Undergraduate / The women in the woods- Macalster suplement essay [6]

Hey I need to submitt this essay in around 30 minutes! I am not a native speaker and i need people to correct my grammar and give me some general feedback! Thank you a lot! I will comment on yours too!

Describe a situation where you had to work or closely associate with someone for a culture very different from your own. What challenges did you face and how did you resolve them?

I always thought she was around forty. Now I know that she is nearly sixty. She does not look old, but her long grey hair and the round strawberry mark right over her left eyebrow, make her look a little like a witch. But like a fairly friendly witch. As my "Get- Away-Mom" at the United World College, she picks me up quite often. Just whenever I feel like taking a break from the community I am living in. Consisting of students headed from ninety different countries, my community is a cultural mix of beliefs, values and opinions. Sometimes when I catch a quiet moment in the middle of the day, I look around and think about how it is possible that despite all our differences, we live all together, forming the most caring and respecting community, I have ever lived in. It seems crazy, and it is. Wonderful-crazy. But as much as I love it, sometimes I just need a break and that is when she comes and picks me up.

We drive in her dusty- blue pick up through the dessert New Mexico's - usually in silence, enjoying the flying- by mountains, New Mexico's unusual blue sky and the dry, yellow fields. Her small, wooden, self-made house is located in the deepest woods on the foot of a beautiful mountain, far away from any civilization. Reaching her house, it is already dark, and we make us some food before we go to bed. All that in silence. The first time she brought me there, her silence made me uncomfortable. Just arrived in the US, I could barely speak more than a couple of words and was unable to start a conversation. She was supposed to become my "New Mexico- Mom", but how could I connect to someone, that seemed not even willing to speak to me? Not even willing to get to know me? I was interested in New Mexican culture and also what made her live this simple and isolated life, but her silence drove me crazy. I knew she was a biologist and just came out of the woods when she went shopping or to pick me up, but that was about all I knew. I wondered what kept her going in her life. What did she appreciate on this lonely life out here?

On the next morning we always wake up before dawn. Stepping outside where nighthawks circle overhead and bats dart past our heads in the barn as we go to feed her horses, she says she would like to take me with her to work and we start walking into the black forest. Her work consists of surveying indicator species, listening for birds and watching for butterflies. Tripping over rocks and running into branches in my attempt to follow her, I always enjoy the rising sun and just to be out there in untouched nature which appears wider than any landscape I have ever seen before. We walk through the woods all day, calling for birds and identifying plants and animals and their left behind traces. Waiting patiently for the responds to bird calls or identifying bear scat and bearberries, saprophytes and squirrel middens, she writes down everything she hears or sees. Looking at her notes it became clear to me that she knew name and propose for every animal and plant we found. And even more impressive their place in the ecosystem as a whole. Though not talking more than necessary, she soon proved to me that her knowledge excelled about every biologist, I have met in my life so far, I have met many, including several professors from prestigious universities. I realized she had spent her entire life trying to understand the relationships in the natural world, from which I can only comprehend a very small part.

One evening after we had been in nature all day, she asked me: "Do you know what I wanted to show you today?" I thought about what had impressed me most and I realized it was nothing else than natures' diversity. Hundreds of thousands of millions animals and plants where out there, many of which I had never seen before, living and interacting together in a way as complex as a society formed by humans. There is no ecosystem that can function without diversity. Without variety everything would simply collapse. As I responded "diversity", she looked at me and smiled. It was a huge, frog-smile just like if she wanted to say: I knew you would understand me.

Her life is simple, but simply wonderful and just as rich and diverse as my own though I live in a community with students from ninety different nations, and she alone in the deepest woods. Our connection lies not in our communication, but in the ability to appreciate diversity, if in our own ways.