Category: News

Summia Tora ’16, Afghanistan, has been named a Rhodes Scholar. She is the first student from her country and first female at Earlham College to receive the international postgraduate award to study at the University of Oxford in Britain.

Summia plans to pursue coursework in refugee studies, forced migration, and social entrepreneurship at Oxford. Her focus will be on internally displaced people in Afghanistan, and  refugees in Pakistan and different parts of the world.

A senior at Earlham in Richmond, Ind., Summia is double majoring in economics, and peace and global studies. 

“I was delighted with the news about Summia,” said Joanna Swanger, director and professor of the peace and global studies program at Earlham. “I had great confidence in her candidacy because of her unique combination of the characteristics of tremendous poise, humility, and courage she has shown, as well as the specific projects she has initiated that relate to peacebuilding.  I truly see her as a future leader on the world stage.”

A UWC-USA cook known for his fresh-made omelets and soups is retiring.

Victor Trujillo’s last day will be on Jan. 17. He has worked in the kitchen on the Montezuma campus for 10 years. Victor’s retirement also will mean the end of a nearly 45-year career in food service.

He won’t miss getting up at 4 a.m., but will miss his co-workers and the students, who have no qualms with standing in long lines for his omelets.

“They’re fun and they give me energy with their silliness,” the 59-year-old said.

Victor makes two types of soups daily. Some of the more popular are carrot-ginger, roasted tomato and New England clam chowder.

Victor grew up in remote Vaughan, N.M., 85 miles south of Las Vegas. It was in Vaughan – a town of 445 — that he started his restaurant career, washing dishes at his aunt’s restaurant. He aspired to become a disc jockey. A few years after high school, he found himself back at his aunt’s place working as a cook.

Victor then moved to Albuquerque, where he lived for most of the 1980s. He worked as the prep manager at Monroe’s Mexican Restaurant. While living in The Duke City, Victor met Tom Snyder. After being together for 31 years, the couple married this past New Year’s Eve.

Victor and Tom left Albuquerque and moved to Phoenix for Tom’s engineering job with U.S. West, a former telephone company. While there, Victor cooked for a retirement community.

Tom was then transferred to Denver, where the couple remained for 13 years. During that time, Victor worked for Holiday Inn Express next to Mile High Stadium, Gunther Tooties, Hot Cakes Diner and the sports bar, ESPN Zone.

At age 45, Victor returned to his native New Mexico with plans to retire. Five years later, he accepted a position with Sodexo, cooking for UWC-USA.

Victor and Tom own a 100-year-old home in Montezuma, which they plan to continue working on. They will be taking a three-week trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and traveling to Utah in their Airstream. They also would like to go to Europe next year.

 

The United World College-USA is the first high school to apply to a program used only by colleges to improve sustainability.

Established in 2005, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education includes more than 900 colleges across 48 U.S. states, one U.S. Territory, nine Canadian provinces and 20 countries.

David Neidel ’87 got UWC-USA involved with AASHE while serving as an alumni-in-residence on the Montezuma campus during the fall 2019 semester.  The non-profit works with higher education faculty, administrators, staff and students who are change agents of sustainability innovation. AASHE evaluates a campus’ framework to assess its sustainability. The organizations assigns its members with either a bronze, silver, gold or platinum for its sustainability activities.

David, who has a background in environmental science and policy, environmental conflict management and ecological restoration, theorized that UWC-USA will receive a bronze status. He noted that the grounds and operations is probably the weakest area on campus due to lack of solar power and use of gasoline-operated vehicles.

“There are really no sustainability procurement policies in place,” David said.

The school does recycle and composts much of its solid waste.

“We have some numbers, but we don’t have a percentage on the total trash,” he said. “If you don’t measure it, you can’t change it.”

The farm on the UWC-USA campus supplies 30 percent of the produce to the cafeteria. Most uneaten food is composted at the farm.

“The cafeteria is doing really well in terms of plant-based diet training,” David said.

Providing plastic takeout containers and vegan options, and making a commitment to buy from small and medium-sized farms are on the plus-side.

A native of Pennsylvania, David has a doctorate from Yale University’s joint program in forestry and environmental studies, and anthropology. He currently works with Yale’s Environmental Leadership & Training Initiative, whose Asia program he has led since its inception in 2008. David spent the last 11 years working on tropical forest restoration in the Philippines and Indonesia.

