SEM’s global patchwork of community

By Alex Valdez, Director of Residential Life

attempt to navigate the long halls and many staircases of the building to find your first class.

Everyone is greeted by the teacher, whom you learn is a caring and passionate person, and you cannot wait to get to know them better and learn from them. A discussion breaks out in class and you’re able to share a story from home that the domestic students would never have had the chance of hearing a firsthand account of if you hadn’t been there to tell it.

You continue your day up to lunch time, but this time when you go into the Atrium, it isn’t the same people from breakfast. It’s the entire school! As you pull up a chair next to the new friend you made in second period, you have the opportunity to learn from everyone at that table, and for you to also share something about yourself.

You talk about your favorite foods from home, and the customs surrounding meal times in your home country. The folks around you share how each of their family units spends their meal times together. Everyone at this table is sharing a moment that allows you to learn, accept, and embrace the differences of one another.

After school you head back to your home to take a break from your first day. Your roommate is home already and the two of you begin to discuss how each other’s first day of school went. You decide to continue sharing as you walk down the parkway to Elmwood Avenue. You each take notice of how different the streets, the cars, the sidewalks, the people all look and feel compared to your respective home countries. You and your roommate are hitting it off, and you’ve just made a good friend from another place on the other side of the world.

It’s time for the final meal of the day. Your house parent happens to be the adult on duty for the evening, and is checking in all the residential students for dinner. They make their way table to table, person to person, checking on each one with care and attention. Those morning feelings of fear, anxiety, and loneliness, have morphed into or strengthened into comfortability, gratitude, and pride.

You know you’re going to be okay, because you’re in a community that cares, and a community that wants to know more about you and where you’re from. You’re in a place that isn’t looking for you to assimilate into its culture, but to contribute to it by sharing your own. You can be yourself. As your day winds down, you reflect on your experiences and what you’re looking forward to in the coming months. It is setting in that you are becoming a part of something bigger than yourself, and it will be important for you to share your experiences and identity with as many people as possible during your time at SEM. It is equally important that you also provide the same space for others to do the same with you.

It is everyone’s duty at SEM to embrace the opportunities that the patchwork of our community creates. It is an act of bravery on the residential student’s part as well as their families to move away from home to an unfamiliar territory and culture. Those of us that are from here, need to show the same amount of bravery and reach out and make stronger connections with one another. We are the lucky ones to have the greatest global resources living directly in our community. Let’s do our part to learn from one another and strengthen each other’s cultures and our community. •