A reflection on friendship across an ocean of differences, from the SOC-ENVI International Summer School 2026.
By Njayl Mhae Mata· Misamis University, Philippines
The SOC-ENVI International Summer School 2026 was hosted by the Faculty of Social Sciences at Kasetsart University, Bangkok, in partnership with the Democratic Education Network at the University of Westminster, London. It ran for a fortnight in July 2026 and brought together undergraduate and postgraduate students from Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, and the United Kingdom to work on sustainability, social innovation, and community-based development, both in the classroom and in the field.
I flew to Thailand expecting new classrooms, new professors, new ways of understanding the things I already thought I knew. I flew home carrying a friendship I never planned to make, and a question I still cannot fully answer.
The girl who was too afraid to speak
When I packed my bags for Thailand, I told myself I was going for the experience of learning abroad. I imagined new classrooms, new professors, new ways of understanding the things I already thought I knew. What I did not expect, what I could not have prepared for, was that I would come home carrying friendships I never planned to make, and a memory that would settle so deeply into me that it would still be sitting there, unmoved, weeks after I flew back home.
If you had met me in my first few days there, you would not have believed I was capable of making a single friend. I was hesitant to even speak. Every sentence I wanted to say, I rehearsed twice in my head before I dared to say it out loud, and most of the time I decided it wasn’t worth the risk and stayed quiet instead. I watched my classmates from a careful distance, unsure of how to close the gap between us, a gap made not just of language, but of everything unfamiliar: culture, humour, the small unspoken rules of how people connect.
A fortnight is a strange unit of time
But a fortnight is a strange unit of time. It is too short to plan a friendship and somehow just long enough to build one anyway. Every day we had activities together, and little by little, without me noticing it happening, the distance started to close.
“A fortnight is a strange unit of time. It is too short to plan a friendship and somehow just long enough to build one anyway.”
We were not just sitting in lessons and taking notes. We were learning each other. Somewhere between group tasks and shared meals and late conversations that started as nothing and turned into everything, we began trading things far more valuable than class notes: life lessons, stories about home, even stories about love. I found myself listening to a classmate talk about heartbreak in a language that was not their first, and somehow understanding every word of it anyway.
The moment that has stayed
That is the moment that has stayed with me. Not one grand event, but the quiet accumulation of a classmate who surprised me, someone I almost didn’t approach, who turned out to understand parts of me I hadn’t said out loud yet. Someone who, by the end of it, felt less like someone I met on an exchange and more like someone I had known for years. And the question that has not left my head since I flew home is simple, and I still do not have a full answer to it: how is it that two people from completely different sides of the world can find pieces of themselves in each other in just fourteen days?
We both knew, even while it was happening, that it would not last in the way we wanted it to. We came from different countries, different lives, different futures that were already pulling us in separate directions. Those days were always going to pass. I used to think that meant the moment would fade too, that anything small and temporary was destined to disappear along with the time it happened in. But I don’t believe that anymore. I think the smallest things are the ones that decide to stay, and whether they stay depends entirely on how you choose to remember them.
What I chose to remember
So this is how I choose to remember Thailand: not just as a place where I studied abroad, but as the place where I learned that connection does not need a shared language to be real. I am not the same person who was too afraid to speak that first week. I found out that even across an ocean of differences, people can still recognise each other. Our similarities were there all along, waiting to be found.
And because of that, I do not feel as alone or as different as I once thought I was. That is the lesson I carried home. That is the one that will stay.
About the author
Njayl Mhae Mata is a student at Misamis University, Philippines. She joined the SOC-ENVI Kasetsart University International Summer School in July 2026.
