A few weeks before I left campus, I was a nervous wreck. I’m talking about full on questioning every decision I have ever made, nervous to the point I considered backing out from this program completely. What was I thinking? Who do I think I am? The doubts came in fast and loud. A friend jumped in to reassure me, but it barely helped. My parents know I signed up for the program, but I couldn’t find the words to explain it to them, or anyone for that matter. This program is truly a one-of-a-kind experience that no amount of pre-trip conversations could have prepared me for what was coming.

When I landed at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, I was buzzing with anticipation. I was about to spend 26 days with people I had only met once before, in a city and state I had never set foot in. Uncharted territory, in every way possible.

But the moment we arrived at Grand Isle, something shifted. The first night, we all gathered in the kitchen, worked together to prepare dinner, and sat around the table getting to know one another. The nervousness began to transform into something else—curiosity and excitement. We were all in it together.

Challenges

I will be honest, the first challenge I faced was personal. Our professor Andrew's first order of business? Relax, unwind, and read.

I come from an architecture background, where there is always something to be done, a project to refine, an idea waiting to be developed further, and a deadline always lurking somewhere on the horizon. Leisure is not something I do naturally. Sitting on the porch swing with a book and nothing else to do felt almost uncomfortable at first.

The book assigned was The Awakening by Kate Chopin, set right there in Grand Isle and New Orleans. And I have to say, reading a novel in the very place it was written about is an entirely different experience. If I were to read the book back in LA or Atlanta, I would have imagined a completely different kind of beach. Bright white sand, clear blue water, the kind of beach you see on postcards. Grand Isle is none of these things. It has a quicksand-like texture beneath my feet, brown water, heavy rolling waves, relentless mosquitoes, bugs I couldn’t begin to identify, golf cart tracks worn into the ground, endangered birds nesting nearby, and days draped in a moody, grey light. It's hauntingly beautiful in its own way—raw, unpolished, and real.

Sitting on that porch swing, surrounded by that landscape, while watching the sunset, it felt as if the rest of the world was fading away. The ocean that stretched out before me was the same water that once surrounded Edna Pontellier or her real-life embodiment, Kate Chopin herself.

On my second day in Grand Isle, I tagged along with Professor Andrew to the local store and a gas station he had mentioned. And for the first time in my life, I felt an eerie, unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt stared at. I felt, for the first time, my Blackness in America in a way I could not ignore.

I moved to the United States seven years ago from Bahirdar, Ethiopia, a city where everyone had similar hair and skin complexions as me. When I first arrived in America, even though I was navigating a new country, I somehow didn’t carry the feeling of being unwanted. I had a kind of blissful ignorance about how I might be perceived in certain spaces. This changed on the road to Grand Isle. We passed a Confederate flag along the cypress-lined, swampy Louisiana highway, and something in me tensed up and didn't fully relax.

I found myself sitting with that feeling for a long time, and I couldn’t help drawing a comparison to Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. Edna was a woman pushing against suffocating social expectations of the 1870s, and despite all the privileges afforded to her as a white woman of means, she still felt caged. She fought for her freedom and tried to find her voice in her artwork. She refused to perform a version of herself that the world expected of her. In a way she was unaware of her privilege the same way I didn’t worry about how I could be perceived.

I couldn’t look past the privileges Edna had. The ones she sometimes seemed blind to, the opportunities that were not available to people who looked like me in that same era. And yet, despite everything she had, she took her own life at the end of the novel. I find that both heartbreaking and complicated. It didn't have to end that way. We never know what tomorrow has in store. It could’ve held something far better than yesterday, but with death, there are no second chances, no tomorrows. If Edna had paused to see the full range of her privilege, maybe the story could have ended differently, but also sometimes certain types of pain are just unbearable, and she needed to do this one last act of freedom for herself.

Louisiana Reminded Me of Home

Before we made our way to New Orleans, we stopped at the Cajun Pride Swamp Tour, and something unexpected happened. Louisiana reminded me at home.

The boat gliding through dark, still water, surrounded by cypress trees and alligators, brought back memories of taking small boat trips with my family across Lake Tana to visit convents set in the middle of the lake. There’s something timeless about moving through water, surrounded by nature that goes beyond geography. The warm air, the sound of water, and the pace of it all and entirely carried echoes of Bahirdar in January. I didn’t expect Louisiana to remind me of home, but it did. It was uncanny for a place that made me sit with the uncomfortable feelings to remind me of home.

I still don’t have the perfect words to explain this program to my parents, but I’m closer now than I was before.

Being able to walk the streets was written about; sitting with the discomfort and the beauty and the contradiction of the place in real time feels like I'm inhabiting the stories I'm reading about.

It is letting a book and location work on me simultaneously.

The Awakening hit differently because I read it in Grand Isle, watching the same murky water Edna walked into. My experience of race and belonging hit differently because I felt that in my body and did not read about it in theory. My homesickness surprised me in the Louisiana swamp because sometimes the word loops back on itself in a way I didn’t see coming.

I came into this program doubting myself, but this is what bookpacking does. It doesn’t let me stay comfortable; it meets me where I'm at and asks me to go further.

And I'm just getting started.