Jeanne Simonelli, Erin McCulley, and Rachel Simonellithe beginning we, too, looked for the reality of Chiapas in faxed com-
muniqués, Xeroxed publications, tiny black-masked dolls clustered in
the back of a child’s wooden truck. It must be time to leave the field.
You won’t find a formula for it in books about ethnographic research,
but you always know when it is time to go.
We swirl down the mountain to the airport, get into a plane, and
are disgorged hours and universes later into frigid New York. We ride
home, one by one walking back into our separate lives. As I drive the
final student up to the campus, we stop at a red light. Coming in the
other direction are two blond college guys, baseball caps turned back-
ward, driving a brand new Subaru Outback. We are home. The young
woman straightens, suddenly frightened, suddenly aware of what she
has seen in her weeks in the field. I can read the story in her eyes.
“Does it always feel like this when you get back, Jeanne?”
I nod, overwhelmed by alternating joy and sadness. She was learn-
ing. She would never be the same.
Field of Reality: After the Trip“I am different, not physically, but mentally, in my heart and eyes. I
have seen so many wonderful, devastating and upsetting situations in
a four-week period,” wrote a Hartwick junior after the trip. Erin Mc-
Culley had similar reflections in her journal: “What can I say about
today, besides reinforcing the fact that this trip is getting better by
the minute,” she reflected. “Each day I wake up feeling slightly more
accustomed to this strange place, a little more comfortable with not
knowing where I am a lot of the time. Then, by the end of the day,
I’ve gone through military checkpoints, through a stampede of men,
and into a rainforest hours from a phone among the most traditional
culture left in this entire country, and I am back to square one. But it
was so worth it.”
Do our students’ growth and learning experiences justify taking
them out of the protected environments of on-campus education and
bringing them to work with and learn from people in locations where
there may be risks to all involved? Many faculty would respond with
a resounding yes! So would many students. In Southwest Programs