Sophomore Ruth Kinsey

“I don’t drink coffee, I take tea, my dear,
I like my toast done on one side,
And you can hear it in my accent when I talk
I’m an Englishman in New York.”

With Nashville substituted for New York, this song by Sting has become my theme since arriving at Vanderbilt in 2007. I find myself humming the melody as I walk across campus to class, and when I contemplate the lyrics, I realize that Sting was right. Even though I speak the language, I sometimes stick out as a foreigner. From food choices to clothing to the sound of my voice, I really am an alien. A welcomed and legal alien, but an alien all the same: an Englishman in Nashville.

The first time I stepped foot in Tennessee was August 2007, a week before classes started. I arrived at Nashville International Airport armed with two suitcases and a backpack, appliances pre-ordered online from Target and Bed, Bath and Beyond, and an interest in American political science. Many people say I should have visited the school I was going to attend in advance, but there hadn’t been time. My weeklong U.S. college tour the previous summer had focused on Northeastern schools—those best known in England. Yet conversations with my best friend’s mother, a Vanderbilt alumna living in the U.K., piqued my interest. However reckless it seemed, I was secretly glad that I hadn’t visited my future home: It appealed to my impulsive side and added to the adventure. 

However as I got out of the plane, felt the 110 degree Fahrenheit (43 degree Celsius) heat, and heard the voice of Dolly Parton welcoming me, the realization hit. I was definitely not in England anymore. Even though I was excited, I began to feel a little nervous. 

I had been warned of the differences between America and England, but the variations most Englishmen see when they go on vacation are the obvious ones. “Don’t forget they drive on the other side of the road,” they said. “Remember they spell words differently.” These are differences one can learn from watching any Hollywood movie. 

Once here, I noticed the less obvious, perhaps things that are more Southern, things most Americans don’t think about being different. I found a sweet potato is a dessert as well as a vegetable, that country is a well-liked form of music, strangers say hi on the street, and it costs money to both make and receive phone calls. Even though I had been to America before, in the South I felt naïve, like a newborn baby. Gone were the things of home: the narrow country lanes, the Marmite, the silence on the Tube, and of course, the rain. 

Ruth and best friend Frances White (now also a Vanderbilt student) commemorate the end of seven years at England’s Wycombe Abbey.

Not only did I have to modify my everyday life, but I also had to adjust to a completely different school system. My education back in England had been at an all-girls boarding school called Wycombe Abbey. It was everything Americans imagine a typical English boarding school to be. In many ways, it was like Hogwarts. Instead of magic spells and wands, we had calculus and pencils, and instead of Quidditch, we had lacrosse, but it was still rather similar. On campus was a forest we couldn’t enter, our main school building was a castle, and our uniform included striped shirts, ties, kilts and long cloaks. 

As classes began, I began to notice that although some differences didn’t matter—no uniforms and men and women attending classes together—there were others that did. Phrases and writing techniques my classmates understood were foreign to me. In my first-year writing seminar, one early homework assignment was to identify the thesis of an article. I remember looking bewilderedly at the professor and my classmates as they nodded and wrote the assignment in their diaries. A thesis? Wasn’t that the article itself? Later I embarrassedly asked the professor what exactly a thesis was. I discovered it to be a statement of argument, not a 20-50 page paper, as it is in England. 

I continued to learn the ways of an American university. I quickly learnt that instead of the final grade of a class resting on one exam, assignments throughout the semester also contributed. I attempted new things, joined new organizations, and considered classes that I didn’t necessarily think I would enjoy. With the help of multiple cups of tea, bars of Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate and new friends who laughed with me, I slowly but surely muddled through my first semester in the College of Arts and Science, aka American College Life 101. 

When I went home for Christmas, excited to see my family and England again, another realization hit. After having lived in America for only three and a half months, I looked at my country through a completely different lens. England actually looked downsized compared to America. As I looked out the car window at the cottages and village greens passing by, the word that came to mind was “quaint.” 

