Undergraduate / "Sindoor": Why Mac? Supplemental Essay for Macalester College [7]

I'm a female high school senior, applying Regular Decision (January 1) to Macalester College. Though I got my family to proofread this, my school got snowed out for an entire week, and thus I was unable to get any teachers or my counselor to look this over. It clocks in at about 900 words, but there's no listed word limit. I'd appreciate you guys' thoughts on it.

What factors have led you to consider Macalester College? Why do you believe it may be a good match, and what do you believe you can add to the Mac community, academically and personally? Feel free to draw on past experiences, and use concrete examples to support your perspective.

When she was living in Egypt, my science teacher's daughter was kidnapped for her blonde hair. They were walking down the sidewalk with her husband, the child dusty and tired. The happy couple stopped - just for a moment - turned away, and when they turned back, their daughter had vanished.

"Was she hurt?" we shout, innocent and startled. "Did you get her back?"

She smiles, shakes her head, playing our fifth-grade sense of thrill as deftly as the electronic keyboard at the back of her classroom. No, she says; she wasn't hurt. One of the kidnappers' fathers was very sick. They saw her daughter's blue eyes and blonde hair, white as washed bone, and thought that she could cure him. The lines cobwebbing from my teacher's eyes deepen in a sort of rueful sadness. Distance has given the incident dissonance. I won't know it then, but she can't reconcile this neighborhood of pop-top ranchers and ancient trees with the dust of her Foreign Service house, where they set out their leftover bread on the high, high walls for the poor to eat.

I grow up like this: rooted in my town of old trees, but restless, surrounded by stories of elsewhere. My guidance counselor was an ex-pat in China and then Quebec. My friend grew up in Germany. Another friend's father was the ambassador to Peru. My family never moves farther than the other side of town, but when he drives me to school through the Washington D.C. commuter crush, I tease my father about his days as a cabbie in London. I have never traveled out of the country, but my parents met in an Alaskan salmon cannery, and as a child I listen to my mother's stories of India, Lebanon, and Ecuador, the latter the place of her birth. She was a lonely daughter of missionaries who spoke Spanish before she spoke her parents' tongue and swam in the street when it flooded. They are all missionaries, my mother's family. I don't agree with their doctrine, but I hunger for their experience. They translated Bibles into Mandarin, trained doctors in Gambia, gave their children monkeys for pets, fought crocodiles, protected schoolgirls from warlords, slept in airports and on ships. A dervish of the exotic. And I played with my mother's tin of sindoor, fumbling the brilliant vermillion powder out over my arms, my fingers, my romper, until she found me. Caught, red-handed, looking for something beyond what I already knew.

There is plurality in the human experience. This is something I want to experience for myself, and this seems to be what Macalester embodies, this wealth of culture and origin. Just as at Mac the UN flag flies right below the stars-and-stripes, there is an understanding that not only as Morrissey said, "America is not the world," but that wherever you are - whether it be the United States, Macalester College, the Washington DC area, or my home in Falls Church, Virginia - is part of something greater than itself. Difference does not impede union. Macalester students are individuals - coming from forty-nine states, ninety-three countries, and each bringing a completely different life experience - and yet they create a sense of community that is so visceral I can feel it, when I stomp through the snow to visit.

As for myself, I don't plan to follow exactly in my relative's boot-prints. I'm fascinated by people - everything human, from art to anatomy, as emphasized by my somewhat unusual course selections in high school - but I am not religious, and besides, I know the harm the missionary system has done to native cultures in its attempt to do good. This is one reason why, lately, I have become so enraptured with anthropology. I can't fix this harm, but I can strive to understand what remains - celebrate the incredible cultural diversity that this system helped to lessen - and work towards providing solutions towards the inevitable problems of this increasingly globalized world. My love for this applied anthropology seems at home at Macalester, with its campus groups like the Spradley Society. As an artist - passionate about literature, theatre, music, and the visual mediums - Macalester, too, would help me grow a more global perspective on art. Not to mention, its location in the more suburban St. Paul would expose me to the larger arts community and wonderful theatre scene of the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, while also allowing me the intimacy of the Macalester community.

When I visit Macalester, the land is shin-deep in snow. It's exam week, but the students still smile at us, and some of them roughhouse with their friends. At the Campus Center, my mother and I strike up a conversation with a man eating lunch one table over. He went to Mac decades ago, but as he says, he comes back because he loves it so much. He asks me if I'm enjoying it so far, and I laugh, and say that I'm only in high school - a prospective, visiting, but yes, I love it so far. It's a great place, he assures me. He stops for a moment, thinking.

"When I went here," he pronounces, finally, "my roommate told stories about being chased through his village by a cougar," and it's like being eight years old again, hands caked with a shade of red brought halfway around the world, lifting palms up to the sky as if to say, Yes. More.