Living in a different world

By Heather Lowhorn

Think back to those first few breathtaking days as a college student and all the emotions you felt. Experiencing fantastic new freedoms, yet longing for the security of home. Excitement tinged with fear. Everything was unfamiliar. Would you like your roommate? Would you find your classes? Would you succeed?

Now add to that the anxiety of being in a foreign country. You thought you knew English, but your peers are using the language in ways you certainly never learned in class. Your home and everyone you love is half a planet away. And you are surrounded by strange food, different music, foreign practices — the unaccustomed blur of a fast-paced culture.

College is a different world, but that is doubly true for international students. Scott Martin BA 91, director of International Student Services, opens his office and his home to make international students feel welcome and comfortable on the Anderson University campus. As part of the Cultural Resource Center, the Office of International Student Services works with approximately 90 students from 41 countries. The office works with traditional international students — students from other countries who want to study in America — and third culture kids (TCK) and missionary kids — students who grew up in a culture different from their parents and who often have duel citizenship.

Martin himself was considered an international student when he attended AU. When asked where he’s originally from, Martin doesn’t have a simple answer. “I’m a PK/missionary kid, so I have many homes,” he explains. “We call North Dakota home. I was born in Colorado and lived in Nebraska, then went to Africa. If I were to say the homestead, the grandparents are all in North Dakota.” But Martin did not grow up in the States. “The formative years of my life were in Kenya and Tanzania in east Africa. My parents were Church of God missionaries. I came [to AU] as an international student and loved it,” says Martin.

After graduation Martin worked for Warner Press but eventually returned “home” to North Dakota to help resettle refugees in the Bismarck area. He worked with people from 14 different countries including Kurdish, Haitian, and Bosnian refugees.

This background and his parents’ willingness to let him experience new cultures give him a special understanding of the challenges international students face. “I’m not sure [this job] could be done without it,” he says of his background. “I couldn’t do it without it. I think that having had significant cross-cultural experience and developing as a person in another country certainly has shaped the way I do it, but I think more importantly was the way my parents allowed me to develop and really blend cultural characteristics from the places we lived and from the people I grew up with. [This] facilitated my ability to do this job well.”

While many international students view studying in the United States as a great opportunity, Martin sees the other side of the coin. He realizes that having many cultures represented on campus benefits AU. “As an institution, the breadth of our diversity is our strength,” he says. “The more diverse we are with our academics, with our interests, with our ethnic makeup, and experience of our students, the greater strength we have. The student who has a different perspective brings richness and depth to a class.”

Each year his office receives approximately 2,000 inquiries from outside the United States. “They have to essentially weed themselves through those 2,000 inquiries and be the ones that are the most proactive, most determined, have the most energy for the process to rise to the top of that group,” says Martin. “And once they’re in that group of maybe 75 or so, then that’s where we start to get selective.” But when sorting through the inquiries, Martin isn’t looking at just the grades. “A part of finding students [is] trying to have each class represent a wide variety of interests, majors, countries,” he says.

While American students struggle with the sometimes confusing admissions process, international students often have obstacles unheard of in the States. For Avik Bhattacharya BA ’03 of Calcutta, India, the admissions process was extremely difficult. Bhattacharya was enrolled in an engineering program in India when he decided he wanted to study in the United States. “Where I lived in central India there was one telephone for about 3,000 people. And there was no such thing as e-mail,” he says. “The way I e-mailed AU was to find a friend who actually had a computer then see if he had Internet, then go over to his house, pretype the e-mail, log on for like 30 seconds, send the e-mail, then logout.”

Taking the standardized test American schools require for admission was more than a Saturday morning spent with a no. 2 pencil. After taking the SAT, his mother called him at school to tell him he had scored a perfect 1600. “I remember I stood in line for over two hours to receive that phone call,” he says. “The next thing I did was, I had to get on a train with no tickets because you can’t get tickets in India, sleep on the floor of the train for two days and two nights with no money to get back to Calcutta to sign up for the SAT II, because you couldn’t sign up for the SAT II where I was living. Then I had to run back to college. I spent three or four months running back and forth on trains without tickets, just boarding the train in an unreserved compartment.”

