"Confident of My Place in the World"

One of the "benefits of traveling" statements for the politically inspiring black women project:

I left Sri Lanka, the country of my birth to go to college in India. I grew up in an island -- insular and claustrophobic in its own way, though all my life until I left, I had lived a few hundred feet from the beach.

My second year in college, I was elected the Student Union President because though a foreigner (everyone knew me as the ‘Sri Lankan girl’), I seemed so confident of my place in the world. Travel does not make you smarter -- it teaches you to act smart. If you have no sense of direction like me, then you compensate for it by being utterly fearless in simply venturing into places and asking your way around. I always carry a pack of nuts and water with me so that I won't die of hunger and thirst while I am working my way around strange places...
—Anushiya Ramaswamy, literature and composition professor