Remember,

A student at our university committed suicide last week.  She had been in one of my classes last year, sitting on the front row, right in front of me. She was a hard-worker, smart, and was not shy about asking a question or challenging another person's opinion.  She was quiet and humble, but not afraid. As a parent, I look at her and her sisters and brothers and imagine them being a source of "pride" for their families (pride is a whole other subject in this culture).  As a teacher, I "love" my students in that I have great respect for them and want to see them succeed.  If I didn't love my students in this way, I wouldn't put up with the downsides of the job. When that semester of our class together first started, she told me briefly about her ongoing struggles with depression and reassured me that she was managing it okay, and I know she had care from within the school and of course, I thought of her and prayed for her to make it through because life comes in these phases and maybe the next one or the one after that wouldn't be haunted by that fear or anxiety or maybe it would but maybe she would find a new way of shouldering it all.  But she didn't.  And suicide in this culture is a major sin and I understand that the family was not happy.  not happy at all.  that she was attending our school, that she attended because of some now silenced desire from her own mind, heart, and/or soul.  So the reaction here has been whispers among the students and silence from the administration. The silence is not what the administration wants but is what it must do because the student's family has requested it.  They don't approve of us or what we do or maybe it has something to do with the student's gender.  I'm not sure.  There was a "funeral" (again, different from one at home), more of a respectful visitation to her house, to sit with the family.  I was invited and wanted to go but couldn't, and then I heard that another female faculty member went and the tension was very bad because the family did not approve.

But even if silence is what the family wants, this student is not silent in my heart.  And her struggles and her story are a slap-in-the-face re-realization that here, a fast paced change to daily/public life is outpacing cultural/private change in ways that will remain unknown to me. Not because I don't want to know but because I cannot know and in a culture of privacy, I am not invited to hear.  It would seem like it must be a paradox of inspiration, amazement, and hope combined with an anxiety and fear.  It would seem like, because of the pace of the change, that it will put a special burden on the current generation of kids and young adults.  They will bear the load of many generations of change on their singular shared shoulders.  Seems like it must be like entering a black hole, anticipation of what might be and the constant threat of being pulled apart, disintegrated.

I cannot forget this student.  She is why I'm here and why I should be concerned about what my presence here means.