< Back Selena's Story Selena speaks with Jonathan about what it’s like to be living with a family whose views are very different from your own during a global pandemic. 00:00 / 03:29 Previous Next

< Back Talia's Story Talia talks to Charlie about her experience of studying abroad in Florence, Italy. She speaks about how she chose Florence as her host city. She tells us how studying abroad in Florence changed her and furthered her desire to travel the world. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 02:22 What makes you want to travel? Well, I have spent, I spent that last 6 months abroad and so that was really amazing. I got to go through school. I lived in Florence. And that was one of the the best experiences of my life I think and because of that I feel like I learned a lot about different cultures and I was able to learn a lot about myself as well and I reallized that the environment that I am living in and the people I am surrounded by really can make my life better and I think that a lot of people would feel the same way and so I think that traveling is something that will always be important to me in those aspects. What took you to Italy? So I originally was thinking of going to Greece and so I wanted to go somewhere that was warm, somewhere with beaches. I thought that would be amazing then I realized that I have my ancestry is all from Italy and so I thought that it would be really interesting to learn more about where I came from and the culture that I’m from and so that was really important to me. That was part of my decision. I also have heard of how beautiful Italy is and Florence that was and I knew that it was a smaller city it was something that could feel more homey than other cities I think. I think that was something I was looking for especially if I was going to be living there for an extended amount of time. I wanted somewhere that I felt comfortable with I also had my two roommates going with me and we all kind of decided that the food would be the best in Italy and that was something that we really wanted yeah just a bunch of different things led me to go there Previous Next

< Back Rene's Story Rene explains how she feels being the eldest sister of her siblings. She talks through how an experience with her brother brought their relationship together. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 03:59 So my first question is what was your role as the eldest self out eldest sister? Well, I'm the oldest of four. And let's see, I have a sister who's two and a half younger, two and a half years, three years younger than I am. And then another. I had a brother and a sister seven years younger than I am. So we were the girls and twins. That's what we refer to as we were growing up. It was wonderful. It's really a position of privilege. And it's also burden. It was also burdensome. I was a lot was expected of me in terms of helping my mom take care of the other three, she was a woman who was viewed as sickly, and I was capable, and I was smart. And I was willing, because I just wanted those parents to walk me into an audit to get me what I wanted to care those kids in January of 2019, my brother, her twin died, my brother died, he had cancer. And for the last three months of his life, the three sisters we're very close family, almost too close. Sometimes we were almost too close sometimes. My three sisters and I went to Florida and took care of him in his in his medical needs were complicated. And three of us just took on what we were best at. My sister Joanne, the youngest one, his twin is good at organizing shows, she would organize things. And everything was very organized. The medications were organized, our schedules were organized. My sister Marina who loves loves, loves animals. She's such a tender hearted woman. Well, my brother had 180 pound English master. And the dog ate only raw food because my brother was very fussy about what his dogs eat. And Marina, we prepare my sister is two and a half years younger, she would really take care of moose ducks name was moose. And she would feed him and make sure he was water bowls. I mean, Moose was a lot of work. It was like having another child and did things that were more around the emotional caretaking of my brother and made sure that every time he left his bed and came out into the main area, and he had this television screen, which was like, like a sports bar television screen, it was huge. And he would come and sit on the couch and blare it out. And I made sure that every time he came out and sat down, loose was on one side of him in a sister, any one of us, no matter what was going on, one of us had to be sitting next to him, like holding his hand or leaning up against what I leaned up against him. I really wanted him to feel and know our presence and our love was very, very moving. It was such a gift to be with him at the end such a gift and in many ways it both is in a funny way it bonded us the three sisters. It bonded us in a way nothing else could have done. And it also gave us some freedom from each other because I grew up in this enmeshed family, family that just to leave the family was felt like sometimes an act of betrayal to go to college felt for me like an act of betrayal. Somehow after Mark step, having had this very intense experience. We found our freedom to be more of who we were, as individuals. Previous Next

