by Hope Ferris, ’18
This past summer, I spent two weeks with two CA peers, Evan Ehrhardt and Ziyana Greene, and seventy students from all around the world at the Student Global Leadership Institute hosted by the Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaii. We tackled the topic of peace together with field trips, speakers, workshops, and planning for a year-long community service project we’re implementing here at Cary Academy. Below is my reflection on the experience along with a little bit on our upcoming project, Poetry for Peace.
I never thought nail polish could make me nostalgic, but one shared bottle of OPI Red has become my most lasting connection to my time at SGLI. Every night, my roommates and I lived out the model American sleepover — beds pushed together, candy and chips scattered across the sheet, Clueless droned from a sticker-covered laptop while we painted each other’s chipped nails with bad precision and talked until the sun rose. Except from our window, the peak of Diamond Head Crater loomed to the left in darkness, while the skyline of Honolulu glittered to the right. The food — Pineapple Lumps from New Zealand, Green Tea Kit Kats from Japan, Goldfish and Pringles from the University of Hawaii Campus Store. And our conversations — about anything and everything, from our favorite TV shows and music to socialism and sexual assault in our home countries.
The people I met at SGLI — the most empowering, inspiring, wonderful people — have changed the way I see the world: Danish child-pop stars and nationally ranked fencers; boarding school students in urban NYC and rural New Zealand; kids who spoke six languages and kids who had only been studying English for a few years but gave amazing 30 minute presentations to a room packed with students, teachers, and professionals from the Honolulu community; my roommate, Sae, from Japan, who drew adorable caricatures of almost every single person at camp, the majority of them drawn on a moving bus.
I went into SGLI ready and excited for cultural exchange, but I wasn’t expecting the level to which my perspective on the US would shift. To others, the US seems like a much more dangerous place than it does to me, from my bubble; I didn’t previously understand how the rest of the world perceives us. The word “gun” was avoided at all costs by many students — after one of our last afternoons at the beach, my roommate threw around the word on a public bus in a completely innocuous context, then immediately ducked low, wide-eyed, her arms wrapped around herself protectively, partly joking and partly in fear. Visiting Pearl Harbor with an international group, then to the Japanese cultural center to learn about internment camps in Hawaii immediately after, was shocking to me. The introductory video we were shown was the most American thing I had ever seen: most likely Aaron Sorkin-directed, an Allison Janney-esque narration backed by a swell of flutes and trumpets that sounded so distinctly patriotic. It was factual, somber, and respectful, but after visiting the cultural center, the film felt almost gaudy. In 8th grade American History, we learned about the Japanese internment in terms of numbers: Executive Order 9066, 120,000 people, 3 years of internment. But visiting the cultural center and seeing the intricate, handcrafted toys interned men had made for their children out of rocks and shells, then talking to my Japanese friends about Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki impacted me in ways I had not expected. I thought I’d understood the ethical implications of the war, the gravity of the crimes committed by both sides, but I hadn’t realized how much my education has been sterilized. That was the most valuable part of SGLI for me – it put empathy into my understanding of the world.
To promote peace in the CA community, Evan, Ziyana, and I have chosen to tackle the empathy deficit we noticed in the student body. We’d like to use poetry, a means of expression we’ve found to be so cathartic and powerful in our own lives, and engage our peers in a more unrestricted dialogue about topics that are uncomfortable now. The project we’ve designed is titled Poetry for Peace, and though it is still in the development stage, I’m very excited with our plans for teaching, publishing, and presenting poetry that promotes empathy and understanding of different perspectives.
My feet took a considerable amount of physical damage at SGLI: the bottoms were cut to moderate severity on lava rocks, toes blistered from sunrise hikes and sand, shoes entombed in mud, with which I may have left many footprints through the dorm halls after returning from star gazing at 1 am. And while callouses have faded and the shoes have been cleaned, I left the nail polish on my toes as long as I could, the small slivers of red taking me back to those international American sleepovers.
