This week marked the beginning of a small, yet hopefully meaningful practice of building community in the residence halls. We claimed a spot on the bulletin board near the elevator that everyone walks by multiple times on a daily basis to highlight selected residents from Neumann Hall with personal photos and interesting biographical information. This week it was Vasile and Cristina from East side (both students who hail from Moldova), and our only set of twins on campus, Masha & Dasha (from Belarus), representing the West side. Next week it will be a new group of faces with their own personalized stories that are chosen to make a special appearance as the ‘Peeps of the Week. Not knowing how students would respond to my idea, I was pleasantly surprised to see the smiles it brought to faces as well as witness the simple sense of belonging that happens when we are given the opportunity to make ourselves known to one another.
My favorite part happened when we celebrated the start of this weekly tradition by hosting all the ‘Peeps of the Week’ for dinner in our apartment late on Friday night. We had quite the feast to help us celebrate. One of my RAs, Anton, taught Erik and I how to make plov (a delicious dish made with rice, beef, onions & carrots) according to his mother’s recipe. We are learning that plov is such a traditional dish in all Central-Asian countries that every family has their own recipe along with their own ‘way’ to make it. Maksat, a student from Kazakhstan, showed us his family’s recipe last month, and this week Anton showed us the way his mother makes plov back in his home country of Kyrgyzstan. I do not think we could call ourselves plov experts yet, but we are definitely acquiring an affection towards the consumption of this tasty dish.
