Trip to Europe teaches much
By Mike Haynes
“The world
is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
Although I
think you can live a perfectly happy and productive life without ever getting
on an airplane, a spring break trip to Europe reminded me of the wisdom of
those words attributed to St. Augustine.
The tour by
a group of Amarillo College students and faculty, organized by honors director
Judy Carter, was intended to expand minds through direct experience of other
places and cultures. It did so more than I expected.
The sights
themselves affected our students, who had written papers about some of the
locations.
Journalism student Perla was intent on seeing the White Rose
Memorial honoring university students the Gestapo had executed in 1943. When
our group did visit that site in Munich, Germany, our cameras focused on Perla,
reverently grateful to be on the campus where the victims she had researched
had defied the Nazis.
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| Students from Amarillo College and Dutchess Community College in New York shoot photos of the White Rose Memorial in Munich, Germany, during a spring break study trip. (Photo by Amanda Castro-Crist) |
We know
about the Holocaust, but it’s different when you tour the Dachau concentration
camp and stand in the middle of the vast roll-call grounds where prisoners
wondered daily what would happen to them next. Looking down at my comfortable
tennis shoes on the dirt surface, I knew that if God had put me on Earth at a
different time in a different place, it could have been me.
We asked
tour guide Sandra, who grew up in Munich decades after World War II, how
Germans deal with the guilt stemming from the Hitler era. She described the
trepidation she felt when she met a young man from Israel. Should she tell him
she was German? Would he hate her? She was honest with him, and he was friendly
with her. We learned much about humanity from that short talk on our tour bus.
We’ve read
about the Berlin Wall, but our group’s understanding of East-West politics grew
when we could touch a portion of the wall that remains and see how high above
our heads it rises. Our empathy with those who were on the front lines of the
Cold War deepened when tour guide Matti, a Berlin native, recalled how he had
maneuvered border checkpoints in the 1980s for brief visits to East Berlin to
see his girlfriend. And we heard Matti explain how living under Communism
changed East Germans so that some distrust remains 25 years after the wall
fell.
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| Amarillo College students and faculty, clockwise from left, Judy Carter, Amanda Castro-Crist, Laura Cabrales, Mike Haynes, Angie Ross, Paola Estrada, Andrea Guerrero, Bailie Myers and, in center, Raylyn Bowers, ride an elevator to the top of a clock tower in Prague, Czech Republic, during a spring break study trip. (Photo by Amanda Castro-Crist) |
The
differences between Amarillo, Texas, and the Old World were obvious to our
students. Here, people go to church, drive to the convenience store and live in
air-conditioned houses. There, churches host more tourists than members, people
walk and ride bikes or trains to work, and living space is limited. Here, we
value our independent spirit. There, varying degrees of socialism are on
display.
But Amanda, another student, pointed
out the other side of the coin. We spend dollars and they use Euros, but under
the surface, we’re the same. Each morning, whether in Amarillo or Nuremberg, we
all have to get up and go to work. We all need medicine, whether from a
pharmacy or a German apotheke. We all love food, whether a Tex-Mex burrito or a
Czech trdelnik pastry. We all worry about our families.
People are people. St. Augustine knew that, too, and I’m thankful
that Amarillo College allowed us to read a few pages of the book of the world.
