On Thursday, January 19th, 2023, for the first time since January of 2021, our club got the opportunity to call over Zoom with a group of girls in Bangladesh. These girls, approximately the ages of our club members or slightly older, were staying in a dormitory to pursue a secondary education. Numerous Rhoades students on the call had been in contact with these girls through a pen-pal program we set up after the last Zoom call in 2021. Connecting their names to their faces and seeing that they’d received the letters was an irreplaceable experience. On the call, we discussed the girls’ lives as students across the world, and the dreams they were working towards. Many of our students shared details from their own lives, and brought their pets onto the call, which delighted the girls on the other end.

There were plenty of differences that we discovered between ourselves and the girls in Bangladesh. For instance, a lot of the games and hobbies that students on both ends mentioned were new to their counterparts. However, seeing these girls laugh and talk with their friends, just like we do, was an enlightening experience. Even all the way across the world, we were still able to see ourselves in these girls — making us more empathetic to their journeys as girls pursuing secondary school despite the challenges posited to them, and allowing us to truly put ourselves in their shoes as well as make incredible new connections.