No Offense to Russia, But I Shouldn't Have Come Here

The campus-wide email advertised two weeks in a total of three foreign cities, all for $1500 and a plane ticket. The call-out meeting featured delicious Russian desserts and a handful of eccentric people whose witty teasing and embrace of differences suggested a good group dynamic. A consultation with my bank account and a phone call with my mother both suggested the same thing: you can do this.

It would be my last summer before starting "real life" as a college graduate with a challenging and meaningful job, and I was sucked into believing I had to go to Russia. So I signed up for this trip - and now I'm here, wishing I'd stayed home.

Let me clarify that my discontent isn't because of the country, the food, the people here or in my group, the expense, or the things I'm missing at home. More accurately, my discontent comes from a combination of those factors, and the addition of this major one: by being here, I'm not practicing what I preach.

Since returning from my 18-month Mormon mission in rural Guatemala, I've talked about poverty, wealth, and priorities from the mounted top of a metaphorical moral high horse. Cold showers, dirt floors, dengue fever, and the happiness I rejoiced in despite it all, taught me some pretty important things. Namely:

• You don't have to have lots of things to be happy.
• Happiness comes from having a righteous purpose and working hard to fulfill it. 

Trite as those life lessons sound, I knew they were true and was pretty proud of myself for learning them the hard way and at such a young age, or so I thought. But my resolution of living a simple life turned out to be weaker than I thought.

Almost two years after returning from Guatemala, I'd become sufficiently emotionally distant from the things the Lord and the chapinas taught me that I started being swayed by some of the lies of the world. Namely:

• Graduate with a bang!
• Put your saved money to good use. Treat yourself.
• Spending money on travel isn't so bad; it's not like you're indulging in things. You're paying for experience. Travel will make you a better person.
• After this summer, you'll never have more than two weeks of vacation time, and eventually you'll have family responsibilities. This is your last chance to be free.  

So I came. And now I'm here, in Russia, cringing. Repenting, actually. Wishing I had had the resolve to choose the "best" option instead of the flashier, marginally okay one.

It hit me hardest when several members of our study abroad group were returning to the hotel on the fourth day in a week of historical tours of the city and surrounding areas. Our group's director, a middle-aged woman with a tendency to wear tights and flimsy tops while abroad, started mimicking the tour guide. "And to your left," she sung out, walking backwards and adopting a false voice with a hint of a bad Russian accent, "is another church. It was built in the 11th century and features peculiar architecture..."

Something about that impersonation made me cringe, as it did many people in our group. Sure, we had seen a lot of churches on this trip, but they were all actually built centuries or a millennium ago, at great cost and sacrifice for the people who constructed them in faith. The director's flippance immediately dismissed all that.

Worse yet, the tour guide she was mocking is a woman whose careful smile disguises the years of effort she's put in to learn English and work odd job after off job to support her family. When she stayed late one evening to answer a question I had about the city, her hesitant fingers hovering over my cell phone map betrayed the fact that she had never once owned a smartphone. Not to be diswayed, she set the phone aside and gave me directions from memory. This woman is my hero from this trip, and our director's mockery of her made me question whose side I was standing on. Why was I walking in this group of rich Americans, heading from a markets to malls in a land whose language I had not even attempted to learn, when I could have been working to support my (albeit future) family like our tour guide?

That moment multiplied. Time and again on this trip, I have had the opportunity to realize that my actions now do not align with my previously (and so self-righteously) announced priorities. I'm here, burning through Russian rubles on room service and matryoshka dolls, missing church and moments that could be spent with family, just eating, drinking, and trying to be merry. I was wooed by the glamor of the planes and trains and passport stamps, the travelust of the Instagram generation. But I forgot that the things of eternal value don't require a visa, and that happiness comes from having a righteous purpose and fulfilling it.

I'm not saying I'll never vacation again. Traveling really does open a person's eyes, teach us things about the world, and offer needed rest and rejuvenation. I look forward to seeing my kids' eyes light up when they see natural wonders, hear foreign languages, and climb into the sky in a carefully-piloted airplane. But there came a point in my life when God had taught me important lessons. Instead of staying home and putting them into practice, I was greedy for one more trip.

I was wrong.