Why Jerusalem?

My dream is to travel the world but I never imagined that my first steps off of the North American continent would be in Israel. I always thought I would go to England, Sweden, Costa Rica, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Russia, France, Germany, China or just about anywhere before Israel. If you would have asked me a year ago I don’t think Israel would have even been on the list of places I wanted to travel. Isn’t it funny how life throws you curve balls sometimes? But my bags are packed, I’m leaving in four days and I couldn’t be more excited!

People ask why I chose Jerusalem to study abroad. Have I always dreamed of going there? Obviously not. Have I been planning this into my schooling since I was a freshman? No. In fact, it is kind of messing up my perfect little plan and pushing graduation back a year. Are any of the classes going to apply to my major? Nope, not even to my minors. So why go? Now there’s a good question.

Here’s the whole story: I have always dreamed of studying abroad. When I was a junior in high school I even wanted to go to Cambridge University in England but my mom said no and that was that. I came to BYU with the idea that if I minored in Spanish it would only be natural for me to study abroad in Spain. I planned to go in the summer between my sophomore and junior years but as the time rolled around for me to fill out my application for the program I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. About a year after I made those plans I changed my major to Speech Pathology with hopes of doing bilingual speech therapy. I didn’t think a Spanish lisp would be very appropriate for speech therapy so Spain lost its luster. I thought of going to Mexico but, honestly, I can go there just about whenever I want. My family lives 2 ½ hours away from the Mexican border so Mexico wasn’t really my idea of ‘abroad.’

Even though it was really disappointing, I put my dreams of studying abroad on hold. The summer of 2008 in Provo turned out to be 'awesome blossom extra awesome' so now I’m so glad I stayed. And this is where Jerusalem finally comes into the picture. My best friend from when I was little was living in Provo for the summer and she came up with the bright idea that we should set each other up on blind dates. I happened to know a great guy that I thought she would like so I walked over to his apartment, knocked on the door and asked him if he would be willing to go with her. Somehow (don’t ask me how because I have no idea) Jerusalem came up in our conversation. Lance studied there and when he gets going he is like a walking advertisement for the BYU Jerusalem Center. We talked about it for a while and he showed me some pictures and I was convinced. I have had some little second thoughts along the way but ever since that day I have known that I would end up at the Jerusalem Center eventually. I mean seriously...who gets the chance to live in Jerusalem for four months? And visit other cool places in the area? With professors to teach you all about it? This is seriously a once in a lifetime opportunity! I can go visit any of those other places in Europe and South America whenever I feel like it and not have to worry too much about my safety but who knows how long Israel will be a safe plave to visit? I knew that this was the study abroad for me.

I talked my mom into it and then I worked on my dad a little bit and then I waited forever to turn in my application and then I waited some more to get off the waiting list and finally at the end of October I was officialy accepted into the program. It has been an amazing test of my patience! I am so grateful for the opportunity that I have to go and I can't wait to get there!