As soon as I thought it, I wanted to kick myself. Quaint? Who, apart from American tourists, uses that word to describe England? English people definitely do not. This time, I saw what they were talking about. It wasn’t an insult—England is just on a smaller scale. 

Attending the College of Arts and Science has opened my eyes to the world and has made me versatile. More than a year later, instead of a tea-drinking, Cadbury Dairy Milk-chocolate-eating English schoolgirl, I am a student who listens to country music whilst reading the BBC News Web site. I am a girl who uses American colloquialisms whilst walking across campus in her wellies. I have both U.S. dollars and pounds sterling in my wallet. While I still find American politics interesting, I have found my true passion: history. Not only the history of a different country, but relooking at the history I already know from a different perspective. So now, perhaps, instead of being an Englishman in Nashville feeling slightly out of place, I combine two cultures, am able to fit in, and have wonderful friends in both places. I am an American college student with an English heritage. 

Sophomore Ruth Kinsey is a double major in German and history. She hopes to eventually work as a journalist. 

photo credits: Dee Fontenot

No place is so synonymous with the written word and the community surrounding it as New York. And why wouldn’t it be? NYC is “the capital of the world” and an undisputed creative hub, and writing is what brings other worlds, or different ways of looking at this one, into the public domain. New York is the ultimate public domain—an often overwhelming convergence of culture and cultures, everyone swimming around its concrete sea in trains sliding underground like eels, multitudes of pedestrians like darting schools of brightly colored fish. 

As an aspiring writer and a devoted linguaphile, I knew that I had to go there. I’d always loved writing. As a creative writing major at Vanderbilt, I thrived on the energy of our writing community and constant conversation about poetry and poets. New York was where so many of the writers we admired had explored their art in this same way. I felt the tug every time I read the poetry of Frank O’Hara or any of the countless versifiers who breathed the magic of New York into their work. Whitman, in typically effusive fashion, exclaims his love: “Proud and passionate city! mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!”—and all I could do was turn my gaze northward and decide that this California native wanted to be a part of the madness. 

A New York summer 
Wears sunglasses that fog up
From its bazaar breath.

At the farmer’s market, crowds
Select greens for small kitchens.

Each of you is part 
Of the soil of this city
Which doesn’t hold roots.

Between my sophomore and junior year in the College of Arts and Science, I wrote to Alice Quinn, then-poetry editor at The New Yorker, where she had sifted through poems for as many years as I’d been alive. I admired her literary career and expressed interest in the path she took to get there. I then had the chance to meet her during fall break my junior year, which led to the opportunity to work as a summer intern at the Poetry Society of America (PSA), of which she was executive director. With vague directions from the PSA’s managing director to “let us know when you’re in town,” I moved into the New York University dorms on Union Square at the end of May, armed with two suitcases, a few books, and an endless supply of curiosity.

I live on the corner of a college street,
And the park keeps dancing, no matter the hour,
As the coffee shops and the flip-flopped feet
Get their second wind like electric power.

Surrounded by a World of Words

Then I ended up with three internships. 

It was as sudden as that. In addition to interning at PSA for the months of June and July, I worked at The Hudson Review as editorial intern and at the Guggenheim Foundation as Director Edward Hirsch’s project assistant. 

During the school year I had been in touch with Paula Deitz, editor of The Hudson Review, through my adviser for Vanderbilt’s creative writing program, poet Mark Jarman. Paula invited me to visit her office once I was in the city. I left the office with a job. A week later, when I was at a poetry reading featuring Ed Hirsch, a conversation with him became a month of research for his new book. I was working 9 to 5 and then some. So I managed one of the most challenging balancing acts of my life, because loving New York City is also a full-time job.

Surrendered to the City Beat

While I lived in New York, I took it upon myself to be a constant explorer, like some sort of urban, contemporary Christopher Columbus. In fact, like Columbus, I often thought I had found parts of New York that were already part of the vibrant network of the city. I once made a local Manhattanite laugh hysterically by expressing my enthusiasm about Chelsea, which I declared would be the next great neighborhood. Apparently others know it’s there. But my adventures weren’t limited to what one would expect of a visitor to NYC, although I did attend two Broadway plays and two musicals, frequented museums from MoMA to the Met, picnicked in Central Park, and rode the subway at least twice a day.

