Why I Like CBYX

About nine months ago, twenty-five just-graduates from all over the United States all flew to Washington. D.C to kick off their year abroad in Germany. The only noticeable thing they had in common was that they were all Americans and they were all interested for some reason or another in spending a year in Germany rather than going to college or whatever else they might do just after graduating from high school.

When I arrived in Washington that day, I was a bit of a mess. I wasn’t in the least afraid to start this big adventure. What I was scared of (and I still don’t know why) was meeting all of the other CBYXers. For some reason I pre-supposed that all of them would somehow be your typical confused American excited to do a year abroad in EUROPE and otherwise fairly clueless about the world. Therefore, when I arrived, I couldn’t think particularly straight, wasn’t really acting like myself, and wasn’t doing much to get to know everyone. I felt like it would be useless, anyway. It’s not like we’d be living near each other once we got to Germany. These people would never become GOOD friends of mine, they would just be people I knew who would eventually fade out of my life like so many other people I have met for short periods of time.

Fast forward to January, Berlin Seminar. Suddenly, these strangers who I had looked at skeptically and in a way almost condescendingly were friends. The ones I’d never even talked to were friends. Suddenly it became clear that I have a lot of common interests with almost everyone in the group. Of course the starting point for a lot of conversations at the beginning of the week was experiences we had had over the course of the first six months, but the number of actual interesting conversations I had was more than I have probably ever had with people my age in such a short period of time.

And what does that have to do with CBYX in particular? CBYX takes a group of people who don’t necessarily have a lot in common and thrusts them into a foreign (literally) situation. Suddenly, everyone has common interests. Common problems. Common ideas. Common goals. At the orientation in Washington last June, Hecko and Katelyn (former participants who ran a lot of the orientation) told us that the twenty five of us were a family, we just didn’t know it yet. I Immediately thought back to marching band, where I had also been told I was part of a family. The marching band family never really felt like a family to me, more like a giant group of friends. I came to the conclusion that I was once again being forced into a “family” and dismissed the comment as yet another piece of B.S being fed to the young American population.

But they were right this time. Of course, my fellow CBYXers have not LITERALLY become a part of my family. But this year is something the now-twenty-three of us share that no one else at home can be a part of. Although we’ve all had different experiences when it comes to the specifics, all of us have been living on our own for nine months without seeing our real families. While not all of us have dealt with the same problems, it is pretty much a guarantee that if you have a problem, someone else in the group will have dealt with a similar issue. And if you have some sort of success story, funny story, anything, someone in the group is going to be able to relate. It’s become a group of people that I feel really close to even though relatively speaking, I don’t know them nearly as well as my friends at home.

The fact that the vocational part of this program only has twenty five people is another advantage, if you ask me. That means that instead of trying to get to know 250 or however many people there are in the normal program, you get twenty five people and then get to know them fairly well. Having a family of twenty five is a lot easier than a family of 200.

So thanks, CBYX. I’ve been impressed with the setup, and don’t think it could be changed to be much better.