Ask Amanda

Dear Amanda,

My friends and I have been gone at different times for cross-culturals and haven't been together much in the past year. How do I integrate old and new friendships that have formed because of semesters spent apart?

-Socially Schizophrenic

Dear Schizo,

Ah, yes. The age old, cross-cultural fall out... EMU requires each and every young impressionable student to spend a semester away from campus. During this traumatic experience the typical student must abandon her newly achieved collegiate social classification for the unpredictable throes of a somewhat random group of peers. Over the course of that cross-cultural semester, she must learn to navigate a foreign environment accompanied by potentially embarrassing peers all the while maintaining a cultural sensitivity towards her local hosts. Hopefully, she'll return to Harrisonburg in one physical and emotional piece.

What EMU often fails to mention however is the severe damage a cross-cultural can do to your social life. College is a transient organism anyway. By the time you match a name to a face, a major, and a favorite ice cream flavor, they up and graduate. Upperclassmen begin the year with a cocky sense of seniority but an ever-dwindling circle of friends. How does one hold someone still long enough to become his or her best friend? (I mean besides duct tape and nylon rope...)

Obviously, you can't expect your old and new friends to like each other...or can you? (Cue dramatic organ music). The intimate size of our school's student body lends itself to complex, overlapping, and at times, suffocating social networks. Unbeknownst to you, your old and new friends are separated by a few degrees at most. In all likelihood, old friend A had a crush on new friend B's best friend's brother, while new friend A's and old friend B's fathers spent 1976 hiking together in the Andes. But that's last generation's news. We live in an interconnected world. And nowhere is that more apparent than between the social fabric of Eastern Mennonite University.

Even if EMU's cross-cultural program falls short of teaching students linguistic fluency and cultural navigation skills, at the very least it still imparts interpersonal knowledge to its students by coercing them into daunting and awkward social situations. Harness the awkwardness. Draw upon the trauma of your cross-cultural semester. Create moments for your old and new friends to meet and greet. After all, they've probably already met each other at last summer's family reunion. And just as you learned on cross-cultural, there's no strained social situation that a little water-after-Jesus-gets-to-it can't resolve.

-Amanda