers have played a key role in taking care of children and the elderly since 1978, when the state granted work permits allowing a limited recruitment of domestic servants from Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Philippines to ease the burden of working, middle-class women in Singapore.

Prior to COVID-19, about 260,000 such migrants worked and lived within employers’ households. However, many local journalists and scholars recently started to shed light on the legal barriers and gender-based violence migrant female workers are facing. The global pandemic further worsened the situation.

In addition to the research project, the group experienced the multi-ethnic culture in Singapore, including various foods at hawker markets and ethnic neighborhoods, such as Little India, Chinatown and Arab Street/Kampong Glam. Aiding their research and sightseeing was the fact that mostly English is spoken in Singapore.