My experience in Sri Lanka through the ISLE program was filled with cultural immersion, academic intensity, and spiritual realization, all of which characterize an atypically rich study abroad experience.

Unanimously, ISLE students say that their favorite part of the program was their being plunged directly into Sri Lankan culture by living with a host family. My home-stay experience really made my time in Sri Lanka exceptional. The way in which my family immediately made me feel a part of their family, addressing me as poota, or son, quickly gives one a sense of how powerful and important the family is in the Sri Lanka. As time passed, the members of my host family served as my most valuable teachers, from my host-sister's helping me with Sinhalese vocabulary, to the heated after-dinner political discussions with my host-father, and right down to my Wednesday evening cooking classes with my host-mother. Living with a host family also gave me access to valuable inside knowledge on Sri Lankan culture; opportunity most foreign students simply never get. Perhaps the only bad aspect of my home-stay experience was that it had to end. ISLE students all develop a lifetime bond with their host families and I can expect that my host parents will always consider me their American son.

I have to be honest and say that the level of academic intensity that the ISLE program demands of its students was unexpected. Unlike most study abroad programs, the ISLE program matches or exceeds the academic expectations of all its students' home colleges. I am proud to say that the professionalism and expertise displayed by my professors in Sri Lanka meets the standards that I hold for my professors at Holy Cross.

The specific expertise that each professor held, in areas such as Theravada Buddhism, Sri Lankan women's studies, or South Asian political economics, gives ISLE students the opportunity to take classes in a field that they may have not been previously exposed to. To the right student, the academic rigor of the ISLE program is balanced out by the rewarding benefits of utilizing a new understanding of a culture within its natural context.

It is said that for one to truly understand oneself, he or she should be displaced from the environment that contains all the strands of his or her identity. For me, leaving America to live amid Sri Lankan culture, a culture quite different than my own, presented me with a new perspective on my spiritual and cultural identity. A reaffirmation of personal values as well as an appreciation for a foreign society was a direct result of this cultural juxtaposition.

I highly recommend that all Holy Cross students take the opportunity to study abroad in an area of the world that is different than their own backyard. If this desire for the new is matched with an interest in the field of Asian Studies, I couldn't recommend studying abroad in Sri Lanka as an ISLE student any stronger. The professionalism with which the program has operated for over twenty years truly gives its students a most rewarding and prestigious study abroad experience.