2B
Fridav. December 7. 1990 / University Daily Kansan
Programs can help foreign students
By Amy Zamierowski Kansan staff writer
Kansan staff writer
Catherine Bergmiller, Strasbourg, France, graduate student, tried to meet U.S. students when she came to the United States.
But after a month, she gave up.
"I would give them my number and thought they liked me, but I wouldn't hear from them again," she said. "I wondered what I needed. But now I realize things happen differently here."
Gerald Harris, director of the Office of Foreign Student Affairs, said he thought many foreign students who came to the United States wanted to familiarize themselves with the U.S. culture and country.
But sometimes it is difficult for them to interact with U.S. students, he said.
Harris said that foreign students had the same anxieties as U.S. students, such as worrying if they would be able to make friends and fit in.
"I think in the aspect of making friends," some international students go away disappointed because they did not have the exposure they would have liked with American students." And I don't get it by getting American and international students together because of the benefits for education and society."
Harris said that the Office of Foreign Student Affairs sponsored a host family program in which members of a Lawrence family occasionally would invite a foreign student into their home. In the International Connections program, the office pairs interested U.S. and foreign students.
About 2,007 foreign students from 98 countries are enrolled in classes at the Lawrence and the University of Kansas Medical Center campuses. Of those students attend classes at the Lawrence campus; Harris said.
Bergmiller said a problem she found when she tried to socialize with U.S. students was that they were not as social as French students.
"In France, everyone does everything in groups and with group spirit, she said. "In the United States, it is being in individual except for sport teams."
Many say more contact is needed
Bergmiller, who lived in McCollum
Hall the first two weeks of the semester, said she avoided other KU students from France and tried to meet U.S. students.
"One day a group of French students approached me and asked me why I did not talk to them," she said. "I told them I came here to meet people from the United States and not people from France. After lunch, I saw that I wore back French people because they would talk to me.
"Now, the only people I talk to out of class are French people, which is too bad."
Cultural barriers
Neil Bradshaw, London graduate student, said that the more a culture differed from the United States, the bigger the barrier was and the more resistance there was.
"Now that I am on the other side, I can see what students from other countries felt like at my school in London," Bradshaw said. "But because the cultures in England and the United States are not terribly different, I don't have as hard a time being in as other foreign students do."
Sandrine Cuevelier, Lille, France, graduate student, said that poor communication sometimes existed among students from different cultures.
"In France, introductions to a person are more formal than in the United States," she said. "American people are more friendly in the United States than in one. Maybe that is why we expect more from the Americans we meet."
Rie Himiya, a freshman from Nagoya, Japan, said, "This may sound bad, but if American people are interested in meeting me or not depends on whether they are interested in meeting me or treat me not like I am a foreigner and a Japanese student, but like I am just a student."
he did not know the U.S. culture well and would like to learn more about it.
"I have a few American friends, but I would like to have a lot," he said. "But I think it is difficult to meet American people. It is very easy to meet people from Asian cultures. They have almost the same cultures, the same look and share the same food."
Shido said he thought the different languages also caused a problem when Japanese and U.S. students tried to socialize.
"I think Japanese people are shy — it’s part of the culture," he said. "Also, if Japanese people can't speak correct English, they think the American people would think that they were stupid."
Rod Ellicott, Tulsa, Oklahoma, freshman, said that he thought U.S. students were starting to have more foreign friends but that they could make more of an effort to meet foreign students.
U.S. efforts
"People generally tend to associate with people who are like them," Ellicott said. "That is not bad, but it would be better if they would broaden their horizons. It think it is bad when you have a friend in an office, friends from other backgrounds."
Ellicott said he thought U.S. students in general were naive about other cultures
Jun Shido, Tokyo freshman, said
"In some cultures, people will do things like talk in your face, but some Americans don't know that this is a common way to act for the person's culture," he said. "The American person then could feel offended and get mad, rule that appears to them. Some people in the United States think people who come here from other countries should act like them."
Kimberly Hobbs, Flattsburg, Mo., freshman, said she thought it was important to have students and welcome them to the University to give them a
Operation Friendship, a student organization that started 15 years ago, is designed to help international students become adjusted to the U.S. culture.
Cultural adjustments at KU
better sense of belonging here.
About 100 to 150 foreign students are involved in the program during a school year and meet once a month.
"We wanted to bring together American and international students," said Rick Clock, coordinator for the program and campus minister with the Baptist Student Union. "The students have fun and also provide support for each other."
Clock said that many foreign students have told him that U.S. students came across as likable and charming. They wereisting and deep relationships are rare.
One reason for this could be because in the University community, people are on the go," he said. "So you can be in the United States to be friendly."
Clock said that U.S. students could be apprehensive about meeting foreign students because of the differences between the cultures.
"They could be nervous and think, 'What do it say? What do they want to hear?' he said "Sometimes it is on and find someone more like you."
Clock said one perspective about foreign students was that they were guests in this country and U.S. students were the hosts.
"I think many of them expect the Americans to take the first step and show some interest and welcome me. I'm not sure it happens that much."
Eko Setaian, Asahan, Indonesia,
senior, has been attending the Operation
Friendship meetings since Fall
1987.
