When I was in high school, my parents decided to move to Saudi Arabia after my sophomore year (1966) and enrolled me in the American Community School in Beirut as a boarding student. Our whole school was evacuated the day after the June 6 war began in 1967. After the war, my parents stayed 12 years teaching in a university and an elementary school, but I came back to go to college. When I came to Carleton my parents and I decided that I would visit relatives for the holidays and get a job over the summer. I did not see my family until Christmas of my sophomore year. I was lonely and elected to do my junior year back in Beirut to be closer to home.
These high school and college experiences led me to three convictions which I carry today:
Education is a noble profession and everyone can benefit from receiving an education.
War is terrible and not well understood from afar.
Coming to the US from overseas is difficult; loneliness and feeling estranged are natural experiences.
One way that I have connected these issues is by working with groups to identify and bring Palestinian students to the US to study. After I read the story of a Wall Street Journal reporter who befriended one of her interviewees during the Second Intifada and her subsequent visits to his family and her work to bring him here to study I was hooked. Working with the Hope Fund, that her experience helped to launch, my wife Jenny Hartley (also ’72, a veteran of Peace Corps service in Nepal) and I hosted a Palestinian student from a refugee camp in Lebanon. She introduced us to other full scholarship international students and we ended up also taking in students from Nepal and Swaziland and hosting many others for meals.
In 2015 I signed on as a founding board member of the Leonard Education Organization started by Deyá Dresner, someone who had also worked with the Hope Fund. LE.O helps to identify promising young Palestinian students, helps them to apply and obtain financial aid, and then supports them when they enroll here. LE.O host families provide incidental supplies such as cell phones and winter clothes and help meet emergency needs such as homesickness, emergency medical/dental care and housing over break – it is a long list. Sometimes it is just trying to help them get a breath by escaping for a weekend afternoon to a restful place with no expectations.
We have become the Minnesota base camp for students at Carleton, St. Olaf, Gustavus Adolphus, Macalester, Augsburg and now Concordia (Moorhead). At present, there are three LE.O students at Carleton and another at Concordia (Moorhead) and several LE.O alums in the Cities. For these students, education is resistance — it is their answer to war and oppression: their vision of a possible, peaceful future. It is our honor to be here beside them in their journey. I am also honored to serve on the board of ANERA, which is an amazing organization doing work to improve living and educational conditions for Palestinians.