Speech for Opening Ceremony of International Week

Dear students,
None of you will be able to attend the opening ceremony of the International Week festival on Monday because you will all be at your middle and high schools carrying out observations. I will be speaking and thought and you might like to see what it is that I will say. You have had a big impact on me this quarter, and you have helped to shape this speech. Enjoy.

Speech for Opening Ceremony of International Week
November 17, 2008
Eastern Washington University

Gina Mikel Petrie


I am going to tell you a story today. It’s a kind of love story. Are you ready? Okay.

The story begins with me. I was raised on a farm in Indiana where my father was born and his father lived before him. Being third generation farmers on this plot made us relatively new. Most families in the area had been farming the same plots of land for 4 or 5 generations. Those who were in their first generation were talked about as the ‘new people’ until their children had children. Multiple paths of immigration had brought all of our families together many many years ago. And, over the years, we had the time to settle in to this place so that it was hard to distinguish families from farms, people from place. I grew up on the same soil my father grew up on. Mine was a farming childhood in which place and identity were interwoven in ways that I struggle today to express. Mine was the knowing of earth of Ernest Hemingway’s soldiers, lying prone, hugging the earth for mere survival. Mine was the knowing of earth of Willa Cather’s children, lying so still in the warm garden sun that they truly believe that they are the pumpkins around them. It never occurred to me that life might be different elsewhere.

One day shortly before I began kindergarten a traveling salesman brought some children’s encyclopedias that he was selling. Hope against hope as I listened quietly from another room, my parents bought the set. One of the volumes was called “Far Away Lands”. This magical volume contained stories and folktales and pictures and information about places that I hadn’t known existed. A new understanding was born in me: that not every place was like my little corner of the world—that not everyone wore similar clothes or lived in houses that looked like our farmhouse. I became fascinated with the idea of far off difference. I would squint my eyes tight as I looked at our back forty acres so that the waving wheat could almost be an ocean and the little parcel of woods at the back of our property could be dreamed into a far off island To travel from the axis mundi—the center of the world—to some other place full of difference became my dream.

Difference came to our little community on the day that Amy arrived in my kindergarten classroom. Amy was one of the orphans airlifted from Vietnam, and this 5 year old suddenly found herself with a new name, surrounded by people who didn’t speak her language and who certainly didn’t look like her—all of us with our German and Irish and Scandinavian immigrant backgrounds. I warily watched Amy from afar, never attempting to interact. We merely stared across at each other when it was our turn to use the teeter-totter together. Over the next couple of years, Amy settled in, learned English, and played a part of all of my memories of activities from those school days. We were in the same Blue Bird troop, then Campfire Girls, and attended endless sleepovers together. Never once did I venture to ask Amy about her adjustment, about her life before, about her struggles. One day in third grade in the afternoon after lunch, I watched as Amy became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Amy had become a part of our WE. She was quietly folded in to our community, and I never gave it any more thought.

The high school I attended was a very popular place for foreign exchange students to spend a year. I often found Swedish or German or Finnish students, for example, in my classes. I had been taught to be polite, and I certainly didn’t want to offend anyone by saying the wrong thing or by showing that I couldn’t understand what someone was saying, so I did what I thought was the right thing. I didn’t interact with them. I kept my distance.

This changed when I met Jarkko Saastamoinen, a senior from Helsinki. Now, you are probably wondering when the love part of this story comes in. Well, it’s coming. However, it’s probably not what you are thinking. Now, it is true that Jarkko was devastatingly handsome and that we began dating and that my heart beat dangerously fast when I saw him. That is all true, but that is not the love I am talking about here. The love began one day after school when Jarkko said something that I couldn’t quite catch. I told him that I had trouble understanding his accent, and then he said the funniest thing to me. He told me that he had trouble sometimes understanding my accent. That was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard—“But I don’t HAVE an accent!” I half-laughed half-shouted at him. How could I have an accent? Everyone in my ‘we’ spoke just like me. Only people on the outside like Jarkko spoke differently. I was at the center of the English-speaking world.

That night reflecting on what Jarkko had said, something shook loose for me. I suddenly saw that I was not at the center of the Earth, but rather that there was a center of the Earth for ME. The farm was not axis mundi but rather MY axis mundi. The room for new self-concepts was opened up, and flow they did. I breathed in a new perspective of myself, of my culture, of my place, of my language, and I was changed. This is the love that I am here to talk about. The love that gives us the courage to truly hear what others have to say about our differences. The love that gives us the courage to allow transformation of ourselves in the process.

When I went off to college and discovered the presence of a fellow student in several of my courses who I was not able to communicate with because she was deaf and did not read lips, this love led me to make a very different choice than I had made in high school. I signed up to take American Sign Language courses and attempted to use my developing language to speak with her. These interactions took me to places that were at times uncomfortable—learning about an entire culture within our culture that I hadn’t even known existed, learning about the morally-violent injustices that continued to occur in the deaf world, as well as the perceptions of the deaf of the hearing.

Something settled for me then—the joys of learning about difference outweighed any fears that I had had about messy interactions. The possibility of seeing my reflection in the eyes of others overcame the discomfort of not having a ready-made and comfortable script. And that is the moral of my story. That just having difference among us is not enough. It is EASY to dodge the opportunity of difference. We do it everyday. A former international student from Japan, Haruka Nagasaki, once told me that it tired her to show up for class early. It tired her because when she sat down next to other early arrivers, they refused to speak with her. She could feel their discomfort and most of the time acquiesced to what she knew they were silently hoping for—her own silence.

And so, I am not here to bring you good news today. I am not here to congratulate us all on our successful recruitment of students from a variety of cultures and languages or the increasing presence of diverse faculty members among our ranks. None of it means anything if the students sit silently in class waiting for class to begin or the faculty members remain in their offices feeling our disinclination to engage with them.

Expanding the We here is not enough. Just as Amy becoming a citizen, becoming absorbed into that little community was not enough. It doesn’t really change a thing.

What we must seek to do, in the words of new faculty member Darcy Dachyshyn, is to ‘create a more porous I’. We need to be willing to open ourselves to take in the difference, to hear it, to suffer it, to allow it to change us. I am here to challenge you, Eastern Washington University, to step off into uncomfortable territory, and to engage with those around you. Take in every opportunity to breathe in difference and allow it to change you.