"I never miss a meeting," he said. "When you are in a foreign country, you feel like you are excluded or an outster. But the people in Operation Friendship made me feel like I am at home. Now I have so many friends here that it will be difficult to leave in June."
Latin America prime U.S. dumping ground
The Associated Press
SOA PAULO, Brazil — U.S. and European companies dump millions of tons of toxic waste into Latin America every year, leaving poisonous residues that health will endanger lives for decades.
Everything from household trash to radioactive sludge is sent to the region because lax anti-pollen make disposal easier and cheaper.
Waste exporters say they are doing nothing wrong, but environmentalists say Latin Americans are not being told the full story behind the toxic garbage they receive.
Scientists in Brazil say the toxic waste, dumped haphazardly in rivers, marshlands or earth wells since the late 1960s, causes cancers, birth defects, nerve damage and blood disorders.
"This is an illicit trade, shrouded in secrecy and often done by small unregistered companies, that is devastating the environment and will affect generations to come," said Anthony Wong, president of the Brazilian Society of Toxicology and director of the Sao Paulo Poison Control Center.
No precise figures are available for Latin America, but Mostafa Tolla, director of the U.N. Environmental Program, estimates that 40 million tons of toxic waste entered the Third World in 1989.
The United States, which generates 275 million tons of hazardous garbage a year, is the world's leading waste exporter.
U. S. companies wanting to export hazard waste must tell the Environmental Protection Agency.
Such notifications rose from 12 in 1980 to 626 in 1989. A growing share of the waste went to Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and the Caribbean, according to EPA documents.
Rubens Born, director in Brazil for Greenpeace, said, "Latin
America is a perfect dumping ground. There's lots of space, loads of corrupt inspectors and misspread ignorance of the problem.
Waste exporters that wastes are monitored tightly by the EPA and that shipments could not leave the United States if they contained dangerous levels of toxins.
They also say the disposal methods they practice in foreign countries are comparable to those in the United States.
But health officials argue that poorly paid, ill-equipped port inspectors are bribed to sign consent forms for importing hazardous waste or to look the other way when garrows are disposed of illegally.
U. S. law says foreign countries must be notified about waste shipments, but many Latin American companies do not about the quality of the information.
Waldemar Almeida, head of Brazil's National Institute of Health Quality Control, said, "The information we receive from the U.S. EPA is grossly misleading. We are rarely informed of the quantity, the type of waste or its destination."
Wendy Grieder, director of the EPA's international office in Washington, said, "Waste is shipped with the understanding of all countries involved. Latin countries are told through our embassies that waste they are getting, how much and the point of exit and entry."
A 1988 report by the EPA inspector general said, however, that the agency did not know how much waste was shipped abroad and requirements failed to comply with requirements for notification of intent.
Foreign firms often approach debt-ridden Latin governments with offers of public works projects or increased investment in return for permission to dump waste.
Egypt's first lady works to bring education to country's poor
The Associated Press
CAIRO, Egypt — It took Suzanne Mubarak a year after her husband became president to decide what kind of first lady she wanted to be. Then she accepted the challenge of becoming professor and went into the slums.
low."
has a hands-on social worker.
She has done the job largely without fanfare, opening schools and small libraries, obtaining medical supplies and hospitals for those without them. Much of her attention is focused on eradicating illiteracy, with more than half the 53 million Ekvantians.
For eight years, she has worked among her country's poor to bring education and hope to impoverished children. She herself as a 'hands-on social worker'
"I go to the most depressed area, the most depressed school, the most depressed hospital, but I don't get depressed," she said. "When I see what's been done, the smiles of the children . . . If you can solve the worst case, surely the rest will fail!"
Mubarak calls her slum projects self-help. People who are inspired to help themselves "are filled with pride and go on from there," she said. "You don't feel like keeping a place clean if its walls are falling in."
Seated on the lawn of Aruba Palace, a presidential guest house, she spoke of her goals for Egypt and her life as first lady, wife and mother of President Obama. Only subject declared off limits for her first lengthy interview since 1985.
To the outside world, and most Egyptians, Mubarak is a mystery.
She is not a daily fixture in Cairo's government newspapers. Her activities seldom were mentioned at all until the late 1980s, reportedly because she and her husband, Presiess Hosni Mubarak, wanted it that way.
"I can't work in big crowds,in the limelight," she said.
Born Suzanne Thabet, daughter of an Egyptian doctor and a Welsh nurse, she was 17 when she married
Capt. Hosni Mubarak.
For 10 years, she kept to the traditional role of housewife and mother to sons Alaa and Gamal.
She enrolled in American University in Cairo after both her sons were in school. In 1977, when her husband was vice president, she graduated in political science with a minor in psychology. He was president when she earned a master's in sociology in 1982.
Mubarak said that a classroon experience changed her life.
"We had this moody American psychology professor, who was working with children in the Bulla slums of Carino," she said. "One day he came in and lashed out at us. He said he be'd never been in Bulqa to conditions are for children, that we only passed by in our Mercedes."
BENNIGAN'S.
After class, Mubarak visited him.
"I said if he felt this way, why
don't we show us how to help the
children to tell me what to do." Go
and find your own way.
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