 

 

 

Before leaving for their three-week winter break, several students were honored for their commitment to ExEds during the first semester.

Crew Not Passenger awards were presented for dedicated participation in the UWC-USA Campus Services program. Kicked off in September, the program involves students, teachers, and staff work alongside the custodial, maintenance and grounds employees to clean and spruce up the Montezuma campus.

Crew Not Passenger award recipients were:

Grounds Crew

• Sophie “Zosia” Sandweiss ’20, USA-Texas, and Julius Schaut ’21, Germany

Building Exteriors

• Karoline Nedergaard ’20, Denmark, and Anika Quon ’20, USA-Wash.

Hardscaping

• Lorenzo Laquidara ’20, Italy

Forestry

• Nghia DucNguyen ’20, Vietnam

Library

• Vyara Getahun ’20, Bulgaria

Maintenance/Custodial/Misc.

• Asja Babanovic ’21, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Snow shoveling

• Leah Wilson ’20, USA-NJ

 

Community Commitment awards were presented to:

Reading Buddies

• Sophia Huang ’20, Germany

Soup Kitchen

• Milania Lucia Soares da Costa ’20, Timor-Leste
• Catherine Quinn ’20, USA-Texas
• Julia Mazal ’20, USA-NM
• Olusotemidayo “Temi” Oyedele ’20, Nigeria

The SPOT Community Center

• Rara Dzikrina Istifadah ’21, Indonesia

 

 

Recipients of Ethical Action awards were:

STEM Club

• Yuden Lhamo ’20, Dorji, Bhutan

SOAAR

• Sophia Huang ’20, Germany

SWEET

• Elisa Ruiz ’20, Spain

Latin Ensemble

• Andres Block Martinez ’20, Mexico

Cultural Day Leadership

• Juliana “Juju” Lucena Gaspar ’20, Cayman Islands –

Amnesty International

• Foster Preston ’20, Canada

This year’s Mountbatten Memorial Prize recipient is Alejandro Rene Ortiz Lopez from Venezuela.

Presented annually since 1984, the award goes to a second-year student who best represents the UWC ideals of international and intercultural understanding, personal responsibility and integrity, compassion and service, respect for the environment, and idealism. UWC-USA faculty choose the recipient.

The award is named after Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was named president of the UWC movement in 1967. Mountbatten was one of the most decorated and important diplomats and military figures of his time. He grew up in a prominent military family, seeing action during both WWI and WWII. Mountbatten became head of the British Armed Forces in 1959. Upon retiring, he devoted his life to international affairs and the avoidance of conflict, with UWC becoming one of his most prominent interests.

The scholarship is funded by The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation. Bern Schwartz was a businessman and portrait photographer. The foundation sponsors educational projects and initiatives in museums, libraries, schools and universities and donates photographs by Bern Schwartz from its archive.

 

Jessica Lanham has returned to her childhood home — the United World College-USA.

“I’m loving it,” said Jess, the daughter of UWC-USA math teacher and residential tutor Shirleen Lanham and retired art teacher Colin Lanham. “It almost feels like summer camp.”

A freelancer designer with a background in art direction and visual design, Jess needed a break from her California life. She also missed New Mexico.

“I had strong desire for New Mexico and the landscape, and this will probably be my parents’ last year here,” said Jess. “I was in a housing situation where I would have to move.”

So she left San Francisco and arranged to offer workshops to UWC-USA students in exchange for an art studio on campus. The studio is on the top floor of Sasakawa. She’s absolutely loving it!

“It’s been super easy to fall into the community here,” the 33-year-old said. “There’s a younger faculty who are very welcoming and friendly. I’m just really grateful for that. I like to join in on the student activities.”

At age one, Jess moved from UWC Swaziland to UWC-USA with her family. Since UWC provides faculty housing, Jess and her brother, Nick, grew up on the campus where their mother has taught for 32 years. Colin taught here for 30 years before retiring in May 2018.

“I loved growing up here,” Jess said. “Two of my good friends were (retired English teacher) Anne Farrell’s daughter and my other friend was Anna Curtis, Linda Curtis’ (retired dean of students) daughter.”

“We would get into all kinds of mischief,” Jess added. “We ran all over campus and played down by the river. Our mothers never knew where we were.”