After being accepted into AU and securing the financial assistance he needed, Bhattacharya entered into the international paper maze of obtaining a student visa. According to Martin the process is “anywhere from a huge headache to a nightmare, depending on the country.” Bhattacharya adds, “The official U.S. stand is you are guilty until proven innocent.”

Bhattacharya spent three months compiling the required documentation, everything from birth certificates and deeds to bank statements and middle school verification. “When I went on my visa interview, I had nine folders filled with documents. Two huge bags — at least 10 pounds of documents. In India there is a bureaucracy. Things don’t work the way they do in the United States. Something that you assume would take five minutes takes two days. I had to go stand in a high court for two days to get a legal paper saying I had a house in India. I don’t even remember what I had to do anymore, but I literally had lists of the lists of the documents I had. After all this, I got rejected the first time.”

And this was in a pre-9/11 world. Now the process is even more strenuous. But Bhattacharya knew it would be difficult from the start, and that there are no guarantees. “When you apply to a college in the United States, you have to start the process willing to invest about 300-400 hours of work, knowing fully well that at the end of it there is a 50/50 chance you won’t get the visa and you won’t make it.”

According to Martin, Bhattacharya’s experience is not unusual. In many countries, denying the initial visa application is standard in order to weed out those who aren’t really interested. Application fees are often costly and nonrefundable, causing poorer students even more problems. “We’ve had students wait three years before they could get a visa,” says Martin. “We write letters to the embassy, we get the fax number of the consulate we think they’re going to be meeting with and send them a fax. We try to be as proactive and supportive as we can.”

Once on campus, international students are faced with the same issue as American students: finding their place on campus. The Office of International Student Affairs then takes off the admissions hat and puts on the student service hat. In the fall they host a week of orientation for incoming international students. “We go over everything, through the banking system and shopping and building a support network and academic success,” says Martin.

Often the casual classroom setting surprises many students. “This new academic culture is very different from what most of them have experienced in terms of accessibility to professors and the idea of getting beyond rote memorization,” explains Martin. “[It’s] much more casual. The idea that people take food and drink into class is very bizarre.”

Elizabeth Wako Okeniyi BA ’79 is from the Luhyia tribe in Kenya. Her husband, Ezekiel Onaolapo Okeniyi BA ’78 is a Nigerian from the Yoruba tribe. Both were surprised by the way American youth interacted with their elders. “We thought that the familiarity showed a lack of respect. The young people were talking to their seniors as if they were age-mates and calling them by their first names! In Nigeria you bow to greet your senior and traditionally in Kenya you do not look boldly into the eyes of your senior when you are talking to them.”

Bhattacharya realized things were different in American classrooms on his first day. When the professor walked into the room, Bhattacharya stood up. Then he looked around and saw he was the only one standing. “I’m trained to do that,” he explains. “I instinctively stand up when a teacher comes into the room. It took a while, but I found [the casual] setting incredibly good for me.” He had Martin coach him on whom to address by first name or by title and last name.

For other students, conversational American English was the toughest adjustment. Even though international students are required to prove proficiency in English, the difference between English learned in a classroom and complete immersion in the language can prove difficult.

“The toughest part for me was to really read,” says Andreas Krenz MDiv ’00 from Germany. “I remember the very first day I had to do my Old Testament homework, and I had to read 30 pages. After one page, I spent three hours translating. I said, ‘Lord, how should I get this done?’ He helped me. It was tough in the beginning, and I really struggled. I had to study hard, but it worked well.”

