GFA Voices presented six speakers on Thursday night, January 12, who gave a glimpse of the diversity of the school community. They told portions of their stories of coming to America, re-connecting with their past or finding GFA for their child. The audience, often moved to tears by the accounts, was taken from Nagasaki, Japan to Stamford, CT, hearing about brave ancestors, difficult moves and what it is like to land in the United States knowing only another language and culture.
Hiroko described her grandparents’ survival of the Atom bomb dropped in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 and her responsibility as a second generation survivor in continuing the dialogue for peace with the next generation. After marrying an American, Hiroko has a child who attends GFA and is “an ultimate symbol of peace” between the US and Japan.
Jairo, who is part of the maintenance staff at GFA, described the day he left Colombia as a young boy with his family to move to the United States. Alternating between “ecstatic and scared”, he fingered the change in his pocket and took it to an American grocery store to buy candy. He talked about his family and their reactions to the move. “There,” he said, “Now you know where Jairo is from.
Emelda arrived in America from Sierra Leone on a cold Thanksgiving weekend. It had taken her six years to save enough money for airfare and tuition to college. Eventually she began to work at the UN and met Nelson Mandela after he was released from prison. Her son was able to come to GFA in 11th grade. “I only wish we had known about it sooner,” she said, with a smile. “But those two years, playing basketball and soccer, were not so shabby at all.”
Ward, a Spanish teacher at GFA, described his grandfather’s arrival in pre-civil-rights America from China. “He had to ask people which bathroom to use, for whites or coloreds. Imagine,” he said, “having to ask someone else who you are?”
Thuy, from Vietnam, was raised in Europe under the cloud of her war-torn country. When Saigon fell and her family started over in the United States, she was determined to be more “like” and less “other.” It was not until recently that she turned and addressed her long-neglected past. Her daughter, part Vietnamese, part American, part Jewish, is the face of multiculturalism.
Finally, Kevin, also a GFA teacher, described a childhood spent trying to take care of his younger sisters in an environment of drugs, alcohol, death, loss and uncertainty. It wasn’t until he made it into the Horizons program in New Canaan that he experienced the support to pursue his passions. “Anyone who knows me,” he said, “knows that I’m a teacher, a diver and into theater. Now I want to believe in and motivate children the way my Horizons teachers believed in me.”