Gap year abroad. Three simple words that together will guarantee you some of the most rewarding, challenging, awkward, breathtaking, hilarious, incongruous, and proud moments of your life.
Everyone embarks on a Gap year for their own reasons and whatever these are you should have a clear idea of them in your head to allow you to get the most out of your experience.
I’ll freely admit that for me, the decision to take a year out to teach abroad wasn’t entirely selfless. A culmination of factors – a desire to see more of the world, a need to make a difference somewhere, the excitement of challenging myself in an entirely new way, the physical and emotional need to break from the constraints of the educational system, curiosity, idealism, and the slightly daunting prospect of testing and expanding my character – all contributed to my decision to defer from university for a year and enter the unknown.
That’s how I found myself living in a Buddhist nunnery in North West India for five months, teaching English to the most dedicated, loving, trustworthy, and crazy women that I’ve ever met.
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A-levels are tough. No, A-levels are evil. But the prospect of a gap year rather than an immediate transition to university (and therefore more exams!) helped to keep me motivated and was a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ of revision. I found though, that however much I’d moaned about my A-levels and wished them to be over, I felt a real void after results day and I found it great to have such an exciting project to turn my attentions to.
My adventure. However much thinking, dreaming, planning and imagining you do beforehand, nothing can prepare you entirely for your gap year. Before my trip, for example, there was no way that I could have imagined that on a sweltering Saturday afternoon in the not to distant future I would be dive bombing Buddhist nuns in a river, or dancing up a mountainside with them to Hindi pop-songs to the amusement (or should I say bemusement) of drivers, bus-loads of locals and the occassional cow or sheep.
It’s only when you get home that you realise what you’ve done, how you’ve changed, and how you feel. As with everything you do, a gap year abroad has its ups and downs but these are all part of the experience, and make it what it is.
For me, the hardest thing was being away from my family for much a long time – something that I’d never done before – and I’ll admit to having been guilty of the ‘I want to come home’ phonecall syndrome on at least two occasions but I found that the best remedy for homesickness was to get out there and to plough my energies into doing what I was in India to do - to help out. Homesickness, and its ability to drive me out of my bedroom at odd hours of the day, saw to it that I was weeding the nunnery grounds singing Vengaboys songs with about fifty nuns, that I learnt to make chapati, that I found myself teaching aerobics to some nuns as we walked round the temple, and that I podded a whole crate of peas whilst being teased by three young nuns for my technique!
My gap year is part of who I’m going to be for the rest of my life. Everyting that I’ve learnt about myself, about the world, and about the people in it will help to form my opinions and shape my decisions in the future. I’ve learnt the importance of perseverance, the necessity for (and the satisfaction that you get from) patience and tolerance. I’ve learnt to let myself be carried along with events, and to allow myself to be surprised. I’ve learnt about open-mindedness and about acceptance and I have made friends that I know will be friends for life.
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Lizzi Middleton’s gap year was organised by GAP Activity Projects