< Back Terry's Story 00:00 / 03:54 My name is Terry Zuckerman, and I live in Northampton now. And I'm retired. I'm old older. And, I'm enjoying this so much. It's good for my brain, and it's nice to meet Imani and everyone. So, I'm liking it. But it's a little hard to condense a story into, like, three or four minutes, but I worked on it a bit. So here we go. So, my story is about taking off. It's 1999, closing in on a new century. I had been working in IT for over thirty years and married for even longer. Our sweet daughter, Jessica, was grown 25 and on her own. Immediately after she was born in 1974, my husband, Jeff, ran out to buy our first sailboat. For just years, just about every weekend and summer vacation, and whenever we could, we spent time on the boat. I loved sailing, the exploring, the sunsets, the water, and it was great. Meanwhile, we were often talking and thinking about doing some real cruising, some learn long term cruising, and it was time to take the plunge. So now I committed to a major lifestyle change. There was much to prepare mentally and physically. We needed to sharpen our skills such as navigation, reading the weather, the first aid, boat repairs, radio communications, the cell phone, we're not quite there yet, and hooking up with the queues cruising community. We already owned a 42 foot center cockpit sailboat. It sounds big, but it's small. A major downsize was required. We cleaned out and whittled down our possessions and sold our house in Port Washington, New York, put some of our things in storage, got rid of our car, and moved aboard. It sounds easy, but it was hard. Every week, I felt lighter and lighter. For five years, we lived twenty four seven on Ariel, our Moody four nineteen. We sailed down the coast from New York and onto Florida. Then we crossed the Gulf Stream to The Bahamas when we hit basically our only major storm, so that was a challenge. But we kept going. From there, over time, we made our way south and east, beating into the wind and onward to the Caribbean. We went as far south as Tobago, totally immersed in different cultures, customs, and food. I'm glad to be telling this story, not just for you, but for me too, to remind me of all I learned from my cruising years. The importance of slowing down, the importance of downsizing and making do with less, how it both simplified and expanded my left life, realizing the everyday things that matter, things you might take for granted on land like getting water, electricity, finding and getting to a market, doing laundry, etcetera. The satisfaction of facing new challenges, crossing the stream, beating across the Mona Passage to Puerto Rico, etcetera, and thinking out of the box, looking at cultures and people in new ways. We relied on other cruisers from all over, sharing common challenges. We met an amazing array of fellow cruisers and forged many friendships we have to this day as well. Towards the end of our adventure, I wrote this entry in our logbook. In a tiny space on a vast ocean, cooperating and participating and still talking to each other, a true test of our bond and a great adventure. Our space is small, but our life is big. Previous Next

< Back Laura's Story In this story, Laura reflects on her connection to modern dance and how it has followed her throughout her life. 00:00 / 05:28 Laura: I believe I was four and my mother in a creative movement class that was in the basement of this teacher’s home. She was just magical to me. She—her name was Roslyn Fidel. I have very vivid memories of being in this class at age four and growing like a flower, leaping over rivers, and just the magic of being in the presence of this captivating figure—this dance teacher. So, it never stopped after that. We moved further out of Long Island, and my mother found another wonderful teacher of modern dance. In my—I guess maybe my junior year—I would start taking the Long Island railroad into the city to take classes at the 92nd Street Y. In my senior, I started dancing with one of these pioneers of modern dance, his name was Charles Weidman, and would be in these performances on Friday nights. And then I became a dance major at Ohio State but didn’t last because I actually became ill with anorexia and left school and then there were different steps to where ended up. I was in very bad shape and this dance teacher from my teen years called me, and she said that she had heard another of the students in that group was at the University of Wisconsin and she was studying something called dance therapy. And she thought I might be interested in. She had heard I was having a hard time. So, within a week, I was enrolled at NYU in their dance therapy program. And it was such a lifesaver for me because I had been—there was such conflict, such yearning to dance; and I was so depressed and unable to dance; I didn’t have the strength, and it felt so far away—as soon as I walked into that first class of dance therapy I realized—I discovered that I could bring dance back into my life in a way that would also help other people and be really meaningful and meet me where I was at a person and give me this future. Dance actually didn’t end up becoming my main career. Actually, I got a master’s degree in social work. I managed to through missing dance and feeling that social work was never the appropriate—the best—career for me, I was not one to sit in a chair. I managed to discover a way to continue to dance indirectly through the social work because I was working with elders and discovered there was woman who—Liz Lerman—who had an intergenerational dance company. I saw a picture of her dancing with these older dancers in this Swan Lake lineup, and I was just captivated. You know, I once wrote something about this question of growing older as a dance. When I—often times—and it used to happen maybe more, I would dream about dance. Actually, I just had a dream where I could do amazing things in my dream. I could fly into the stars. I would take off from the ground and sail and wouldn’t come down—things like that. So, I had written this—it was an article actually for a magazine about growing older as a dancer, and this hope that those images when I closed my eyes and dream, that I would still have that capacity to conjure those. That they would still come to me. Because I think the imaginable life—the dream life—is another life and maybe that would be something that would be a gift in my dying days. Previous Next

