By Samantha Perez ‘21, UGM Fellow

In a few months time, I’ll have been in Indonesia for a year.

By Samantha Perez ‘21, UGM Fellow

The global pandemic prevented me from making the journey to Yogyakarta in August of last year as planned, and what was meant to be two years in Indonesia became fifteen months. I spent August through April teaching from my childhood bedroom at night, exhausted from my shift as a server at a local restaurant. Most of my friends had moved into the city or across the country, leaving me in the suburbs with my cat as companion and occasional confidant. I would scroll through Instagram stories of friends traveling around Europe, Latin America, sometimes countries in Southeast Asia, and try my hardest to not be bitter about it. Eventually I started to live as if I wasn’t going at all, so as to avoid disappointment.