In the first weeks of the new school year, I walk around the campus observing the new students from all over the world: San José, Costa Rica; Managua, Nicaragua; Cali, Colombia; Johnson City, Tennessee; Nogales, Arizona; the Virgin Islands; Tanzania and Ontario. Usually I speak with them briefly: a word or two of welcome, of encouragement, and then move on. There are many things I would like to say, but they would not be heard because each has retreated into a private place that cannot be touched, and what is on show is only a mask that hides the real person. They have not yet discovered who they are in this new world.
I can see in their eyes the uncertainty, the flickering awareness of the surreal, the desperate search for the familiar. I can hear in their tentative speech the soul inside them crying: “This is not who I really am. This is not the person I am supposed to be. I come from a place where I am known and loved, where people speak in my same accent and idiom, where I have friends, am popular, have a real home. A place where I am real. Here I am not real to you yet; you do not know me. You see me with a stranger’s eyes. Move on, move on.”
There are the defiant ones whose anger is palpable, the frightened ones who tremble like leaves in the wind, the dazed and confused ones whose anchors, which tied them to cultures they understood and friends who cared, have been torn away. Here they are Outsiders, and nothing I can do or say can dispel this truth about themselves which they know so well.
During orientation week we tell the other teachers and the local student guides: “Make them feel welcome. Make them feel at home.” It is, of course, presumptuous. We can do little more than be kind, accessible, human. Most are not “well” psychologically; they have been uprooted from the connections that made them whole. Most are not glad they’ve come, and words will not soothe their troubled psyches. It will be a while before they feel “at home.”
The journey on which their parents have taken them in pursuit of careers, in service of a mission, or as a means of family survival in the competitive world of global capitalism, is more than a geographical one for these students. It is also a journey into the self, a perilous inner journey. They have been fragmented, cut in half, separated in part from the person they once were. It is not just a question of “making new friends” or getting involved in school activities which will make them whole again. They must reach down inside and find what qualities will sustain their spirits in the days and months ahead. They must re-create themselves.
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