Don't judge a book by it's cover.....Norelly.

I walked in to Union Grounds a little ahead of time to make sure I didn’t miss Norelly and found myself a seat that would allow me to see everyone walking in. Since I didn’t have a huge idea about what the IEP was all about, I was expecting a college freshman Norelly.  I then take my phone out and text her saying that I was at the meeting spot and that I will wait for her and before I put my phone back in to my pocket, I hear another of the 9999973 pronunciations of my first name, dare they try my last. I turn around to see an older woman dressed in a white shirt and a pair of jeans waiting for me in a corner. We then go about introducing ourselves and I then go on additionally about how to pronounce my name right and how my last name is optional to try.

Norelly is from Venezuela and she owns a shipment store in her city.  She has a fourteen year old daughter whom she gives her life for and for whose benefit she’s taking the IEP program.  Norelly tells me that she never got to learn in school to be fluent in English and how that has restricted her from communicating and living a global lifestyle. She wants her daughter to have a chance to learn to read, write and talk in English so she has a better lifestyle later on. Norelly, enrolled in the IEP at TCU, even though she doesn’t really require English at her workplace, just so she can complement her daughter’s learning of the language.  This is a true motherly instinct according to me and I could feel its power, given the fact that IEP students get a good amount of homework, when she told me how much she hates to do homework.

We then went on to talk about our favorite things about TCU and the other fun things that we’ve done since school started and as it is obvious, anything about TCU must start with football. To not mention football here, is to have sinned as a horned frog and as a citizen of Fort Worth.  Norelly told me that she went for the season opener with Michael Zeiser and his conversational partner (Thanks for telling me Michael!). Her experience in the stadium came out as bitter sweet to me.  She seemed to have enjoyed the people around and the massiveness of the stadium. But however, she wasn’t so fond of the nucleus of the stadium; the football game itself. Norelly found it too physically aggressive and didn’t want to be around for a long time.  Adding to the hitting and pushing that she didn’t like, she found it hard to keep herself entertained because she really didn’t know what football was and in the eyes of a newbie, footballers look like a bunch of risen gladiators from ancient Rome; fighting to stay alive. As an international student, I could totally relate to it as I experienced the same things in my first game at Baylor last year.

A trend that I noticed with her, that she later accepted, was that she became freer in talking to me with time. She got a lot funnier, threw in a couple of simple jokes and made funny expressions and noises when she described some incident about her travels to Europe. Quickly, the talk on travels took us to my homeland; India.  She seemed to be pretty interested in India and her people.  Some of Norelly’s friends have told her about their travels to India and how they found Indians possessing inner peace and calm in all their daily chaos (If you say so!). That seemed to surprise Norelly as Venezuela is pretty chaotic too, but they still swear at one another when they jump a traffic light or when a pedestrian jaywalks.

She said something after this that made me laugh a bit. Norelly told me about her reaction when she first received my email and saw that I was from India.  She has a hard time comprehending the Indian accent and she was worried that she might not understand and comprehend what I would say in our meetings together. And like the previous 9999973 people that messed my name up and then went on to ask how I don’t have an accent, Norelly jumped into the bandwagon and asked me why I didn’t have a strong Indian accent.  And as I have answered to the past 9999973 people, I told her that I simply did not know.

Then, there was an awkward silence, an indicator of “We’ve officially run out of topics to talk about” which initiated a humble invitation from Norelly to join her and her family for a meal sometime.

As I escorted Norelly back to her car, I realized that she and I had so much in common by just being international students here. It tells me how a new culture can be thought of as a new sheet of paper where everyone starts afresh and makes his/her own roadmap. And in the hope of having more of such explorative conversations, I waved goodbye and walked back to my residence hall as the icy drops from the drizzle hit my face.