The Journey to the SIT Graduate Institute

By Susal Stebbins

What a journey it’s been! I arrived at SIT Graduate Institute after a ten-day drive through the great Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, across the Continental Divide, through the Great Plains and Black Hills and Badlands and across rolling northern Midwest hills and flat as a pancake Ohio farmland, through New York wine country and then the late night rustic roller coaster of Route 9 from Bennington to Brattleboro. I know other SIT students crossed even more varied lands, nations, and great oceans, not to mention equally complex cultural terrains. Reaching orientation at SIT became a mutual large dot on the time-space maps of our lives.

And zooming in on that dot, we found it to be a multi-layered pivotal point. We are uploading information – about mailboxes, degree programs, new faces and the new names that go with them, advice on enjoying the feeling of being connected and welcoming the discomfort that comes with true multi-cultural living…In the midst of this, Alvino Fantini, an ex-faculty member connected to The Experiment and World Learning for more than 40 years, jovially informed the assembled MAT and PIM students, “Hoje, eu declaro Portugues a lingua oficial da escola.” What?! Laughter and bewilderment rippled through the crowd. Alvino explained – in English – that language and culture can exclude and that our task is to use our awareness to be inclusive.

My own awareness was that I was awed by my classmates: one who had been a political prisoner for standing up for minority rights in India; others who had worked with Habitat for Humanity in Chile and with the Peace Corps in Namibia; another who had come to SIT to become more proficient in teaching English in her native Tibet; another an African-American woman with a three-year-old son who had dreamed and worked for years to come to SIT and was reveling in all the ideas and possibilities.

And I was inspired by the faculty. Karen Blanchard reminded us to find what we really need (and realize that we will need to let go of some of what we want), to listen for and follow our soul’s song. When the Conflict Transformation faculty stood up and spoke eloquently of tearful good-byes with teenagers from the Middle East in the summer CONTACT youth peace-building program, of establishing dialogues to resolve differences between the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, and of training former Maoist women soldiers in Nepal to become effective Members of Parliament, tears came to my eyes. All of these conflicts have affected me deeply, and these stories spoke to something deep in my core, of the needs and possibilities in the world, of my own potential to make a contribution to the full well-being of the peoples, countries, and world I love. I can see similar path-finding moments happening for many of my classmates, and I look forward to the next stages of this amazing adventure.

Susal Stebbins is an entering PIM student (Intercultural Service, Leadership, and Management degree). She calls Minneapolis, Minnesota and Kathmandu, Nepal home and has had a rich life experience with many strands of writing, photography, social activism, music, and teaching.