Dorothea Laurent, Honours BSocSc political Science and minor in law , 4th year
Internship country: Ghana
Canadian NGO: AFS
Local NGO: Future of Africa
I thought I knew myself pretty well.
If someone had asked me who I was before I left for Ghana, I would have had an answer ready. I am a Haitian girl who immigrated to Canada at a young age. I grew up as an only child. I am strong-minded, opinionated, social, easygoing, and generally not afraid of much. At 21 years old, I had spent enough time with myself to believe that I had a pretty good understanding of the person I was.
Then I moved to Ghana for three months and realized something I had never considered before: I only knew the version of myself that had grown up in Canada.
It is easy to think of personality as something we carry everywhere with us. We say, “I am organized,” “I am adventurous,” or “I am independent,” as though these qualities exist completely separately from our surroundings. Being placed in an unfamiliar environment made me question how true that really is.
One of the first contradictions I noticed was almost funny. In Canada, I would describe myself as Type B. I am usually flexible with plans, I can deal with things being last-minute, and I do not need every detail planned in advance. Yet, in Ghana, where I experienced everyday life as much more slow-paced than what I was accustomed to, I became the person craving structure. I wanted things to start when they were supposed to start. I wanted to know the plan. I would catch myself becoming frustrated by the exact kind of uncertainty that normally would not bother me at home.
I had not suddenly become a different person. I was simply seeing what happened to the same person in a completely different environment.
That realization followed me throughout my stay.
I had always considered myself adventurous, for example. Abroad, I became more cautious. Eventually, I realized that perhaps being adventurous in a place you know is easier than being adventurous somewhere where you cannot predict the possible outcomes of your decisions. Maybe some of what I had understood as fearlessness was also familiarity.
At the same time, I found myself doing things that would be unusual for me in Canada. If I wanted to know where to find something, I became comfortable simply asking someone nearby. At one point, that could mean asking a neighbour where I could find fresh fruit instead of doing what would come naturally to me at home: pulling out my phone, searching online, or asking someone I already knew.
These are small things. Yet, strangely, it was the small things that made me question myself the most.
One of the most memorable examples came from someone who eventually became a good friend. He kept describing me as “bubbly” and “jolly”—two words I was not accustomed to hearing people use to describe me. Eventually, he admitted that when he first met me, he found my cheerfulness so unusual that he wondered whether I was pretending. He even compared my personality to the kind of character you would see on television.
I laughed, but the comment stayed with me.
I am not usually someone who changes how I see myself because of another person's opinion. This felt different. It was not that I suddenly believed his description of me more than my own. I was fascinated by the fact that someone meeting me with absolutely no previous knowledge of who I was could notice something about me that had never stood out in the same way at home.
For the first time in a long time, almost everyone around me was meeting me from scratch.
There is something strangely freeing about that.
Nobody knew who I had been five years ago. Nobody had a story about me from high school or an established idea of what was “like me” and what was not. I did not intentionally reinvent myself—I actually believe strongly in being authentic—but I was experiencing myself outside of almost every familiar reference point I had.
And sometimes, the environment did not reveal something new. It reminded me of something I had slowly forgotten.
Growing up as an only child in Canada, I had become very accustomed to functioning independently. Living with a host family for three months challenged that. Sharing a home meant thinking about other people's routines and needs, contributing to a shared space and adjusting to people in ways I had not needed to think about for a long time. It reminded me of savoir-vivre—not simply knowing how to behave, but knowing how to live with others.
I began to understand that the environment we grow up in quietly trains us. It shapes what feels normal, what makes us uncomfortable, what we expect from other people and even what we mistake for permanent parts of our personality.
That realization followed me home.
When I returned to Canada, I did not come back as a completely transformed person. In fact, what surprised me was how easily the old version of myself returned. My routines made sense again. Certain behaviours came naturally again. The old me still fit.
But now I wonder why.
Is it because this is simply who I really am?
Or did I put a puzzle piece back into the environment it was originally shaped to fit?
I do not think Ghana gave me a new identity, nor do I think I left an old one behind. Instead, the experience complicated a question that I once thought had a straightforward answer.
I can be easygoing and still crave structure. I can be adventurous and become cautious. I can value independence while learning to rely more comfortably on the people around me. I can be the person I have always known and still discover characteristics of myself through the eyes of people who have only just met me.
Perhaps we are not meant to have one fixed version of ourselves.
For most of my life, when I asked myself, “Who am I?”, I was unknowingly answering a much narrower question: Who am I here?
Three months away from everything familiar made me realize that there may be many versions of me I have not met yet.
And somehow, they can all still be me.