I was walking the streets of Deadwood, a town in South Dakota, when a window display stopped me in my tracks. “The only good journalist is a dead one,” a graphic T-shirt for sale read. Accompanying the text was a silhouette of a person, hanging in a noose under a lone tree. Surely, with a history of racial lynching and a present-day mental health crisis, such images (being sold for profit, nonetheless) would appall anyone? I had been in the country for less than 48 hours, as a journalist on a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Missouri, and the provocative messages hit home hard. None of the other passersby batted an eye.

Tigers are everywhere in Columbia, Missouri. All students, called ‘Tigers’, wear caps, shirts, sweaters and bags with the animal logo. Several stores only sell yellow-and-black flags, mugs and toys. And if you want to survive the humid summer heat, you can buy ‘Tiger Stripe Ice Cream’ (with vanilla and chocolate flavor). So the first thing I did when I arrived in my new hometown, was buying a yellow ‘Mizzou’ t-shirt.

In August 2020, I packed two suitcases, bought a one-way ticket to New York and moved across the ocean in the middle of the pandemic. The main question preceding this move was: “Should I go or defer?” Some people warned me that due to the pandemic I will not have the ‘real’ Fulbright experience.