The smell of freshly made home cooked food, the sweet sound of family members arguing over politics and day to day life, football playing in the background as all chaos ensues in the household. This is the Thanksgiving most of us have come to know and love year in and year out, with every one having a slightly different spin and tradition than other families. But for some students at Texas A&M University Texarkana (TAMUT), the convenience of a trip home isn’t always so easy or practical.
Most international students see themselves spending their thanksgivings in the Bringle Lake Village dorms on campus. Either distance, cost, or both are the cause for them not departing for their families back home. Diego Saldana, an international student from Coahuila, Mexico is one of the many that stayed over the break.
“The Situation I had with the food was that I had to go and buy what I needed for 3 days.” commented Saldana. To some of us, this would be a major inconvenience on a holiday where you show up expecting everything to be already laid out and ready to eat, but not for Diego. “I liked the experience, because I had to cook things for myself, and I could eat what I wanted, but it does get a bit complicated because there is only one kitchen in the dorms, and many residents wanted to cook at the same time,” said Saldana.
Thanksgiving, as the name suggests, is a time to give thanks and for families to gather and catch up with one another in their day to day lives. With the mass exodus of students with a reasonable drive from the dorms, this leaves the international students having to pool themselves together and create as much of a “family” atmosphere as they can. Saldana says “In the daily living it is very different than when all the students are here. The university is empty and there are very few people.” He did say that he and a few of the other students did in fact get together however, “I was lucky that several of my friends stayed and I was able to hang out with more people. If I had been alone, I would have had a bad time since there is nothing to do.”
The experience is not a bad one as described by Saldana, it is just different compared to what we know as a ‘normal’ Thanksgiving. At the end of the day though, the important thing is that even though you throw together a bunch of international students, from several different countries, ethnicities and beliefs, they still find ways to come together and give thanks, the same way you would with your family at the dinner table.