It’s a funny thing—how much of a self-contained bubble Duke is. While most of its students are out “in the field” in developing countries like Haiti, Uganda, Nicaragua, and of course Kenya, I find myself occasionally stuck in the mindset associated with this self-contained bubble. While Duke has most definitely expanded my view on many international issues and has opened my eyes to unimaginable experiences, it has also led me to have a very skewed view of what is “normal.” This is because Duke students are far from “normal.” For us, normal is travelling to these underdeveloped countries, living amongst struggle and poverty, and engaging in various research and community development projects. It is normal for me to have friends currently in South Africa, Egypt, Nicaragua, Uganda, and Tanzania, as well as friends in Italy, the United Kingdom, Israel, and Costa Rica (and I actually do have friends in all of these places at this very moment). And all of these friends are interning, researching, and creating sustainable community development, like myself. Therefore, I find that it is easy for me to fall into this mindset that what I am doing is as well, “normal.” It’s easy to feel that I am only one of over 300 DukeEngage students living throughout the world, doing essentially what I’m doing. Additionally, I am with a group of five other students here. We are all living and working here. It is during thoughts like this that I must remind myself just how few these 300 DukeEngage students are in our growing world. That we are not, by most standards, “normal” and what we are doing is not average. At times, when people would react in shock and amazement about this journey I was about to embark on, I could not help but think of the other hundreds of students like myself travelling on a similar journey. This is not necessarily a bad way of thinking, as it really raises our standards of normal and what we should be doing with our lives. It opens many more doors of possibilities and inspires us to do things that we would have otherwise thought impossible. We dream bigger because of the lofty goals of our peers and we are more confident we will achieve anything and everything, because of the successes of those peers. However, at times like these when I find myself in the midst of an ambitious research project of gender parity in education in the cornfields of a remote, rural, and strikingly underdeveloped town in Kenya, I must remind myself that my life and these goals are not “normal”- they are incredible. And this is thanks to Duke, and its bubble of excellence.
