An International Student's Thoughts on Leaving Home

A guest blog post by Jochebed Airede during International Education Week 2024

I left Nigeria to study in the U.S. when I was 19. To many Nigerian—and often African—students, moving an ocean away from home is no strange feat; it’s the African dream. The COVID19 pandemic required that I travelled alone. I stuffed my life into two 50-lb suitcases. A mask shielded the bottom half of my face. 

My first month in the U.S. was like living in the eye of a hurricane: standing alone while surrounded by a whirlwind. Having received one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine—as Nigeria didn’t require it—I lived in quarantine. I loved returning to a spacious apartment after a busy day of pinballing between eight classes and my on-campus fellowship, but I was lonely. I hated going to the dining room alone. I spent one evening bawling on the phone because I couldn’t find the key to my room, and I couldn’t afford the $75 it took to replace it (thank God, it was in my wallet). 

In my Junior year, only my second in the US, moving abroad again to study in Paris for six months was difficult, too. It rained every day of the first week of January (that irritating European drizzle that doesn’t warrant an umbrella, but promises you’ll be soaked without a coat). There, I experienced seasonal depression for the first time. A taxi-driver jocularly called my French accent “disgusting.” Money gurgled down the drain as I bought overpriced bagel sandwiches (I couldn’t cook in my first apartment). Each time I moved, I had moments where I wanted to go home.  

But these moments were always overridden by other ones: by nights spent singing Hamilton and Troy Bolton hits off-key, then eating Korean fried wings to celebrate a friend’s birthday; evenings spent watching the marigold sunset from the top of the Eiffel Tower; memories of flat-out sprinting in an ankara jumpsuit to catch a train from Milan to Como with the girlfriends I’d made in Paris; and riding a gondola in Venice.  

You might worry about money. You might be the only Black person in a room. You might worry about your accent or learning a new language.  

But take the leap—go abroad. For 10 days, for a month, for a semester, for a year. Just go. 

Not because everything will be perfect or romantic (it won’t)—go because you might be the first in the family to do so, and how will they know it can be done if you don’t go?  

Go because, no matter what you might think about yourself, you deserve to know what life’s like beyond the borders you grew up in; to know what it’s like to eat rose-shaped cones of gelato or push through crowds to see the Mona Lisa. You deserve to know what it’s like to have earrings made of midnight-blue glass, blown in Morano, to hang them in your ears and know there’s a story dangling on your body; to make friends who will love you, even the parts of you that you thought nobody would ever accept.  

You deserve, Scarlet Raptor, to be more. To see more, to do more.  

And if I believe in you, who are you not to believe in yourself?