CULTURAL CHANGE - FlipSeek, Inc

AN INTERNATIONAL
EXPERIENCE Michelle Lund
’07 (middle) of Bethel Park,
Pa., and Samantha Fuller ’07
(right) of Belpre, Ohio, enjoy a
camel ride during their trip to
Egypt, Greece and Italy this
summer.
students and also organizes an extensive Peer Partnership
Program in which international students are matched oneon-one
with American students. Each year, the campus
hosts, among other events, a Lunar New Year Celebration,
an International Dinner and an International Photography
Contest for both American and international students.
Kendrioski is among the campus’s major proponents
for an International House, which would allow continual
interaction between American and International
students. And, it could provide ongoing international
programming for the entire campus. “It would be a very
obvious sign to the campus and to the community regarding
internationalization,” says Kendrioski. “I think it
would be the perfect learning community.”
With all of the tools now in place for cultural visits and
exchanges, discussions will begin this fall among MC
faculty and administrators regarding the next step for
the campus’s internationalization. “When the Marietta
College student leaves this campus, what do we want them
to know?” asks Rees-Miller. “What do we want them to
do? How do we want them looking at the world?”
She’s hesitates before answering. “I want Marietta
College students to have an understanding and appreciation
of different behaviors and belief systems that arise
from different cultures,” she says. “The only way to understand
what is going on in the world…is to understand
other cultures.”
PHOTOS COURTESY OF MICHELLE LUND
Wei Tan ’04 easily recalls his first semester as
an international student on Marietta’s campus.
“The first week after I arrived was Sept. 11,”
he remembers. “From that point I have started
learning about human life. What challenges come against
us in the road, we should stand up to pave the road to
the future.”
Certainly, Tan understands challenges. Today, just two
years after graduating from Marietta, he is an international
program manager for the William J. Clinton Presidential
Foundation’s China office dealing with AIDS and HIV.
Tan’s Marietta experiences led him to complete a semester
at American University in Washington, D.C., and then to work
with the U.S. Foreign Policy Program. Once he graduated
from Marietta, and after a few more months in Washington,
he decided to return to China. A friend recruited him to the
Clinton Foundation position that he has held since April 2005.
“The foundation does public health work in 45 developing
countries in the world,” he explains.
His job is to assist the Chinese government and the
Chinese Center for Disease Control in strengthening HIV/
AIDS care, treatment and testing programs. China has an
estimated 650,000 residents who were infected with AIDS
in the early 1990s due to blood mismanagement, explains
Tan. In addition, there is a major concern about secondgeneration
transmission as some of those HIV-infected
women are in child-bearing stages. “We’re trying to help
the government develop early diagnosis methods for the
babies and integrated family care for the moms,” says Tan.
Also, he focuses partly on the drug-using population
helping to educate them that sharing, although culturally
encouraged as a good thing, is a bad idea when needles
are involved.
Incidentally, when the former President Clinton visited the
Hunan province last September, it was Tan who served as
his interpreter for two days. “It was a great experience, but
of course I didn’t get to sleep too much,” he says. “It was
a lot of talking to do.” Clinton visited, partly, to unveil, with
China’s top health administrator, a program that will bring
Chinese doctors to America so that they can be trained in
the treatment of AIDS.
Hearing success stories such as Tan’s is heartening to
Marietta Professor Dr. Xiaoxiong Yi who has spent nearly
his entire tenure at the College, after arriving in 1989, connecting
the two cultures. “Wei Tan is a great example of our
Chinese student program,” says Yi. “Many of our Chinese
students are now working in mainland China and have
become quite successful.”
In upcoming generations, College officials expect Marietta
graduates to be among the top Chinese government leaders.
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