Alumni Spotlights

BY SHAUN KITTLE

Embracing who you are

Zina Asante (NCS 17)

WHEN ZINA CAME TO North Country School in 2014, she was used to moving around, but she always believed that home is where your family is. Zina is from Ghana, Africa, a country colonized by Britain, and the schools she attended there were the epitome of proper—people were called mister and missus, students had to dress a certain way, and there was a gulf between adults and kids. She quickly learned that’s not the case at NCS, where students and teachers are on a first-name basis and everyone is encouraged to wear comfortable clothes, especially during activities like barn chores or gardening.

“Everyone is so friendly, there are hugs, and it feels like a close-knit community,” Zina said. “It’s pretty impossible to go to NCS and be a loner. It was very welcoming, especially since I was so far from home.”

It wasn’t long before Zina started calling NCS her home, too. It was a smaller school than she was used to, but the emphasis on community and taking care of each other encouraged a closeness among Zina and her peers. Zina said that through simple tasks like doing laundry or harvesting vegetables from the garden, she learned to take care of herself and the people around her. She also learned some new things, like taekwondo, cooking, and knitting.

“You lean on someone and they lean on someone else and they lean on someone else—it became like a circle, and it was all balanced in the end,” Zina said. “I learned a lot about taking care of myself. It was still a community in which I was taught to do things on my own, but it wasn’t like I was pushed out into the desert and left by myself.”

There is one particular memory that cemented the feeling of home in Zina’s mind. Her grandfather, whom she hadn’t seen in four or five years, had traveled all the way from Ghana to see her. He was exhausted from the long flight and the drive from the airport, and as a result he fell into a deep sleep, missing the play Zina was performing in. She was crushed.

“He traveled and came to NCS, and he was so tired,” Zina said. “It was the night of the play and I found out he hadn’t seen it, and one of the teachers came over and she gave me a hug and comforted me. The fact that she was there and she embraced me got me through.”

Today, Zina is majoring in neuroscience at Emmanuel College in Boston. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, she has also been helping to take care of her family in Connecticut. Zina has been on a long journey, and perhaps one of the most important takeaways from that journey is that she has learned to embrace who she is. Being an American student from Ghana has in the past made her feel neither here nor there, but that’s changed. She now proudly identifies as both, and calls herself a Ghanaian-American.

“Once I got used to being away from my family, it’s like I had a new family,” Zina said. “I had a sense of belonging, and I was going through a crisis of being from Ghana and America. That journey started at North Country, so it’s definitely a pillar for me. It’s something I battled with for a long time, and I’ve learned to be fully comfortable learning to balance both things. I know who I am.”