I once saw a man on the subway,
Who sat, fully nude, in a calm way,
Though the passengers glared,
He couldn’t have cared,
And, at the next stop, went on his way.

The memories that stick are unique: a visit to a slam at the Bowery Poetry Club, an experimental theatre production in a deserted public pool in Brooklyn, the two-hour adventure to find a slice of red velvet cake favored by a review in The New York Times. While others might remember Times Square, I remember the poetry reading held there. While others might savor a slice of New York pizza, I stood in two-hour lines at our local, legendary parlor Artichoke, which serves only artichoke pizza. Instead of going to the block-long Barnes and Noble on one side of Union Square, I became a regular at The Strand down the street, wandering its musty aisles with a cup of too-hot coffee from my friendly street vendor. 

The myth that New Yorkers are unfriendly 
Is a lie: New Yorkers are helpful, kind,
But they won’t invite you into their lives.
They’ll show you how to get where you’re going,
And wish you well on your parallel path.

photo credits: Marc Iserman

Written into the Poem of Life

My summer was about words, about poetry. At The Hudson Review, I found a family in the amazing editors under whose supervision I worked. I had the pleasure of reading dozens of past issues and categorizing the works within, a process through which I was introduced to wonderful poets, fiction writers, reviewers and critics. In my project for Ed Hirsch, I delved into the histories of limericks and ghazals, rengas and skeltonic verses, gathering materials for his follow-up glossary volume to How to Read a Poem. And at the Poetry Society of America, I saw how poetry could be brought to the people who wanted it, through events, contests and newsletters.

In my own little way, I brought poetry to the world. I scribbled verse, I observed, I shamelessly stole New York and wrote it into the poem of my life. I frequently sat my two roommates down—a Condé Nast intern and a Carolina Herrera-employed fashionista—and read them poems that moved me. I said, “Isn’t this beautiful?” 

I learned this summer what I want to do. I want to sit people down with a poem like I’m setting up a blind date. Poetry matters. I had three angles from which to view that one truth. Three lessons in what I love. Four if you count New York City.

When I left this city, I wrote a letter on the plane,
I love you—hate to leave you—but I’ll see you again.

Amsalem with the lama of a local monastery.

This painful, yet relevant question was posed over the phone by one of a group of Italian doctors who were running a hospital in a remote part of Tibet. I was reminded of volunteering in an HIV clinic in Kampala, Uganda, not a year earlier. Because I had no medical or counseling training, my contribution in Kampala was limited to hours of pill counting in the dispensary.

I countered the doctor with a bold proposition. He answered back, “Well, if you get your EMT certification, then we could really use you. Call us when you are certified, and we’ll be waiting for you at the hospital in Lithang.”

So I spent January–February 2007 obtaining my certification as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). I also added Wilderness EMT training to help me deal with emergencies in isolated settings with minimal equipment. 

Then, one week before I was scheduled to leave for Tibet, I received a devastating phone call. The hospital had been taken over by the Chinese government. The Tibetan staff had been kicked out, and no foreigners, including the Italian doctors who had funded and built the facility, were allowed.

There I was, newly certified with a leave of absence for the spring semester and no prospect of work. I began a frenzy of e-mails and phone calls to every contact I had, as well as to any nongovernmental organization (NGO) I could find in Tibet. Determinedly, I decided to travel to Beijing as planned; make my way to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet; and use my medical skills.

Amsalem’s class of 70 Tibetan kindergarteners.

By the time I arrived in China, I had leads, but nothing definite. After five gray and dismal days in Beijing, I managed to sneak onto a train going to Lhasa. I say, “sneak,” because I didn’t apply for or purchase the permit required by the Chinese government to travel to Tibet. I didn’t want to be screened out by the authorities as an undesirable visitor.

And so I arrived in Lhasa, the Forbidden City, the highest capital in the world. This strange, medieval town would be my home for several months.