In high school, Jess befriended some UWC-USA students. She always looked up to them, and attended cultural day shows and other performances.

“It was just a real treat to have this as my backdrop of growing up and getting to go to all those things,” she said. “I thought they were the coolest people and couldn’t wait to be a UWC student.”

The wait turned into reality when Jess left Robertson High School in Las Vegas to attend UWC Atlantic College in Wales, graduating in 2005.

“Atlantic College was really different from UWC-USA,” said. “They had more students than here, and it was a very different climate.”

At UWC-USA, she experienced the fun, but not the stress of the academics and the international baccalaureate.

“The IB was hard and it kinda kicked my butt,” she said.

Taking IB art allowed Jess to completely immerse herself in fashion and installation. Prior to going to Atlantic, art was just a hobby. After UWC, Jess went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on a Davis Scholarship.

“I went there with the intention of doing fashion design and ended up hating the program,” Jess said. “So I took an introduction to etching class and fell in love with print making.”

She received a bachelor’s of fine arts in printmaking in 2009 and moved to San Francisco, which is known for its print-making community. Her brother and boyfriend at the time also lived there.

Concerned about finding work to pay her student loans, Jess taught herself graphic designing and worked at editing house. She ended up in marketing, working as an art director. After four years, Jess wanted a challenge and got into freelancing.

“I’ve got a pretty good steady business now,” she said. “It allows me to have flexibility and mobility, so I’m here for four to five months.”

While in Montezuma, Jess continues to run her business and is working on light installations created on silk fabric. She plans to present her designs and artwork to students.

 

 

 

 

The United World College-USA’s Cultural Showcase series will launch Saturday, Nov. 23, with a two-hour stage production dedicated to exploring the theme of color as it manifests across time, place, culture and consciousness.

“Our new thematic approach to the traditional cultural shows will allow us to explore the nuances of culture as a concept and to explore intersections and divergences of a single idea throughout our individual and shared cultural spaces,” said Melinda Russial, director of arts and culture and the international baccalaureate music program at UWC-USA.

The performance production and exhibition will be entirely student created and directed, and reflect works from across disciplines of music, dance, theater, film, poetry. and visual art, Russial said.

The format replaces the cultural show tradition of featuring three regions of the world during one academic year and three more the following year. This gave every student the chance to participate in at least one show.

With the new format, students also will have the opportunity to learn about and celebrate cultural practices from their individual regions through the new Community Cultural Event series, Russial said.

“We have recently celebrated Diwali with rangoli, cricket games, Bollywood dance lessons and Guy Fawkes Night. Other highlights will include a Lunar New Year Celebration, Nawruz Celebration, Eurovision Contest, Quinceañera, Coronation of Kings and Queens of Africa, and Black History Living Museum.

A second Cultural Show case will be held in the spring featuring the theme of memory.

 

 

The 2019 CROP Hunger Walk for Las Vegas, N.M., raised $10,139, surpassing its $10,000 goal.

Held on Oct. 26 on the Montezuma campus, the event included 210 participants who collected pledges to complete either a 1- or 3-mile walk, Swinton said.

In related matters, UWC-USA students held a mock Oxfam Hunger Banquet a few days before the CROP Walk, which gave them a hands-on lesson on how one’s income translates into how well one eats.

During the banquet, students and employees were assigned to a different social background to participate in a simulation of global hunger inequality. Everyone was randomly chosen to have a lunch that might be typical for low-, middle- and high-income earners.

Of the estimated 260 participants, 70 percent were in the low-income group, 20 percent in the middle-income and 10 percent in the resource-rich group

“We tried to imitate the real-world class-distribution as much as possible with our limited resources,” said one of the event’s organizers, Vicky Wang ’20, USA-Fla.

The resource-poor had beans and rice. The resource-medium had chicken, broccoli, rice, and brownies. The resource-rich had salads, beef, fruits, and a much wider variety of choices. Each group had something to drink, but simply a wider variety was given to resource-rich.

Oxfam is a global organization working to end the injustice of poverty and help people build better futures, hold the powerful accountable, and save lives in disasters. Started in 1974, the Oxfam Hunger Banquet gives everyone the opportunity to make a difference, both locally and globally. The banquets are volunteer-led interactive events that bring statistics about poverty to life.

