By Erin Swanson

By about 4:30 on a Sunday afternoon, everyone has filed out to work on papers or go to the gym or otherwise carry on with their lives as usual. Kelly sits by herself at the dining room table next to a mostly eaten plate of sugar cookies and a stack of fresh diapers. Every few minutes she leans back in her chair and tugs her red polo further down over her jutting belly button and across her stomach, which at this moment looks more like a well-inflated balloon than any part of the human body ever should.
            She lifts her chest and surveys the remnants of a pretty successful baby shower: smudgy plastic plates, bits of blue and pink wrapping paper and here and there a stray Kelly trivia sheet, which lists “everything” her friends remember about her before she spent a semester studying abroad and returned six months pregnant. In less than an hour, her best friend Danica will come home from the library and turn the space back into a college dorm room, but for now Kelly seems to enjoy soaking it all in.
            According to a survey conducted by the US The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, in 2007, 223,534 American students spent either a year of a semester abroad, 922 of them in the Dominican Republic. Kelly is one.  “I kind of knew I would meet somebody over there,” she says, breaking the head off one of the sugar cookies.  “The same thing happened when I went to Panama. Well,” here she rubs the sides of her red belly as if she might lift it off, “not the same thing exactly.” Kelly brought back more than the traditional wide-brimmed hat when she visited Panama with her high school class in 2003, she brought a back a boy. “I was only fifteen, and he was seventeen so we weren’t sleeping together or anything. It was kind of weird having him live in my house though.” She shrugs at the misadventures of her youth.  “My family didn’t like him very much. He went back to Panama a month later. He was actually much better looking than Mike is.” That’s Miguel she’s referring to, the Dominican boy she met during her junior year abroad, and the father of her baby girl.  
            When most college sophomores begin thinking about junior year  abroad, falling in love isn’t usually one of the things they consider. Nor is it one of the points outlined in the standard orientation workshops.  Romance, however, has never been hindered by borders, and in some cases like Kelly’s, it seems to gain strength the further it gets from home. Lots of relationships spring up overseas and some end in marriage. Just as many fizzle though, and for someone in Kelly’s position, the pressure to hold on is especially straining.
            Kelly’s circumstance is not all that surprising to Georgetown-in-Spain program director, Ani Flyes. “Back when I started in the 80’s,” Flyes says, “most all the girls in our program found a Spanish guy to go out with, and I remember quite a few marriages. There’s more time while your abroad, and students aren’t stuck on social distinctions. Anybody who gives you the eye in a bar is exotic and exciting.”
            Kelly hoists her feet onto a large cardboard box with the portrait of a giggly-looking baby on one side and her name scrawled across the other. She tries to recall Mike’s appearance with a straight face. “He’s just, really skinny,” she chuckles. “I mean, really, really skinny. I want to start showing people pictures of him now so they don’t freak when they see him.” She sighs again and flashes a smile that at once passes for both embarrassment and amusement. It’s a common look for her. “I didn’t even like him at first. He was dating a friend of mine.” Kelly starts poking at a piece of bubble wrap she’s pulled from under the stack of diapers and her face shifts almost entirely into embarrassment. “He was funny though. Some days we’d just spend entire afternoons looking at weird stuff on the Internet, and so nice. He grows on you,” she says and gets quiet.
            Dating abroad isn’t actually as common as it used to be, says Flyes. “Maybe the trend’s gone the other way due to globalization. Things are less exotic now, and students are less interested.” That’s not to say that Kelly’s an oddball. Flyes recalls a recent case in which an undergraduate, for lack of a better term, impregnates the daughter of his large, very Catholic host family: “It was a huge scandal, you can imagine. Abortion was not an option for them.” The family kicked him out of their home, and he returned to Georgetown alone and broken-hearted.  After two years of total silence, the girl contacted him. “She came to visit so that he could meet his child.” They fell in love all over again and are now raising a family in Italy where he is stationed as a reserve officer.
            Not every love affair ends with a happily ever after though, and watching the color drop out of Kelly’s face when she’s pressed on the details of her future plans makes it obvious how far away from a fairy tale real life sometimes is.
            Most abroad relationships end in separation. “People fall in love with the culture,” says Graham Hettlinger, Georgetown’s Russia-abroad coordinator. “I think they sometimes become involved while still in that early, heady stage, and this is where things get difficult. As the spell dissipates with time, and if there is nothing more to the relationship, it too begins to evaporate.” Hettlinger found the love of his life while pursuing graduate studies in Russia. “I had been involved with the place for more than ten years before I met my wife though. The sort of wild, giddy love one feels for a foreign culture during the early stages of acclimatization had passed, but in its place, I had developed a fairly complex understanding.” And that, he says, is key.
            Kelly pulls the bubble wrap in closer to her chest and shakes a few curls forward in front of her eyes. Her plan—or as deeply as she’ll describe it before the tension in her chin overcomes her candor—is to give birth here, in Georgetown. Then she’ll spend a few years learning to be a mother in the Dominican Republic and return to the U.S. where her daughter will benefit from the American school system. “A lot depends on Mike though, because my parents won’t support us.” The frankness in her voice is almost as startling as the decision she’s facing, but the rapid-fire bubble-wrap-snapping going on at her chest undermines her calm as she continues. “If he can’t take care of us, then I’ll have to give Bianca up for adoption”—this, one of the rare occasions in which she refers to her daughter by name. “I’m giving him a week to tell me what the situation is, and then I’m just going to decide on my own.” Kelly finishes the last of the bubble wrap and throws it down on the table as if in response to the hesitation in her voice. “Bianca will be okay,” she says, the rosiness returning to her cheeks. “She’ll be weird, like me and Mike are, but she’ll be loved.”
             Kelly becomes Kelly again when she’s telling anecdotes about experiences only someone like her might have while being pregnant. One involving a special, extra wide classroom pregnancy chair and a miscommunication with a particularly eccentric, cross-eyed dining hall employee has been a consistent crowd pleaser she says.  It’s hard for her to talk for very long without mentioning the Dominican Republic or Mike though, and so her conversations tend to swing pretty rapidly between the comic and the very uncomfortable. “I’m not sure about the future,” Kelly interrupts her own story as if she’s had enough of the whole thing, “but regret isn’t really an option for me now.”  With that, she rolls forward and heads over to the coffee table to start stacking dirty plates.