On Top of the World

I spent three frustrating weeks trying to volunteer for every NGO in Lhasa, to no avail. The government crackdown left none willing to let me work with them. As I searched, I became familiar with the town, its customs, and its incredibly warm and generous people. Giving up my hopes to volunteer medically, I explored what the culture had to offer and what it needed from me in return. 

In my time in Lhasa, I taught English in three schools. My pupils ranged from 70 kindergarten students to 60 15–25 year-olds. Every afternoon I traveled outside of town to the famous Sera Monastery to study Tibetan language and Buddhism with Togme, a monk. I gave speeches and lectures to schools and youth organizations about first aid and emergency medicine. Thanks to the great work of the Hope Corner, a local youth program, I taught first aid to many of the tourist guides who drive Land Cruiser tours. Soon I could not walk half a block without running into people I knew or hearing a student yell, “Teacher, teacher!” from across the street. 

I spent many days simply walking the Kora (holy pilgrimage) clockwise around the Jokhang Temple, Tibet’s holiest. I sometimes played pool with young monks, wandered the area’s winding alleys, watched kung fu movies in small teahouses, drank yak butter milk tea, and wrote.

A boy leads a mule near the holy mountain of Kailash.

One of my most memorable experiences was camping in the snowy mountains with some new Argentinian and Israeli friends. Aside from a few yaks, we neither saw nor heard another living soul during our time there. Every morning we would select a peak in the distance, pack up dried yak meat and a bar of chocolate, and set out. Every night, we would heat some tea and watch the sunset from our 5,000-meter throne on top of the world.

Off to Katmandu

After three months, my visa was to expire. Still eager to get some medical experience, I decided to try Katmandu, Nepal, where regulations for foreign volunteers would be less strict. After I e-mailed a few leads, I was contacted by doctors at Patan Hospital. They were excited that I was an EMT and wanted to discuss a project. I hitchhiked to the border as quickly as I could. I managed to slip out of Tibet as unnoticed as I had slipped in by sticking with two English twin sisters who had all the necessary permits and forms.

After settling into my new lush, green and hot environment (I hadn’t seen a tree or shrub in three months), I met with the doctors.

Their still-theoretical project was to establish a central ambulance system for the Katmandu Valley, which had no emergency medical service. We would need to develop a free emergency number (like 911), create a dispatch and communication center,
get and equip ambulances, establish an EMT school, and convince people to use this system rather than take a taxi or bus or walk to the emergency room when they were in need of medical attention. Because I was trained to work on an ambulance in the United States, the doctors believed I was the most qualified person they had come across to handle the project. 

So I did. 

Pilgrims walk the circuit of prayer wheels surrounding the Jokhang Temple.

I planned, met with the directors of every hospital and emergency medical center in Katmandu, and inspected the existing makeshift ambulances (more like slow and expensive private taxi services). The few of us working on the project obtained a three digit number, convinced the Katmandu police to let us use their dispatch system and house our ambulances (the service now has three), and got the Nepalese army to make its retiring medics available as the first class of EMTs. 

Then I ran out of time. In August, I had to return to school.

The Return

The months I spent in Asia were the most incredible of my life. Not only did I see and do things I would have never imagined, but I gained life experiences that give me vivid and true insight into world issues. In classes for my major, medicine, health and society, I feel differently about most of the subjects we discuss because I’ve seen it firsthand. I have met people and experienced the topics we raise in public and global health courses, and this has motivated me more in the classroom. I’ve integrated all I learned traveling and working abroad into my studies at Vanderbilt. 

Today, I continue my work with my Nepali counterparts on what has become the National Ambulance Center–Nepal. I have also worked with several of my teachers on writing proposals and developing fundraising strategies for the National Ambulance Center. I registered our organization as a 501(c)(3), obtained training material for the EMTs, and have been fundraising until I return to Katmandu next summer. 

For I am returning. I have something to contribute. 

Senior David Amsalem is a medicine, health and society major from New York City. To add your own contribution to the National Ambulance Center—Nepal, visit www.hhnepal.org.

Photo by David Amsalem.