Confessions of a Corporate Shopaholic

After literally 2 full days of connecting flights and school buses, I arrived in the middle of nowhere.  Montezuma is next to a town called Las Vegas but nothing like its sister in Nevada.  The school is located at a 3-hour drive from New Mexico’s airport in Albuquerque.  I couldn’t pronounce half of these names at first since they are all Spanish.  The community is largely Hispanic and I felt nothing like in the States, though technically I got no reference in the first place.  So when my friends and schoolmates asked me whether I had been to New York, San Francisco, LA, Washington DC or Florida when I was studying in the States, they couldn’t believe my answer. 

The school however was located in a picturesque part of the rocky mountains.  Although it is located far south of the States next to Mexico, the town is 6,400 feet above sea level, so there was a decent amount of snow during winter.  We were completely isolated from everything else because there was no public transportation, no shops or malls.  The students were not allowed to drive because of insurance issues, and had to rely on scheduled school vans to take us out to the nearest Safeway (supermarket).  I felt completely trapped.  I was surrounded by my schoolmates 24 hours a day, and the school and our second year seniors had organized all types of activities for us that were meant to knock down cultural barriers.  That was very much needed, since there were language issues, cultural issues, curriculum issues, discipline issues, and sex issues.  Yes, you heard it right.

The UWC schools have a long tradition of incorporating wilderness and community services inside our curriculum.  For a city boy who was hardly skilled in sports in school, it was definitely something new.  I went for 5 day hiking and wild camping trips carrying backpacks half my height, stuffed with cooking pots and pans, food, sleeping bag and mat.  We hiked through the woods with compasses and maps and had to hang our food up the trees at night to avoid sniffing bears.  The boys needed to pee around the wild camp site to mark our territory against bears, and we often saw knocked down trash cans the morning after as proof that they were around us just a mile away.  Sometimes part of the hike involved kayaking.  After 10 hours of hiking and paddling every day, I always collapsed no later than 7pm after the camp fire, under the brightest and biggest night of stars I had ever seen.  Rock climbing was another extremely scary but fulfilling experience.  And no, we didn’t do it on a rock wall.  We did it on the coarse mountain tops under light snow.  When I repelled down, I felt that I was literally going to die.

Community service was not easy work either.  Yes it did sound like something which mild law offenders were sentenced to do in orange jump suits.  We built houses for the elderly, painted fences, cooked for the homeless, and in my second year I paid weekly visits to the elderly who lived alone and wanted someone to talk to.   It was the school’s mission to pay back to the nearby community, and being located in a rather run-down hispanic environment, there was plenty that a group of 17-18 year olds could do.

During the two years in UWC, I hardly spoke a word of Cantonese or even Mandarin in front of mainland Chinese schoolmates.  The norm was not to speak in languages which others couldn’t understand, so we were instructed to always use English whenever possible, with no disrespect to our own cultures of course.  I remember I was tongue-tied when I landed HK during summer.  For the first hour or so I had to remember how to speak in Cantonese.  The people, the various accents, the cultures, the weird food, the temperature, the wilderness, and depending on nobody but yourself was quite daunting for myself at the time, but it was exactly this exposure that helped shape who I am today, rather than the academic curriculum that you haven’t heard me mentioning one bit, so far.