|
Not home for the holidays two
Hillsdale students
By Jon
Gibbons
Collegian Freelancer
As the
final week of school rolls around and students anticipate their
final exams and "dead-week" partying, their thoughts
also turn to returning home for Christmas break.
However,
two Hillsdale students will not be returning home this break.
Senior
Busra Kurtuldu will not be able to return to her home in Turkey
this year.
"I
cannot go home because it's too expensive to go back,"
she said. "I'm going to be here in Hillsdale working in
the [George Roche] Sports Complex and staying in a friend's
house."
Kurtuldu,
a Turkish Muslim, will be staying with nearby friends for her
second American holiday season.
"I
celebrated [Christmas] last year," she said. "I'll
be around and I bet my roommate [senior Jane Cobb] will do something,
and hopefully I'll be with them."
Kurtuldu
said she is grateful to have found a strong, helpful community
in Hillsdale.
"There
are great people around here," she said. "I cannot
imagine myself being at a big school, no one would take care
of me. [In Hillsdale] I have so many places to go."
Senior
Daniel Silliman is also not returning to his home this holiday
season. Silliman is from Sequim, Wash.
"It's
a combination of money and work I could get done," he said.
"It's fairly expensive for me to go home," he said.
"My parents can't afford it, I can't afford it-and if I
stay here, I'm going to get more work done."
Silliman
also said his lack of roots in his hometown, as well as a friend's
wedding, has given him other reasons to stay in the Hillsdale
area.
"I've
only lived in [Washington] for two years, so I don't really
have any friends in the area, and the ones I have moved up to
Seattle," he said.
Silliman
said that he was not anticipating any extreme loneliness over
the break and will not be spending Christmas alone.
"There's
a very real way that this is home," he said. "Whenever
I'm in Washington, I refer to here as home, and whenever I'm
here, I refer to Washington as home. I'm sure Christmas day
will be fairly lonely but I've been invited to an Anglican church
in Flint, and I have some friends in Ann Arbor. So I won't just
be sitting in a dark room and crying for Christmas."
|
