Stanislav Presolski '05, from Bulgaria, recalls an epiphany during an English composition taught by Lee Family Professor of English Cedric Gael Bryant. Presolski remembers working on essays for the class on several nights from 8 p.m. until 8 a.m. "I wrote one essay about the gypsies in Bulgaria," he recalled. "It's a hidden conflict, almost like racism. Back home, when I was reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, I would say, 'Wow, see how Americans are so cruel in their treatment of black people.' But I had never questioned myself or considered that I had the same kind of bad opinion of the gypsies."

The value of such cross-cultural exchange runs in both directions, of course. Ana Prokic '04, of Yugoslavia, arrived at Colby in the fall of 2000. Within a few months, U.S.-led NATO troops were bombing Belgrade. "I was watching the live broadcast and they said on television that the military hospital where my mom works had been destroyed," Prokic said. It took her six hours to get through on the telephone to find out it wasn't the hospital that had been hit.

Several American students whom Prokic didn't know well at the time were supportive through the difficult weeks that followed, and she says she won't forget their kindness. Her classmates' response to her personal crisis in turn informed her own reaction when she returned home for vacation last December, after the September 11 attacks.

Prokic said, "People blame the U.S. for the bombing in my country, and so they celebrated the attacks. I said, 'Can you hear yourself? Listen, it's not Bill Clinton, it's not the pilots who bombed our country that died, it's two or three thousand innocent people.' Watching the bombing of my country was really really hard. But I was also here for the September 11 attacks, and when that happened I felt the same exact pain that I'd felt when I saw buildings crash back home."

International students at Colby say they've found themselves in a startling position during the past year. Several likened their new challenge to a navigation between the world at home and the world of classmates and professors in the United States.

I've become a kind of interpreter between the American perspective and Polish perspective--an interpreter in both directions," said Pawel Brodalka '05 of Poland. Brodalka is on the track team and rooms with an "outspoken conservative" from New Jersey. "He's an intelligent fellow," Brodalka said. "He's got his strong views, but he's not close-minded, and he's willing to listen to my views too."

Since the terrorist attacks a year ago, "To my roommate and for the guys on the track team, I found myself to a certain extent able to explain why America is sometimes viewed as isolationist and unilateralist in its actions," Brodalka said. "And to my friends and family in Poland, I was able to explain just how frightened people are because those planes crashed into the World Trade Center. I told them the [U.S.] is no monolith, and that it's not as if everybody is against the Muslims now," he said. "I told them that people are smart, and that they understand that you should not generalize and play into stereotypes."

Brodalka also finds his own attitudes shifting as a result of the frank exchanges in the classroom, during workouts, at meal times and in the dorms. "Most of my life I found myself strongly pro-Palestinian," he said, offering an example. "Now when I listen to my conservative roommate and other American friends I find my perceptions shaken. I hope they find their perceptions shaken, too, in listening to me."