Mariko Kitamura came to AU through a relationship between AU and Saga University in Japan. Kitamura felt English was her biggest challenge, but it was also her reason for coming to AU. At Saga University she is studying to be an English teacher. “Since I wanted to develop my English ability, I wanted the environment where few Japanese were around me,” she said. “If I had spoken English more fluently and understood what people spoke more correctly, I could have gotten to know my friends on a deeper level. English was my biggest challenge. I felt so all the time!”

Once international students have earned their degree from AU, they are faced with the choice of staying in the United States or returning to their homeland. While the majority nationwide return home, many AU grads stick around, at least for a while. “Of the students who have graduated since I’ve been here, most have gone to graduate school or they’ve been recruited by local businesses,” says Martin. Students from poorer countries see the prospect of working a few years in the United States and earning what they would earn their entire career in their own country. “They petition the U.S. government to let them stay and continue to work. Like any college graduate, the prospect of a job is a nice thing. It’s common among our students to want to get some substantial experience if they can while they are here. Unemployment is not uncommon in a lot of the countries where our students come from. So if somebody is pursing them to work here, it’s hard to say no, even if their intention is to eventually go home.”

After graduation from Anderson, Ezekiel Onaolapo and Elizabeth Wako Okeniyi went on to graduate work at North Texas State University. Both earned master’s degrees, Ezekiel in labor and industrial relations and Elizabeth in journalism communications. The couple returned to Nigeria. Ezekiel is an assistant controller general in the Nigerian Customs Service. Elizabeth lectured at the University of Jos for eight years and headed the English department at Greensprings International School for seven years.

In 2003, however, Elizabeth moved back to Indiana. Though Ezekiel has remained in Nigeria during that time, he will soon join her. The Okeniyis have a child who graduated from AU in 2003, two children currently enrolled at AU, and one who will start at AU in the fall. “Our choice to move to America right now is mainly because all our children are here and we just want to be together,” explains Elizabeth. “How long we will actually be here remains to be seen.”

While the Okeniyis always felt they would return home to help in the development of their countries, they knew the value of their education at AU. “The degrees we received in America made all the difference in the standard of life we were able to enjoy back home,” says Elizabeth. “In developing countries, education is one of the most important things that separates the poor from the rich. Education was a ticket to a good job, good salary and, therefore, a better standard of living. We thank God that we have been able to send all our children to school here in America.”

Kitamura will graduate from Saga University this year and begin teaching English at a Japanese junior high school in April. She feels her time at AU will give her a deeper understanding of the language that she will be able to draw from in her teaching. “[My friends and the faculty] taught me American customs, slang and such, which is great to know about American culture. These will be good resources when I teach English to junior high kids.”

Krenz came to feel very much at home in America, but he says, “I always had in my mind to go back to Germany. I feel the call to minister in Europe.” After graduation, Krenz accepted a position as second pastor at the Church of God in Braunschweig, Germany.

Avik Bhattacharya is a pursuing his PhD in the department of computer science at Duke University on a graduate fellowship. He hasn’t decided whether or not he will stay in the United States or return to India. “I honestly don’t have a clue,” he says. “I like working here. I like living here for the most part. My parents live in India. If there is a reason I would go back to India it would be to take care of my parents.” An only child, Bhattacharya returns to India once a year to visit. He describes the separation from his family as extremely difficult. “It is difficult in ways I cannot put into words.” And while he likes the opportunities America affords, he does not see it as a place he would want to grow old in. “Certain societies tend to have the social structure such that the older you are, the more useful you are made to feel. I think here the older you are the more there is a tendency to shut you out.”

Wherever he does decide to live, Bhattacharya believes Anderson University was the right place for him. He was exposed to people from all walks of life from all over the world. “It was a fantastic experience. I learned how to use chopsticks!” he says. “When you’re thinking education, you’re thinking abstract algebra. But more importantly, I lived with a Singaporean guy and ended up being really, really good with chopsticks. I would have never learned that sitting in an Indian college with only Indian people.”