We stood in a circle on the soccer field, beneath the stars. A girl stepped forward to speak. I was surprised, because the first few days of the program session, she barely spoke at all. “I am so glad for these past two weeks, the friends I have made, and the experiences I have had here. I know now that I am not alone.”
For that single moment, I knew that my summer spent working at the Global Youth Village had been beyond worth it. Another participant stepped forward.
“I was in a bad mental place before I came here,” said a very bright young lady who never missed an opportunity to share. “Now I know I have the skills and the support so I can go out and produce positive things in my future. We have to go at it together.”
And another, his face brightened by candlelight, as he named every single one of us around the circle, and told us we would never be forgotten.
The next day, they were all going back to their homes across the world: Poland, Ghana, Taiwan, Japan, Libya, France, North Carolina, Virginia. Their fleeting community would be scattered.
Twelve days earlier, thirty high school students had arrived in the forest outside Bedford, Virginia. For thirty five years, Legacy International’s longest running summer program has done the difficult work of bridging languages and cultures to enable intercultural understanding within its participant population, and give each young person the tools to spread that understanding within their home community. In my cabin, Salaam, my eight high school girls took a few days to warm up and become acclimated to camp life. There was bunking in a cabin to get used to, the program’s culture of dialogue and sharing, and a camp’s typical cadre of spiders and creatures of the night. There were four ESL learners in my cabin, and to be perfectly honest, that first day I was terrified. On arrival day, I had spent hours asking every question I could think of (What do you do at school? What is your family like? Tell me about your pets!) to fill the void–and to little response. The gap between those students and the rest of my cabin was like a gaping crevasse, and I felt like my brain was about to explode with the pressure to bring them all together as a community. At that point, the only thoughts I could cohesively gather were “Tree? Bee!” Someone had been stung that first night, life was charades, and everything felt as if it were collapsing into a fiasco. But keeping it in perspective, I could not even begin to imagine how young Yu Zhe, who spoke not more than ten words of English, must have felt. “Trust the process,” I was told. I laughed the delirious laugh of the exhausted, and asked for a hug.
Those first few days, I became a lot more comfortable with silence, something which I usually try to avoid at almost any cost. I knew, though, that they needed me to shut up so that they could take initiative with each other. Slowly, slowly, slowly conversations started. “What is it like in Taiwan? Tell me about your school! You take the metro in Budapest? What kind of movies do you like to watch? Frozen!? You know Frozen?! I LOVE Frozen. Cue the “Let it Go” sing along. And in those moments was the true beginning. I remember celebrating (like jumping up and down in the staff lounge celebrating) the day the silent one came down from her bunk to sit on the couch, and cautiously ask one of the Taiwanese girls for help with some characters. Contact! My English speaking girls took a Chinese language and culture class, and soon started practicing with the native Mandarin speakers in my cabin, who taught them not just tones and pronunciation, but card games and a few favorite Chinese songs.They played guitar. They played a uproariously silly game called Pterodactyl. They danced. They talked about boys and family and school and cultural whys and hows. The cabin meeting on the fourth day was filled with laughter. Hun hao. Very good.
And on that last evening as we reflected on the nights of folk dancing, the days of discussions about gender, Fukashima, and the merits and pitfalls of ping pong and Justin Bieber songs, we blew out our candles. We sent our lights back to the stars. Good night, goodbye, and I love you echoed through the night air in a tangle of languages swirling together to rest peacefully in one quiet understanding: friendship. Trust the process.
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