Wofford College - Study Abroad

A night in Iepers, Belgium

As the rain came down harder, more people in our group grumbled. When we arrived in Iepers, Belgium for our class trip, the sky above us opened up, began to spill out its contents and it hadn't run out of supplies yet.

The rain hardly fazed us when we first arrived. We were too busy hunting for authentic Belgian waffles and making ourselves sick from all the chocolates we ate. But as night began to fall, we all noticed as the puddles grew larger and as the cold wind grew sharper and cut through our jackets. The weather was miserable, and we were in no mood for learning.

Despite our need to be inside, warm and maybe sipping a Belgian hot chocolate, we were at the Menin Gate Memorial. Though we had visited early in the day and learned its significance -- it holds the names of 55,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers whose bodies were never recovered in World War I -- we couldn't quite understand why we were back, especially in this weather.

We had already visited the In Flanders Field Museum, located in the middle of Iepers main square. There, we not only found the rest of John McCrae's moving poem, but we learned what the war really was, especially in Ieper. Here, in this Belgian town, British and German troops -- along with some French, Canadian and New Zealand soldiers -- had fought perpetual battles in the muddy fields. If they didn't perish in the battle or disappear into the mud, they lived the life of the trenches, a condition that wasn't much more favorable.

As wrong as it was, all these soldiers' sufferings slipped out of our heads as we suffered ourselves in the rain. It was only when I almost slipped in a mud puddle myself that I realized how fitting it was -- that we should be in Iepers on such a terrible night. While we had umbrellas and jackets to cover ourselves, these soldiers just sank lower in the trenches and prayed the rain would stop. While we knew that we had a home to return to -- either our hostel, back to London or back to America -- they didn't know if they would ever return to the place they considered home. In fact, some of them suspected they would never see that beloved place again.

And it wasn't just those soldiers that suffered. Those who knew them suffered as they waited for their boys to come home, or at least for their bodies to be discovered.

We finally realized that we hadn't just returned to the Menin Gate for another look around, but we had come to witness "The Last Post" -- a ceremony that has taken place every night at 8:00 p.m. in Iepers since the year 1928. Even tonight, a night in which no one could want to venture outside, hundreds of people came to witness this ceremony. Family members or fellow school mates of lost soldiers came to remember their brothers. They all brought red poppy wreaths as a tribute to the soldiers; the poppy became a symbol during the war of the soldiers -- to some it represents courage, to others, suffering. Local officials sounded their bugles and the crowd grew silent, watching as each group walked forward and placed their wreath against the Menin Gate.

The rain continued to fall during the ceremony. Even though we were under the Menin Gate, water fell through the three large holes at the top. But, even as a shivered, I was glad it rained in Iepers. If nothing else, our group got the tiniest taste of what these young men suffered.

How to Measure the Wait

You can measure the wait in different ways.

You can measure it in deadlines: the dates by which you must turn in applications, recommendations and essays. The forms are easy. You just fill in the space with an answer. Though the demanded answers get harder after "name" and "address" you know somebody has to know the answer: mostly likely your study abroad director or academic adviser, or, if all else fails, Mom.

Essays prove more difficult. Instead of a single line there's a blank page before you and it demands to be inscribed. With what? That's the problem. Only you can answer the question before you: Why do you want to go to London? You sit down, strum the keyboard idly until you realize the point of the essay: they want to make sure that you actually think about why you want to travel across the Atlantic for three and a half months before allowing you to do so. So you do.

That's one way you wait: you endure essay after form and form after essay, hopscotching from date to date before finally landing on that final deadline -- the day you leave.

You can also measure the wait in moments. You can count the number of times you'll lay across your sixteen year old brother's bed with your legs splayed and watch some crude show with him that you’d never watch otherwise. Or, you can guess how many more times you'll witness the exasperated look your mother gets when she finds out you still haven't started packing –- a look she'll later apologize for with a defeated sigh, as if she's been trying to get the wind to blow in the other direction, and a mumbled "I love you." You can even try to determine how many more car rides, movies or meals you’ll have with friends before the day arrives.

Before you know it, they'll be no more moments to count. When the wait is up, the only moments left will be the ones you experience once you step off the plane onto foreign terrain.

You can measure the wait in expectations. You can try to imagine your life in London. Will you take a liking to fish and chips and start drinking tea? Is it possible that your slight Southern accent -- which is especially prominent when you're nervous, as you'll certainly be many times in London -- may disappear and you'll replace it with a soft British accent instead? Or, will half the fun be borrowing words from British dialect and laughing at the way you butcher their pronunciation? Will you feel different as an American when you examine your country with a sea put between your home and you?

The wait almost disappears as your imagination runs away with wonderings about the future abroad. When you imagine it, you're halfway there.

Perhaps the most sensible way to measure the wait is time. There’s nothing more concrete than knowing you'll board your plane in Atlanta at 6:40 p.m. on September 2nd.

Yet, time is anything but concrete. Time is simultaneously fast and slow. Time fluidly moves, then abruptly halts. You can take one day at a time, and yet you imagine all those days lumped together like a street full of traffic lights you wish you could just bypass. Time flies when you're having fun -- but isn't that just when it should stand still? And even if you try not to measure your wait with time, you can’t help but arrive in London and think, "It’s about time."