Written by Sarah Kyle and Blake Mathews
While most students are looking forward to going home for Mom’s Christmas dinner and family traditions, a significant part of Harding’s student body is from not miles away, but countries away.
The distances from their homes to Harding make weekend trips for free laundry, food and fellowship near impossible. For many, the distance makes it difficult for the students to see their family even over lengthy breaks like the Christmas holiday.
Take a step into their world, and learn a little more about what some of Harding’s international students do during Thanksgiving, Christmas and summer vacations.
Martha De La Torre, a junior international business major, is from Chiriqui, Panama. She has two siblings, a 20-year-old sister who is studying in Honduras and a 10-year-old brother.
For Thanksgiving break, De La Torre said she traditionally goes home with friends that live in the States.
“Thanksgiving is only a week, so it’s kind of difficult for me to just go for a week and spend that much on the ticket, which is pretty expensive,” De La Torre said.
De La Torre has spent her breaks with her roommate or family friends, and this Thanksgiving she headed to Florida with a friend.
“Her parents are from Ecuador, and my mom is from Ecuador too,” De La Torre said. “So I got to meet them, and we had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner.”
For Christmas break, De La Torre plans to return to Panama to spend time with her family and a German exchange student who spent time with De La Torre’s family during her freshman year at Harding.
“She’s going back to Panama to see my parents with her parents, so the house is going to be full,” De La Torre said. “They don’t speak Spanish, so it’s going to be interesting. They’ll be coming from Germany.”
The family plans to just have a family reunion and Christmas dinner during the holiday. De La Torre’s favorite Christmas tradition is cooking.
“The food we prepare for Christmas, it takes a lot of time to be done,” De La Torre said. “So we usually spend like a whole day cooking together as a family. Everyone does something. Everyone has a task.”
For De La Torre, the hardest thing about being an international student at Harding is the sense of loneliness and forced independence.
“When you’re at home, your mom or family is the one who takes care of you,” De La Torre said. “Whenever you are here as an international student, if you don’t have house parents, it’s kind of difficult. When I came here from the summer, I got really sick, and that week was awful.”
De La Torre usually spends her summer vacation at home in Panama.
“For the summer I have to go home,” De La Torre said. “I always go home for summer.”
Chuma Ikeora, a junior from Enugu, Nigeria, has been at Harding for three years. Ikeora is a biochemistry and molecular biology major with plans to attend medical school and possibly conduct research.
Ikeora’s family consists of his parents, three brothers and one sister. While he has been able to visit his home in Nigeria a couple of times since attending Harding, he lives in the States with family friends during his education. His older brother lives in North Carolina with some of the family’s friends, where Ikeora will be spending Christmas after a brief stay in St. Louis at the beginning of break.
Ikeora also spent Thanksgiving break in St. Louis with family friends, a place he said he “likes a lot.”
Ikeora said his family has been able to visit him at Harding multiple times, and that his sister will be joining him in North Carolina for Christmas.
The biggest challenge of being so far away, Ikeora said, is missing his family. However, he said he doesn’t miss very many family traditions because he comes from a Western family with traditions similar to those in the States.
Ikeora’s favorite Christmas memory is from the year 2000, when he spent Christmas with all 20 of his cousins.
“We all met at my granddad’s house— my cousins from London and from all over Nigeria came, so it was really neat,” Ikeora said. “We had gifts from everyone, so it was really nice.”
This summer, Ikeora plans to work at an internship related to his major. After graduating, he hopes to possibly attend Washington University for medical school.
Yongxi “Daisy” Peng is an international business major who is just about to finish her first semester in Harding’s MBA graduate program. Originally from China’s Hunan province, Peng’s family currently lives in Guangzhou, though she has a family friend she refers to as “Auntie” living in Philadelphia.
Peng will spend Christmas with her “Auntie,” who has not seen Peng since she was three years old, touring major cities on the east coast. She said she eventually wants to visit the west coast, but in the four months she has been in the U.S. Peng has only ever seen Searcy. She did not even get to leave for Thanksgiving break because her international business course met during the week.
“It’s not a problem because if we have to have the class, the teacher has to stay here, too,” she said.
When she graduates from Harding, Peng said she might bring her family over from China to see her, but she will not be going home for Christmas. Instead, she will join other Chinese students when they fly back home in February for China’s Spring Festival.
“It’s a festival where friends and family get together and they watch television and have a feast, and then they talk … a lot like Christmas, but there’s no Santa,” Peng said.
Christmas is still celebrated in China, but Peng said it is treated as a curiously Western holiday and generally not considered to be that big of a deal. If it were left up to her, she said, she would spend Christmas here and head to China for Spring Festival.
“Then I can have both,” Peng said.
