The summer before freshman year, now-senior Safia McLeod-Ali took a three-week long trip to Panama to help fix schools in an impoverished community. She enjoyed the experience so much she couldn’t wait to go back.

Next, she lived in Lisbon, Portugal, as an exchange student during her sophomore year, where she went to school and was on the volleyball team there. McLeod-Ali says, “having that experience changed my world perspective, and then suddenly traveling the world seemed like something that was much more possible, and something that I really wanted to do, potentially as a career.” Since then, she’s been increasing  her language study and usingpursuing the world as her classroom.

McLeod-Ali is fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. She is also currently taking French classes and has plans to learn German next year, during her time there as an exchange student, adding a fifth dialect to the list.

McLeod-Ali will be staying in Aachen, Germany as part of the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange (CBYX), a government-funded U.S.-Germany exchange program. The city is home to about a quarter million people, compared to Portland’s almost 620,000. While she is in Germany,  McLeod-Ali will be taking part in Germany’s 5-year high school program, living with a host family and learning the culture.

When McLeod-Ali explains the program, it is easy to see how important this trip will be for her. “The entire basis of this program is intercultural understanding and acceptance,” says McLeod-Ali, “because obviously stigmas and stereotypes and fear of the unknown is something very prevalent in our society and so the idea of the scholarship is to help people realize that ‘those are humans over there, they’re not just a stereotype, everybody’s different.’”

She explains that “[the German language] is really useful if you want to be in the global economic world, because it [Germany] is the center of Europe and Europe is a huge superpower.” This is certainly not an average gap year, and won’t be a vacation by any stretch of the word.

McLeod-Ali is excited to see how different Germany is from America. “I’m sure they’ll all have strong opinions about our government. It will be interesting to see what they have to say,” McLeod-Ali says.

It takes a lot to be the right kind of person to be chosen for this sort of program. McLeod-Ali says “It was a pretty lengthy application process, and I was almost deterred a couple times.” The application process took her from October through December. Now that her plans are set in stone, the stress is gone and the anticipation is kicking in. The Cardinal Times wishes you the best and is excited to see where the world takes you Safia.