Thursday, July 7: Day Three - Mealtime

The first time all of the students participating in GYI met each other, the foreigners sat with their host families. They had been living with the hosts for a day already; they were familiar. As we stood and ate sweets after the ceremony, the Taiwanese and Russian and German students drifted back to the people from their own country and the Americans did the same. The draw of familiar faces and words was stronger than the desire to discover new ones.

The next time we ate together and chose our seats (breakfast at Luther yesterday), we still sat divided by country lines. We did this again at lunch and again at dinner and again at breakfast today. The foreign students and teachers sat in groups and spoke their native languages and the Americans were too timid to sit with them. When we played soccer yesterday, we split into a Russian team and a Germany/ United States team. When we toured Iowa State, we were dead silent.

At dinner tonight, our approach had quietly changed. I walked in to find two giant tables with all 42 GYI participants sitting no longer by the initial, comfortable groups but in diverse mixes of nationality, age, and gender. I had a conversation with two American teachers, a Taiwanese TA, and American TA, another American student, two Russian students, a Chinese student, a Chinese teacher, and a Russian TA. All 42 of us have done enough together that we have become tentative friends.

Food, the core of the global problem on which our program will focus, brought us together. The way in which we were sitting at dinner showed how the mood of the program had changed. Today, the soccer teams were mixed. Today, when we listened to a presentation about Luther College, we joked around and teased each other during group discussions.

This ability to talk and play and joke and sit with one another is the same thing that we will use when we work with the issue of food security. Maybe we can come together as we have at meals and games and activities to find a solution.

-Sarah Mansfield, USA