Visiting student from Washington University at AUCA

May 25, 2015

Zack Staples is a visiting student from the U.S., who grew up on the Caribbean island of Barbados. He came to Kyrgyzstan a few weeks ago, and now he is volunteering for the PR office of AUCA as well as travelling around Kyrgyzstan. Zack told us about himself, why he deferred attending Washington University for a year, and what he likes most in Kyrgyzstan.

“My name is Zack Staples. Although I am American by heritage, I grew up on the small Caribbean island of Barbados. From birth I lived and attended school there until age 11, when my family moved back to the U.S. Despite being American, adjusting to living in the U.S. was difficult for me as really all I had ever experienced was life in Barbados. This was my first experience of culture shock, and while I eventually overcame it and became accustomed to life in America, I was fascinated by the phenomenon.

Having grown up in Barbados, a cosmopolitan island and a crossroads of emigrants from many different nations, I have always had an interest in travel and, more specifically, experiencing other cultures than my own from all over the world. Thus when it came time to decide what I wanted to do after I graduated high school in the U.S., I was conflicted. I had already been accepted to Washington University, a very good school in St. Louis, Missouri, but I felt unready to start college, as I had no idea what I wanted to study and was still academically exhausted from the grueling college application process. What I really wanted to do was travel. So that’s what I did. I deferred attending Washington University by one year and made plans to take a gap year. Starting last September I’ve been traveling around Asia, primarily in Thailand, Myanmar and China. I’ve been studying and learning about the local culture in these places primarily through direct contact with the inhabitants, mostly in rural regions of the countryside, but sometimes also in cities. In the case of China, I was also studying Chinese.

Originally I had planned just to visit these three countries so that I could spend an adequate amount of time in each in order to really absorb what life was like in these places. Additionally, at the pace that I planned to travel, just these three countries would represent a time commitment of over six months of traveling and living out of a backpack, after which I assumed that I would be tired of the road and ready to go home. However, a few months ago while I was in the midst of preparing to leave for China, my mother contacted me with an intriguing proposal she had received from an old college friend of hers, Andrew Wachtel, who was now the president of the American University of Central Asia. He had extended to me the invitation to visit Kyrgyzstan, and said that if I came he could find me a place to live and something to do at the University.

I must admit that before receiving this offer I was unfamiliar with Kyrgyzstan as a country, and it was never really on my radar as a place to travel to. However my lack of knowledge about the country only made it more intriguing and harder for me to turn down the offer, so I accepted and extended my trip by another two weeks (all the time I had available). At the time of this writing, I have been on the road for seven months, including a month spent working in my original home country of Barbados. Although I am somewhat homesick and road-weary, overall I am very excited to be here and cannot wait to start learning more about Bishkek and Kyrgyzstan, and what it is like to live and study here.

In my travels I’ve experienced culture shock many times since that first move to the U.S. I’ve come to welcome and appreciate it, as I believe it is through culture shock that we learn the most about a society and it’s values and, by contrast, our own. I suppose this is the reason I’ve come, to indulge my desire to always be experiencing something new and different, and through being challenged by the experience, to learn from it.”

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