Applicants for Davis Scholarships to attend UWC-USA or one of of the 17 other UWCs, must complete their applications by October 31.

Check out the UWC website for more information about the UWCs around the world or the admissions section of the UWC-USA website for more information about Davis Scholarships.

Questions about the application process can also be directed to the Admissions Office at admission@uwc-usa.org.

“After three summers at Concordia Language Villages,” says Mads Benishek, “I approached my United World College experience with more of an open mind than I would have otherwise. I came to UWC very open to what it could be; I was prepared for the challenges of a roommate, a new place, a new community, and the kind of intensive learning that happens in an immersion environment.”

Concordia Language Villages and the United World College were established in 1961 and 1962, respectively. Both thrived in part because of an acute sense that youth were the answer to the difficult questions that the Cold War posed. At Concordia Language Villages (CLV), young people are immersed in a language and cultural summer camp where learning a language is the means to achieve intercultural understanding. The United World Colleges are two-year residential high schools on five continents where students develop the skills of peacemaking as they learn and work together.

Both focus on building the capacity for youth to see the world differently while forming powerful relationships with others during an intensive, immersive international experience.

Both programs have strong program and mission similarities and, not surprisingly, there are a number of CLVers who became UWCers. Asked to reflect on their experiences, two villagers who later received Davis Scholarships to attend their last two years of high school at a UWC, shared the ways that the programs complement each other.

Leo Penny, a senior at Brown University double-majoring in biology and geology-chemistry, feels that his three summers at Sen Lin Hu, the Chinese Language Village, prepared him for UWC Waterford Kamhlaba, one of the two UWCs on the African continent.

“I was definitely pushed to learn an impressive amount in both programs,” Leo said. “At CLV, we were encouraged to be curious about the target language and culture; I dove into both and was rewarded for it. UWC also celebrated the same kinds of curiosity but the focus on the International Baccalaureate and the academic program was the most challenging and rewarding.”

Mads Benishek, an alumnus of Lac du Bois, the French Language Village, attended the UWC in Flekke, Norway graduating in 2009. He also returned to CLV as a staff member after his two years in Norway. “CLV prepared me for a UWC experience by teaching me to expect surprises and helping me become more comfortable not understanding everything all the time,” Mads said. “CLV helped me learn to be curious about things that are different, like food or customs or habits.”

The parents of both Davis Scholars saw changes in Mads and Leo as they progressed from CLV to UWC. “While we had no idea about UWC at the time, we think that our family’s CLV experience was actually a kind of test run for what would become our UWC experience a few years later,” said Gretchen Penny, Leo’s mother. “For Leo, CLV was a way to experience a different life and culture, if only for a couple of weeks in the summer. As his parents, we found that CLV tested our comfort and confidence in Leo’s ability to be successful without our constant attention and support. This turned out to be important when it came time to send Leo across the ocean to a distant UWC campus.”

Mads’ mother, M.E. Emma DeJonge, speaks to the confidence Mads gained in both programs. “Mads always had a strong sense of self and came back from French camp with even greater confidence. He returned from two years at the UWC in Norway with a depth and clarity about his identity and values that struck me as being incredibly rare in an 18-year-old. Mads returned with an internal sense of ‘this is who I am, these are my values, and this is how I am going to walk in the world’ that was vividly clear, amazingly strong, yet as quiet as a whisper to those around him.”

The 18 UWCs around the world and all CLV programs in 15 languages rely on a foundation of strong community to deliver the programs. At CLV, when a community is stronger and more supportive, villagers of all ages are more willing to muster the courage to speak a new language. For students attending a UWC, they find that they must learn to trust one another to work together in classrooms and during community service and activities. The focus for both is on how these community-building skills and experiences will help alumni forge coalitions and alliances to tackle the challenges our world currently faces.

The UWC and CLV missions seek to give youth the skills to build effective communities across political, cultural, linguistic, and social divides to work toward a more peaceful and sustainable world. Gretchen Penny summarized the benefits of the programs working in tandem with each other: “Both of these experiences gave Leo the confidence to seek out new opportunities, regardless of – or maybe because of – geographic or cultural differences.”

Concordia Language Villages offers language immersion programs in 15 languages for youth 7 – 18. U.S. high school students are eligible for Davis Scholarships to attend the last two years of secondary school at one of 18 UWCs around the world.