In 2018, my mother and I were watching Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities while I curled her hair. I knew she had attended Southern University, an HBCU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But as the memories bubbled up, she mentioned how she’d spent the summer after her freshman year in Switzerland.
I paused with the curling iron in my hand. How in the world had my mother, a young Black woman and the eldest of four, raised by two parents who had never finished high school in a segregated town in southwestern Louisiana, spent a summer in Europe in the 1960s?
“We traveled around Switzerland for two months and the trip changed the course of my life,” my mom said, nostalgia in her voice. It was part of a program called The Experiment in International Living program, she explained, and through the support of an encouraging professor, donations organized via the university newspaper, and a car wash that she hosted with fellow students, my mother raised the $1,500 needed to participate and she was off to Switzerland at the age of 19.
She hadn’t been back since. Naturally, I looked at her in that moment and vowed to return together. We could retrace her steps; we could revisit the places that had silently loomed so large over the years that followed. Nearly seven years after that conversation, we made it happen.
It was September 2025. We had one week, and two Swiss Travel Passes, which would allow us to journey by train (and bus and boat) eastward, from Geneva to Zurich. We would revisit towns she had known—St. Gallen, Lucerne, Zurich—while adding in some she dreamed of, like Geneva and Interlaken. The goal wasn’t to recreate her trip exactly, but to pay tribute to key places, and to see which forgotten memories surfaced themselves along the way. What had once felt like simply a nice idea had also become something more urgent: My father had passed away since we first dreamed up the trip, after years spent suffering with dementia. I grieved not only his death but also the memories that he’d never shared. I was determined to preserve some of my mother’s stories while I could.