< Back Linda's Story 00:00 / 03:24 Previous Next

< Back Miriam's Story Miriam describes her experience studying the Hutterite community. She reflects on their sense of community and how it has been shown in her own life. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 05:21 When I graduated from college, which is just where you are, I was able to know about and to actually, in that summer afterwards, go to study the Hutterites. The Hutterites and live communally. But what it means to live communally is that you're not really looking at what a lot of psychology looks at, which is sort of an individual lifespan, or tradition or whatever, of self, self, self. But these are people who live in a rural area, in a farming in the Midwest or in Canada, who came from east from Europe, decades go. This is a an agrarian farm thing. And these people learned from childhood there were a few people who moved into these communities but they've had plenty of children an average of 10 to 12 children, per family. Yeah. And I was amazed by how the world can be so different if you're living in a situation where you don't have money. Nobody has things. No, you don't own a house. This there's a car. But that's because the man who was in charge of the the farming things, he has to go to town and buy some equipment that can't be made, but the shoemaker lived there, and the people who made their clothes lived there. And there was a use of health care that people thought it was necessary. Nobody lived in individual house, nobody had their own fancy kitchens, everybody ate, breakfast, lunch, dinner together. Everybody went to school, but not outside, of course, they had their own teachers, they had their own churches, and they had their own process. Everybody went to church. Everybody wore the shoes that were made there. And everybody saw themselves as very much like the others. There were, there was a family or a couple who belong to the community, and they left. And that was a terrible thing for that community. Wow. Nobody ever left these communities. Right. Right. 2:49 Do you think it helped them in a way to have this really, really intense sense of community? Or did it almost become like a, like a total lack of individualism? 3:01 That's a very difficult question. Right. Right. I think that is the basic question. 3:07 In the United States, there's been sort of this push for, like, sort of extreme individualism, and it's sort of like, you rely on yourself, you get your toes, and that's, that's kinda like, where the line is drawn. We lost a sense of community in a lot of places, I think. So I wonder how we can find that happy medium, sort of where it's like, you still like feel like your own person, and you have this autonomy, but to still feel grounded in your community, you know what I mean? 3:34 In fact, have a probably 30/40 years ago now, there were villages where older people were able to sort of join together and support each other. Because they were they really want to live in a nursing home. There's nothing about a nursing home that is desirable. And they've started it here five years ago, called Northampton neighbors, but it was for older people who and that's how come I happen to be sitting here with you. 4:10 Yes, yeah, exactly. 4:13 Could join together in some ways, but have the kind of autonomy and world of their very special interests, and biases and skills and so forth. And it has worked. Right? Right has worked amazingly well. So anybody could call and say, Ah, is it possible that somebody could get me to the doctor, you know, supposed to snow on Wednesday, and there'll be somebody who would volunteer to take the person. Previous Next

