Three Little Letters

SST. These three little letters carry almost 50 years of memories for thousands of people. These three little letters evoke a wide range of emotions for many in the Goshen College community. When I hear these letters, a smile instantly comes to my face.

In the spring of 2013, I travelled to Phnom Penh, Cambodia for three months. It was my first time out of the country, and I was more than a little anxious about what I was getting myself into. As I stepped on the plane with my fellow classmates, I had no idea that I was about to travel to a place that would eventually become a second home for me.

The first few weeks were hard for me; I have a hard time with transitions. However, after the first few days with my family, I started to feel at home. My host family was a little unconventional in that I did not live with host parents. I lived with a brother who was close to my age and a sister who was ten years older than me. I immediately felt like I was part of their family. Although there were times of homesickness and tears, my host family gifted me with many times of smiles and laughter.

Women Are Half the World

Nikita Zook spent six weeks in Ayacucho, Peru during the summer of 2013. As part of her final project, she conducted informal interviews with several women who were part of her daily routine in various ways. She wrote what she had gathered of their stories, trying to capture some of their resilience and strength. Her goal was to describe the value of their ordinary, day to day, past and present experiences, and to do that as honestly as she could, in spite of the language barrier. The following was written to be read out loud or performed as a series of monologues.

I. Luz

My story is very sad, she tells me, shaking her head.

She’s standing in the middle of her tiny kitchen as she says this: sink, two burner gas stove, wooden table, two crowded shelves, several broken appliances. She rummages through a dusty canister that holds small bags of canela, cinnamon, rice, dried things I can’t quite identify.

I was abandoned when I was three months old, she says. I don’t have a family.

I can tell by the way she looks at me, brow furrowed, pushing back dark hair with one hand, that this is a line she’s repeated many times before.

She scans the cluttered table for a knife, finds it, starts peeling a potato.

When I was six, I hid sugar in the ground in a plastic bag. I was buena inteligente, she tells me with a grin, I was smart, it was my secret.

And that’s why you have no teeth! her eleven year old daughter shrieks beside me.

Her lips close together quickly. But then she laughs. It’s true, she’s missing a few bottom teeth. I’ve never noticed that though. When I look at her, it’s her eyes–they light up when she laughs.

A Return for the Song

I had always known about the LANSA flight 502 plane crash on August 9, 1970 that killed 99 of the 100 Peruvians and Americans on board. I had always known about the flight that killed Albert Sarfert III, an eighth grader from New Jersey who had been participating in a summer study abroad program in Peru. I had always known about the flight that killed my mom’s brother, but it wasn’t until I went to Peru myself that I stumbled upon a tangible piece of my family’s history.

In the weeks before I left for Peru on SST, my mom showed me newspaper articles from the crash and pictures of a memorial site that was supposedly located (according to Wikipedia) on a mountainside near Cusco’s San Jerónimo district for the victims. Coincidence hit hard when I found out that our first portion of study was to take place in that very district. I knew no other specifics of its location, but it was enough to instill within me an incredible drive to find the memorial that no one in my family had seen, and gain a deeper understanding of the event that instantly changed the lives of my mother and her family.

The Mystery Woman

Her face was etched with deep wrinkles. Her back hunched from decades of carrying the world — in all its forms — on her back. Her black hair had turned silver, shimmering in its long braid under low light.

As I revisit her features now, two years later, each detail seems harnessed with my Peruvian experience. But in that moment, they only represented my fears.

I had been living in Cusco, Peru for less than a week — not enough time to yet have a routine, but sufficient time to avoid getting lost in the mountains of Cusco. After school I would return to my new home of Lucre, a small agricultural town imprinted on the side of the Cusquenan Andes. Our first bus up the mountain seemed laden with handsy men and only enough oxygen for two thirds of its passengers. I felt scornful eyes on me as I struggled to occupy the least amount of space possible.

But perhaps the scorn was my own, as I became increasingly more aware of my whiteness. Our eventual stop in Huacarpay yielded fresh air and a taxi ride of seven adults up the mountain to Lucre (what later came to feel like a spacious ride). Here, I would leave my peers, anxiously cross the makeshift bridge and join my family at their new fish restaurant, where we would eat dinner and I would do my best, through broken Spanish, to tell my family what I learned that day.

Out of the Classroom, Into the World

In his opening remarks at a service-learning conference a quarter century ago, Goshen College president emeritus J. Lawrence Burkholder said he claimed only one credential for speaking at the event: He was a “born again” believer in international education.

As one who has co-led nine SSTs — in Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Cuba, China, and Cambodia — I write today as one similarly reborn. And in the spirit of some Dominican evangelicals, I’ll testify to a series of rebirths during my years of teaching in a small, Mennonite, liberal arts college — recommitments to graceful living as well as to international education, and to service or experiential learning. God knows, I’m a believer.

But even back when I was a pagan, in my undergraduate years at a college that had no international education program, I intuitively recognized the need for and value of cross-cultural education and experiential learning. In my sophomore year, a friend and I spent six weeks of the Christmas break and January interterm backpacking and train-hopping our way through western Europe. We lived off of oranges and bread; toured museums, cathedrals and other historical sites; bedded down in the homes of any family that would take us in, or in youth hostels; and communicated in our halting French and German, smiling and gesturing profusely when we traversed Italy and Spain.