“Great things don’t typically happen in your comfort zone.”
Benjamin Whitnell, a senior international business major with a minor in Spanish, looked at me with an intense earnestness. With mere words and pictures, he transported me to his semester studying abroad in Sevilla, Spain.
“I was really scared,” Whitnell said. “Obviously I love to travel, but without my family, it was just going to be me.”
Whitnell has lived in Jackson for his entire life, and had traveled for vacation with his family before, but had never stayed in another country for an extended period of time.
His interest in the Spanish language was sparked in a bit of an inauspicious way. When younger, he met a group of Puerto Ricans on a cruise, who are known for being perfectly fluent in Spanish and English. They would talk to him in English, then about him in Spanish.
“And that really made me mad because I don’t like being excluded from a conversation, especially when I’m in the personal space of someone else,” Whitnell laughed. “So that day I decided I’m not going to ever let that happen again.”
He immediately started Spanish classes and decided to study abroad in his junior year of high school, but COVID canceled his plans, much to his disappointment. Once he discovered the opportunities in college for studying abroad, he decided to go to Spain the spring semester of his junior year of college in 2024.
“I was originally going to go to Costa Rica just because I’ve never been,” Whitnell said. “But Costa Rica didn’t have my major, so … I was going to Spain, and I was a little bummed, but I was like, you know, there’s probably a reason.”
Whitnell stayed with a host family, calling the wife his ‘Spanish mom’, whose cooking he couldn’t stop raving about.
“It’s funny, I preferred to eat in her home than going out to eat … She was whipping up incredible stuff and was trying to make us feel at home,” Whitnell said.
Whitnell’s enthusiasm was contagious as he showed me photo after photo of the delicious food in Spain, including the classic Spanish rice-and-seafood dish called paella, the potato-onion tapas and a lentil dish called lentejas. His Spanish mom even tried to make him and his roommate, a student from the University of South Carolina, what she thought was American food.
“One of the nights she literally made us hot dogs and mashed potatoes,” Whitnell said. “She put cheese in the little hot dogs … It was so funny, super heart-warming.”
The food was always fresh, and Whitnell estimates he lost around 30 lbs. You could eat twice as much of food, but still lose weight.
Studying abroad can be thought of as being a lonely endeavor, with students being homesick and sad. Being isolated from fellow Americans and away from friends and family can be difficult. Whitnell missed his family, of course, but ultimately thrived living in a foreign country.
“I was the only person from Union there, so I really had to make an effort of going out of my comfort zone and talking to people because I honestly felt like a freshman again,” Whitnell said.
In order to meet new people, Whitnell would go with other study abroad students to a language exchange, which took place at a bar where everyone would wear name tags with their names and known languages written on them. There, they would walk around and meet the locals, many of whom knew multiple languages.
“It’s an incredible feeling when you can speak a different language and you’re able to connect with someone on a personal level,” Whitnell said.
The number of languages and different dialects present in Spain baffled Whitnell. He recounted an amusing story on one of his excursions watching a girl on an airplane try to use Google Translate to translate between Spanish and Catalan — which is a dialect spoken in Barcelona that Whitnell compared to French. He was shocked that you could live in a city and not understand a dialect of the language you know how to speak, because it is that different.
In America, we tend to take for granted our ease with communication, and most of us only know English. Being bilingual amazes us, much less needing to know four or five languages or even dialects in order to buy groceries or talk to a relative. But this is simply part of life for a European, their linguistic skills often stretched and developed in their everyday travels and conversations. We have little motivation in America to learn another language, much less three, because we have no need to.
I believe this also applies to traveling and living abroad. We rarely take the tentative step towards actually traveling to foreign countries, and studying abroad for an entire semester can seem daunting. Whitnell’s story isn’t just a study abroad success story; it portrays someone who conquered his fears, and culturally experienced being immersed in a country so different than his own.
Dr. Julie Glosson, a university professor of language, designed the Spanish program at Union and started taking students abroad in 1998 to Costa Rica and Mexico.
“There’s so many benefits as far as transforming you as a person, helping you understand and appreciate your own family and your own country,” Glosson said. “It teaches you empathy, it gives a sense of compassion and it challenges your worldview about America.”
Whitnell was also provided with the opportunity to be an example of Christ to the Spanish locals and the other study abroad students.
“A lot of these people had never been to church before,” Whitnell recounted. “So I was able to not only be a good example, but they would sometimes ask me questions because they knew I was from a Christian school.”
Some asked him why he believed Jesus was real, or how he knew that the rules he was following in his Christian life were the right thing. He didn’t try to preach to people, rather he chose to show an example of Christ in how he talked and acted. In return, he would ask them questions about their lives at home and what they spent their time doing.
“I think I believe my role was to plant seeds,” Whitnell said, after a moment of reflecting. “It was honestly a really big mix of ideas and beliefs, and I was able to see not only life, but college and other things out of a non-Christian scope.”
When I asked him what he would tell someone who is considering studying abroad, Whitnell’s eyes lit up.
“I would simply tell them to just do it, because if you don’t, not only are you going to miss a huge life-changing experience, but you’re going to regret not going for the rest of your life. There’s so much world out there,” Whitnell said.
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