Discovering New Worlds

If Giles Ferrell did, she wouldn’t have competed against varsity level track and cross country athletes beginning in the 7th Grade, stared down adversity with a smile during her six-year distance running career, and emerge as a team leader and All-League of Independent Schools and All-VISAA honoree multiple times in both sports.

 

She wouldn’t have undertaken a demanding course of studies and myriad extra-curricular activities that challenged her intellect and time-management skills and emerged as the female valedictorian of Collegiate’s Class of 2024.

 

And she wouldn’t have postponed her freshman year at Princeton University to spend nine months in Cambodia, a world away from family and friends, teaching college level classes and absorbing a culture vastly different from hers.

 

Stepping outside her comfort zone, you see, is standard operating procedure for Giles. It’s how she discovers new worlds, both literally and figuratively, it’s how she grows, and it’s how she challenges herself to be the best possible version of herself.

 

Giles traveled to Cambodia under the auspices of Princeton’s Novagratz Bridge Year Program.

 

“It’s all about learning and service and the idea that those two things go together,” she said one morning recently just before she departed for Princeton to begin what she termed her redshirt freshman year. “You spend nine months in a different country where you learn the language, live with a home-stay family, and do service work. That really, really interested me.”

 

Why, when taking the conventional path would have been so much easier?

 

“Education is not for me alone,” she said. “It’s to prepare me to better serve the community.  I felt like this would be a great step in my education because what I was learning would enable me to help people and learn about different cultures and ways of life. It was an incredible experience.”

 

Applicants ranked their preferences among six destinations. Giles’s first choice was Cambodia.

 

“I was really interested in Cambodia,” she said. “The country has a very tortured history starting with the Vietnam War, which led to four years of the Pol Pot regime with genocide and then 25 years of civil war, but in the past 25 years, it’s seen incredible development. Now, Cambodia is a leading force in peace work. That was a powerful, inspiring story. I wanted to learn more about the history and how they came back from traumatic events and moved forward.”

 

Last August, Giles flew from New York to Taipai, Taiwan, with four others from the Novagratz program. Then, it was on to Phom Phen, the capital of Cambodia.

 

Was there ever a what-have-I-gotten-myself-into moment?

 

“There was absolutely hesitation,” she said. “I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect, but I knew I wanted to go and try this because I knew the experience would push me to grow. I was looking for that challenge.

 

“The moment I got on the plane, I felt ready for an adventure. The moment I got off the plane, everything felt very different. We were driving from the airport to a restaurant. The traffic was so unlike traffic here. There were three lanes in the road but five vehicles next to each other. Everybody was on motorbikes, zigging and zagging around each other. There were cars. There were trucks. The traffic rules seemed more like suggestions.”

 

Giles’s assignment was to teach intermediate- and upper-level spoken English at Preah Sihahouk Raja Buddhist University. She taught two semesters of classes comprised of 18 to 20 students, mostly monks and many from poor, rural communities. Most were older than she. Many had taken English for years. Some had just a rudimentary understanding of the language.

 

“When I first got the job, I was told a Cambodian teacher would lead the class and I’d be an assistant,” she said. “I showed up for the first day of class. One of my teammates handed me a marker, and I realized I was the only teacher in the class.”

 

Ever resourceful, she improvised and in typical Giles fashion, found a way through research and thorough preparation.

 

“The students I got to be with were so inspiring, joyful, and excited to learn,” she said. “They were passionate about learning another language. (Their attitude was that) if I can speak English, I can do anything. It’s a language that makes the world so much more accessible because it opens up opportunities to travel and study. I had a sense that they were fulfilling part of their dream by learning English.”

 

Giles’s home-stay parents, Sakoeng and her husband Vitvol, helped her navigate the challenges she encountered.

                   

“It got hard in November and December because I’d been there for three or four months, and that was the longest I’d been away from home,” she said. “The most difficult thing was that I didn’t have a strong grasp of Khmer, the Cambodian language, so even though I felt a lot of purpose in my job, it was a little hard during that time period interacting with people who couldn’t speak English.

 

“As I became more confident with my language skills, I developed deeper connections with my family and friends there. That’s what made the experience really powerful. We have such different paths in our lives and not as much in common, but I learned that loving and caring about people transcends those differences.”

 

To say that Giles’s experience was life-altering is an understatement.

 

“My understanding of the world has definitely changed,” she said. “I have a much better appreciation of the interconnectedness of the world. My friends and I worked with different non-profits, and I got to learn about how they worked. I got to see the ways people in small communities can work together to make positive change and the ways nations are doing that on a global scale. I have a much greater appreciation about how much our world relies on working together, not just on big issues but small-scale community change.”

 

There were other revelations, of course.

 

“One of the best things we experienced was learning about Buddhism,” she said. “Cambodia is 98 percent Buddhist, but they’re very welcoming of religious diversity. I worked in a Buddhist university. Buddhism is one of the greatest forces in Cambodia that’s contributed to peace building.  They have a very famous leader, Maha Ghosananda, who went to Cambodia after the Pol Pot regime when the Cambodians in the refugee camps were repatriated and led a peace march back into the country. He brought Buddhism back to Cambodia.

 

“We talked about (how) a peaceful heart makes a peaceful person. A peaceful person makes a peaceful family. A peaceful family makes a peaceful community. A peaceful community makes a peaceful nation, and a peaceful nation makes a peaceful world. You see that people are so joyful, which is shocking (because) if you’re older than 25, you went through civil war. If you’re older than 50, you survived genocide, and yet people are so kind, joyful, and lovely.”

 

The joy manifested itself in random acts of kindness.

 

“My home-stay mother found out it was Valentine’s Day,” Giles said. “She said, ‘I’m so sad. I didn’t know it was a holiday in your country. I didn’t get anything for you.’ So she went and bought a bunch of bananas at the market. She took off two bananas. She said, ‘I’m giving this to you. I know it’s not much, but I wanted you to have something so you know your mom here loves you too.’ That was just so sweet.

 

“I remember once I needed a pair of shoes. I asked this woman if she could point me to where I could find them. She didn’t just point me in the right direction. She got on her motorbike and took me to the right place. People were so loving. They wanted to understand my culture as much as I wanted to understand theirs.”

 

As Giles moves into the next phase of her life…

 

“(Leaving Cambodia) was absolutely bittersweet,” she said. “I tried to journal every day while I was there. That will give me a way to remember everything. I’m excited to go to school, but I’m going to miss the relationships that I had, the sense of community that I felt, and joy people had in their everyday lives.”

~Weldon Bradshaw