Concord High students sat around Anna-Marie DiPasquale’s office Monday afternoon cracking jokes, passing around a guitar and coloring posters.
They were getting ready for International Night, an annual event put on by Be the Change, the club that brings refugee students – at the high school, they’re known as new Americans – together with local kids for lunches, multicultural events and public speaking.
There were musical and dance performances in native garb – and food, too, of course, including momo dumplings from Nepal; fried cabbage rolls from Pakistan; a potato soup from Burundi; and mandazi, a type of fried dough, from Sudan.
The night’s offerings were a reflection of just how much more diverse the high school has become over the past decade. A refugee resettlement site, Concord High was 93 percent white 10 years ago. Now, 20 percent of its students are non-white.
Many described Be the Change as a safe, welcoming space.
That’s how Elida Ntirenganya, the club’s co-president, described her peers.
“They made you feel safe,” she said.
But for the native Burundian, the club was also a way to get acquainted, and comfortable, with difference.
“I always thought, ‘Oh I’m from a different country. I know so much diversity.’ But where I lived in Tanzania, I was only surrounded by Burundians,” she said, adding that her family and the community she lived with were also all mostly Seventh-day Adventists.
She was nervous when she made her first Muslim friend through Be the Change – she even worried about going over to her house. But eventually the two became best friends.
The club may have taught Ntirenganya about others, but it also allowed her to learn more about where she came from.
For a long time, Ntirenganya said, she didn’t want anything to do with a country so ravaged by war. But the club, which tours classrooms in Concord and in other schools to teach kids about other countries, encouraged her to learn more about where she came from.
It’s how she learned about the history of the conflicts in Burundi that she thinks have been badly oversimplified as ethnic strife. It’s also where she explored what’s beautiful about Burundi – especially its mountains.
“Because of this club, I’ve learned to learn about my country and accept it,” she said.
Be the Change co-president Sana Khan, a new American originally from Pakistan, said she loved the club because it embraced diversity.
“They welcomed me with open arms,” she said.
DiPasquale likes to joke that Khan will one day run the World Bank – the ambitious junior is all booked up on business classes, and she hopes to one day open up her own enterprise. Khan got to show off her Pakistani heritage Monday, with homemade, fried cabbage rolls and yogurt-mint dip. But she flexed her management muscles, too, assigning tasks to her harried classmates.
Fisto Ndayishimiye, a junior born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said the club helped him learn the basics when he arrived in New Hampshire just a year ago.
“They taught me how to speak English, how to speak to people, how to act, the culture,” he said.
Ndayishimiye is already nearly fluent. But he’s had practice speaking in new tongues: English is the seventh he’s learned.
(Lola Duffort can be re ached at 369-3321 or lduffort@cmonitor.com.)