I’m pleased to introduce our second guest blogger of the summer and our first international correspondent. Kami L. Rice recently joined InterVarsity staff to work with graduate and professional students in Nashville, but she has extensive experience as a freelance writer with a large number of credits to her name. Kami is in the middle of a 4-week journey to India. She plans to connect with students and faculty while there, but she begins her series this week with reflections on a previous trip to India and on the benefits of travel to her spiritual perspective. Thank you, Kami, and welcome to the Emerging Scholars Blog! ~ Mike
Once upon a time, a missionary speaker admonished a group of gathered students, which included me, telling us that if we have any openness to going abroad as a missionary, we should go, because so many people are unwilling to go. While I think I took issue with that statement then, I definitely take issue with it now, since statements like that don’t exactly invite input from the Holy Spirit or reflect a good theology of calling and vocation.
Though I investigated every option from graduate degrees in international development to joining the Peace Corps, from missionary work to volunteering to pick French grapes, the way for me to begin the international part of my life didn’t open until my calling as a writer was firmly established. Thus, when I headed to Africa for four months in 2007 to cover writing projects for mission and humanitarian organizations, I literally went to ask questions, not to solve problems.
It was then that I fell in love with the way traveling as a writer allows me to ask questions that could normally be inappropriate to ask of new acquaintances and the way listening to their answers opens avenues for learning from people in other places.
Two years ago I came to India for the first time on a trip that happened to conclude an inaugural two-year period of extended travel abroad. That formative two years began with the seven countries in Africa and went on to include work for more NGOs (non-governmental organizations) during a month in Haiti, then three months of writing from London, before bringing me to India. [Read more…] about Heading East: Kami in India