Temba Mateke, Class of 21
Zambia
I was 38,000 feet over the north Atlantic when a curious button in the restroom of a British Airways flight caught my attention. This was only the second trans-continental flight of my life – the first having ended a few hours prior – so I really had no way of knowing what this button did. It wasn’t the button to flush the toilet. That one was rectangular and blue with a picture of a toilet on it. This one was blue too, but it was round with the outline of a person on it. It seemed to me that the only way to find out what this innocent little button did was to press it. So I did.
Nothing. “Well that was disappointing,” I thought to myself. A few moments later, and for no apparent reason, there was a British lady banging on the restroom door saying “Sir! Sir! Sir, are you okay! Are you okay!” in an increasingly loud and very British voice. I tried to say that I was fine, but I didn’t get as far before she began to forcibly open the door to make *sure* I was okay. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but when I sprung from the toilet to hold the door shut, I think she got the message that I *was*, in fact, okay and did *not* want her in there. At least now I knew what the button did.
I told this story of my 2017 flight from Zambia to the States during Swarthmore’s international orientation. It was part of a small icebreaker competition to see who had the best travel story. I made it to the final round of this competition only to come in second place to some Nigerian kid whose story I don’t even remember. I didn’t forget the Nigerian kid though. We lived in the same dorm for a while, I did voice acting for a radio play he directed, we both worked for the same startup, and the last time we spoke was yesterday when we chatted over the phone and watched “My Dinner with Andre”.
You never know who you’ll connect with or what you’ll get up to at Swarthmore and that was always exciting. I could never have guessed that my closest friends would be a playwright from Nigeria, a physicist from India, a linguist from Vermont, an engineer from Chicago, a physician scientist from Nepal and so on. Nor could I have guessed that I would be launching rubber ducks off academic buildings, spending hours getting expensive engineering equipment to Rick Roll, going on a movie date to see the live-action Lion King in Beijing, or singing in a cartoon movie about space pirates!
Of course, there was a brief period where I had to stay 6 feet away from everyone I knew, but on the whole, Swarthmore was a solid 9/10 experience. Would recommend.
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