Eating empanadas and drinking mate in Oklahoma

It seems that the more I think about helping Southern Nazarene University students go global, the more aware I become of the global opportunities on and around our own campus. Just last week while talking with a student who will enter SNU in the fall, I mentioned to her that several of the majors in the Modern Languages Department came from other countries. I was trying to help her see the opportunities she would have on campus to get to know and study with international students. Part of learning to go global locally is learning with and from students who bring completely different perspectives and experiences to SNU because they come from contexts that are quite different from those of most of our students.

The next day, I met for an hour with the Chinese husband of one of our international graduate students. In our conversation, he asked me what I thought about Tibet. My Chinese friend was worried because his father travels frequently to Tibet for work and he had heard about violence directed at Chinese in Tibet. I responded that I only knew what I read in the newspapers and heard on the news, but that it seemed to me that Tibetans were just asking for what most other people want, that is, the freedom to be themselves and to govern themselves. He said that it was a confusing situation for him because all that he knew about Tibet was what the Chinese government allowed to be published. Since arriving in the U.S. in January, he has heard views that give a different side of the story. He is also learning what it means to go global by having to evaluate perspectives that bump up against his own. Later on that same day, I spent forty-five minutes with a student from Honduras and then ended my afternoon by speaking for an hour with a student from Mexico. It was a very international day for me without ever leaving campus.

I attended a meeting tonight (Saturday) that reminded me again of the global opportunities in our backyard. The church of which I am a member is making plans to start a new Hispanic congregation. The new congregation will be led by a bilingual/bicultural couple. The husband is from Argentina and the wife is from Oklahoma, although she has lived in Argentina and speaks Spanish with a decidedly Argentine accent. (I am definitely going to have to learn to speak “argentino” and drink “mate”. I already got a little practice being argentino because the hosts served us Argentine empanadas…very good!) What sets this planned congregation apart from the other new Hispanic church starts in which I have participated is that it is planning to be a bicultural/bilingual work from the start. The group wants to do this because many Hispanic families include family members who are not comfortable using Spanish. They may be children of Spanish-speaking parents or non-Hispanic spouses of Hispanic immigrants or second-generation Hispanic adults who want to maintain their ties to the Hispanic community but who cannot communicate well in Spanish. Thus, when we start our home groups, we are going to be ready to have two groups meeting in the same home at the same time, one group using English and one using Spanish, if we need to.

I am excited about being a part of the new Anglo-Hispanic congregation. I am also excited about being part of a university that offers its students such great opportunities for broadening their understanding of the world while they are on campus as well as when they study or participate in summer programs abroad. What a great place to study! What a great place to teach!

P.S. The NY Times is running an interesting series about an Iraqui translator/interpreter who has immigrated to the U.S. Check it out at http://baghdadbureau.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/leaving-iraq-an-iraqi-christian/.