A Classroom of Six ๐ง๐ฌ
There are six of us in the English prep class at a medical university in Bulgaria.
Three Japanese โ Kyo, Yui, and me (Akari). One Palestinian โ Mohamed. One Sudanese student whose name I'm still learning to pronounce properly. And that's it. Six people in a room that could fit thirty, hunched over grammar worksheets while Bulgarian winter presses against the windows.
It's a strange little universe.
Most days, the six of us sit in a loose semicircle. Our teacher, a soft-spoken Bulgarian woman who speaks English with a slight French lilt, moves between us like she's tending to very different kinds of plants. The Japanese students โ us โ are quiet, diligent, paranoid about making mistakes. Mohamed asks questions constantly, loudly, without embarrassment. The Sudanese student listens with his whole body, nodding slowly, taking notes in handwriting so neat it looks typeset.
We're all here for the same reason: we want to study medicine in English, and our English isn't quite there yet. But how we got here, and what "here" even means to each of us โ that's where it gets complicated.
One afternoon, Mohamed picked up a dry-erase marker and drew a map on the whiteboard.
It wasn't assigned. The teacher had stepped out for a moment. He just stood up, walked to the board, and started drawing โ the Mediterranean, the coastline, the rough outline of a place.
"This is where I'm from," he said. "This is Palestine."
He drew it with the confidence of someone who has traced those borders in their mind a thousand times. He marked his neighborhood. He marked the hills nearby. He talked about the smell of the air after rain, the way the light hits the buildings in the late afternoon, the sound of his mother calling him in for dinner from three floors up.
I had heard about Palestine, of course. On the news. In headlines. But sitting there, watching Mohamed draw his hometown on a whiteboard in a Bulgarian classroom, a marker squeaking against the surface โ something shifted.
It wasn't just a place on a map anymore. It was somewhere that had a specific quality of afternoon light. Somewhere a mother's voice could carry three floors.
I didn't say much that day. I'm not sure any of us did.
The teacher came back, we returned to our worksheets, and class continued. But I kept looking at the whiteboard, at the rough coastline Mohamed had drawn, until he eventually erased it to make room for a grammar exercise.
I wanted to say something. I didn't know what.
Being abroad teaches you, slowly and sometimes uncomfortably, that the world is not a collection of news stories. It's a collection of people who have a very specific relationship to those news stories โ people who grew up inside them, who carry them in their bodies.
Mohamed doesn't carry Palestine like a tragedy. He carries it like a home. That distinction matters.
Six people. Three countries. One classroom in Bulgaria.
Some days we complain about the food in the cafeteria. Some days we help each other with vocabulary. Some days someone draws a map on the whiteboard and the room gets very quiet.
I think that's what studying abroad actually is โ not the adventure-poster version, but this: six people sitting in a cold classroom, trying to find the words for things that don't always translate.