Letter
By Lidia Karavaeva
Moving to another country is scary. Moving to another country, where you know nobody, is even scarier. But when you’re a fulbrighter, you know that you’re not alone. On the very first day during the orientation for new students, I met another fulbrighter, who became a good friend of mine. And it happened just because he heard that I was a fulbrighter too and came to talk to me.
When I came to Fayetteville, I had contacts of the President of Fulbright Scholars at the University of Arkansas, which was very helpful. First of all, before coming here, I didn’t know that there was such an organization at the university. Manuel provided me with the most necessary information for the first days here, for example, what I should do first or where to buy the essentials for the apartment. Secondly, we have meetings with other fulbrighters every two weeks. At the first meeting we met each other, talked about our programs here and what we like doing. But meetings are not the only things that we do now together.
The first activity that we did as a group was volunteering at Devil’s Dean Park. We went there on a Saturday morning, quite early, but the trip there was fun. Not being used to hot weather, I was afraid that it would be too hot and I would die there, but everything was fine. When we came they gave us extremely nice large T-shirts, plastic bags, gloves, as well as instructions and directions where to go and what to do. The first time in an American park made a good impression on me. We were desperately looking for the trash, but could hardly find anything. Isn’t that great? That means that people here care about nature or at least just respect the rules of behavior in the national park.
Nevertheless, we did find something very interesting. Obviously, somebody cares not only about the nature, but also about other travelers, because they left two mattresses right in the middle of the forest close to a narrow path that we took to go away from the main road. I wonder who would like to sleep on them though. Anyway, I’d say that we were glad to make such a discovery.
That was the first activity, but hopefully not the last one. To my mind, doing something like that lets us not only help the community, part of which we all are now, but also get to know each other better. As they say, if you want to know who your friend is, do something together. And when you know your friends, you’re not scared at all anymore, even if you’re hundreds, thousands miles away from your home.