< Back Stefanie's Story Stefanie discusses how COVID-19 affected her college experience as a student athlete. As well as the impact that quarantine had on her social life as an incoming college student. 00:00 / 03:14 I think like as a person, I’ve grown a lot socially since I’ve been at college. I know COVID, when COVID happened and everybody was in quarantine it was like, I didn’t really see that many people. I only saw my family like my mom, my dad, and my sister and like occasionally my friends but like my parents were really stuck on no seeing anybody like during COVID. So I kind of like lost all my socialness, I guess, like all my abilities to be like social so I kind of had to relearn that when I came back here, or when I came to college. So I mean it was a struggle just getting into like this new world of like everything is so social. Especially, like in college, like everybody goes out and stuff like that, everybody goes to parties, and like everything is just super social with your friends. So, I just kind of had to learn how to change from COVID and not seeing anybody to seeing like hundreds of people a day like in my classes and stuff like that. So like last year, I was a freshman and well I graduated high school early, I came to college early. But it was still COVID and so we had all of our classes online, everybody was on Zoom so you weren’t really able to make friends and really my only friends were on my team. So then last year, it was the like first time that like everybody had been back into full classrooms and stuff like that and everybody is just trying to get into the flow of it again everybody’s like relearning everything that they lost like during COVID. And last year was especially difficult for me because I was trying to like extend and make like friends off the team and stuff like that and create like connections off of like my team or outside of my comfort zone but it was just super hard because it was everybody is so used to who they already talk to. But I think this year especially, I moved in with some people on the soccer team, so I’ve been able to like branch out and make connections with like them obviously. Just my social circle is just way bigger than it was last year and that’s something that I really struggled with last year. But this year it’s definitely a lot better and like I said before, it’s something that I work for, instead of, I was trying to let it come to me but it really wasn’t and it was hard because it was like when everybody gets in classes with like 200, like 400 people especially at UMass like when we have classes that big like nobody's really gonna talk, everybody is going to keep to themself. So like it was kind of like I had to teach myself how to go outside my comfort zone especially like I definitely had to go outside my comfort zone deciding to live with three girls I had never met before. I mean I was friends with one of their teammates and I have never meet the three girls that I live with before. It was definitely outside of my comfort zone. I was definitely scared just like what would happen. But, I’m definitely glad that I took the decision because now I’m just so happy with where I’m at socially so I’m definitely glad that I went outside my comfort zone, and I took that risk. I think like college and like being this age has also taught me how to reach out and make friends it’s not like everything is going to come to you and everything is going to find you, it’s like you need to go find like what you want. Previous Next

< Back Amy's Story Amy shares about moving from NYC to Philadelphia as a young girl. During this time, she learned some of the hard lessons about hatred and what it means to stand out. She also learned that some of her closets friends are the ones who have the most differences between them. 00:00 / 03:46 Previous Next

