Meet the student

MEET THE STUDENT

LIFE IN CONTRAST

Aiglon life is a world away from the usual challenges for Palestinian Anas Abbassi (Delaware, Year 12).

Words Becky Allen Photography Joe McGorty

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here is a couplet on his bedroom wall that speaks volumes about Anas Abbassi. Taken from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Diary of a Palestinian Wound, and written in Arabic, it reads: “My country is not a suitcase. I am not a traveller.”

“In lots of ways it contradicts what I am doing,” says Anas, “but given that I’m far from home and want to remember where I come from, it’s the perfect quote for me.”

Reflecting on his first year at Aiglon, Anas says living and studying in Villars is a huge contrast to life in Palestine. “I live in Jerusalem and went to school in Bethlehem, which meant passing through a border crossing every day. I enjoy living there, but sometimes, due to the conflict, there are challenges.”

As well as its peace and security, Anas is relishing all that Aiglon has to offer, from skiing and stargazing to cheese fondue and house dinners at Delaware. He’s even taken his first Alpine winter in his stride. “I’m used to temperatures of 20-35°C every day, so the cold took me by surprise! But you soon get used to it, and when you start taking in the sights and the outside activities like skiing, it’s really amazing,” he says.

Long nights and dark skies have fed his passion for physics and astronomy, during what has been an exciting winter for space exploration. “I like delving as deeply as I can into things, so I joined the astronomy club and we’ve been able to use Aiglon’s observatory to take pictures of Mars,” he says. “We are also following the Mars Curiosity rover. Seeing the first pictures it sent back from the ‘Red Planet’ was amazing – it gives you a totally different perspective for a while; a much wider one.”

Coupled with the cold, there’s also been the warmth of Delaware family life and the discovery of Swiss

Anas Abbassi says he arrived at Aiglon feeling like a traveller but now views his friends in Delaware as a “second family”. cheese in all its many forms. “My mum cooks Palestinian dishes like waraq dawali – vine leaves stuffed with rice and beef and rolled up into fat fingers. She cooks them with spices, lemon and a tomato sauce, and they’re really tasty. The food here is very different, so if I could take something home from Villars for my mum to try, it would have to be fondue, because it’s a dish that’s made for sharing.”

And if he could share just one event from his first year at Aiglon, it would, he says, be the friendships he’s made through simply breaking bread together. “My most memorable moment was our house dinner, just before Christmas. The whole house gathered, we did some activities and ate together. It’s the best way to get to know people at a much deeper level. So, while I arrived feeling like a traveller, now I feel like it’s a second family.”