< Back Sarah's Story 00:00 / 04:34 Previous Next

< Back Sean's Story Sean talks to his match about the differences between them and their values caused by the differences in their cultures and generations. He also discusses the impact of American values and how media and modern technology play a role in individualism. 00:00 / 03:24 I don't think the biggest difference between us, if I'm being honest, is our age. I think our difference is a lot of our upbringing. Which we talked a lot about the difference in how in Russia there is no concept of privacy, but to me privacy is one of my most fundamental things, one of the most fundamental concepts that America has is privacy, everyone I know is obsessed with it, every person I consider to be in a different generation from myself especially - my parents loves their privacy, it's just such a fundamental thing in America. I think that our cultural differences from you growing up in the Soviet Union are the big differences between us. But the older generation, if we are talking about the American generation, is so different from people like myself. I think the older American population is very very individualistic. I think at times, this is an experience I have with a lot of people in older generations. Their thought process is “me first, me first, me first.” it's a product of the society they grew up in. In America for society, the cold war was going on and America had to be the pinnacle of the top. How do you get to the top? - You work hard! That is where the health concept of pulling yourself by your bootstraps comes from in America, which I don’t really believe in. I just think the older generation just has this idea that individualism is more important than having a community or having different world views. I think that I see that a lot in my life that it is - well I need to help myself first before I can help anyone else first, I think that comes into the American economy, and I think the American economy is run by the older generation. It is not run by people my age, this individualism leads to a lot of dangerous concepts in America too. We look at the failures of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the individualism that people didn't wear masks, it was their body, they didn't have to wear a mask - to hell with if they gave another person COVID, if they wanted to get COVID that was their prerogative. I think that that was such an awful and dangerous ideology and I think it led to a lot of divisions in the country based on that. The biggest difference between the generations is that my generation tends to have more of a holistic world view, we look at the world as a community rather than the older generation looking at themself first whereas my generation looks at other people first. I don't necessarily think that my generation is more compassionate or caring, I think my generation has access to resources that this generation didn't have growing up. In my generation, if I wanted to reach out to someone in Russia, or the Middle East or Europe, I could do that if I wanted to, I could. I think that comes with a lot of, I'm not so different from this other person. Social connectedness on social media and text comes with a lot of drawbacks, there are a lot of dangers to it. I think one of the best things it has done for my generation is connected the world and made the world a smaller place and shown people that we are more human and more alike than we thought we were. My upbringing really got this idea of “you are different from other people around the world, you are very very different” but then growing up I have had instagram twitter, everything at my fingertips and then I realize - oh no I'm not that different. We all had a lot of the same childhood experiences, we all lived in the same cultures and even if we didn't live in the same culture, you are still human and you still have this - I should still care about this person even though we are different and come from a different culture. Previous Next

< Back Djenabou's Story Djenabou talks with Rene about her family. She shares her exceptional relationship that she has with her sister. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 03:08 Djenabou: So my youngest brother is named TJ, that’s his nickname but his name is Tijani. He is 17 years old. And then higher from that is my brother named Hamadou. He is 18. Then there is me, 22. And then my other sister named Fanta, she just turned 31 a couple days ago. And then my eldest sister's name is Isha and she is also 31. I'm closer to my sister, Fanta since Isha, my eldest sister left when she was 16, had to leave the country. So I grew up with my sister Fanta for all of my life; all the bickering, arguing, we grew really, really close because we were always together. We would go to the movies together like each week or go to the mall each week and stuff. Rene: “What was it like when you were little?” Djenabou: I think one moment that I remember with Fanta was we were watching High School Musical together on VHS and I love musicals now because she had High School Musical so that was a really connected bond between us. And another thing, I think when I was in elementary school, she would always go to all of my award shows because my parents were always working and stuff like that so my sister would always be there for my award shows and stuff. And it was always important because when she went to see me receive all my awards and even at my graduation too, when my parents weren’t there. Rene: “You know I’m a big sister and I have two younger sisters and I was a stand-in mom for them frequently, so I understand the tenderness of that relationship. So she was like your mom at times, your big sister, tell me a little bit about how you would characterize your relationship with her.” Djenabou: I think about tough love, like she is very honest, very brutally honest. But I know she does that because she cares about everyone in the house. And I know that if I ask her for something she'll do it. No questions asked shell do it. She will ask questions a little bit after but she’ll definitely do it. She's very caring, she's funny too. She has her moments, I guess. She's such a perfectionist also, a very high maintenance person. She's very very independent as well. Rene: So what would you most like, if you could tell her thank you, what is it you would say to her? Djenabou: I would thank her for a lot of stuff, like being the person I can go to. Also, just being the role model for me too. And always making sure I’m good and I have everything. If I don't have anything she will provide me with that. Even planning for my birthday too with my group of friends, she'll pay for it even though the bill is high. She will go out of her way and pay for it. Just like that second motherly figure and stuff. Rene: Really, how lovely. Previous Next