Maia Abroad: UWC Waterford

My first year at Waterford Kamhlaba is done. I'm writing this on the plane home. I've always loved the last leg of a journey back to my city - catching small glimpses of home in strangers. MEC backpacks, unironic flannels, hiking boots and ugly jumpers and silver jewelry. It's comforting, it eases me into the feeling of Vancouver before I'm properly back and have to engage in the often frenetic pace of the city. The last term at school has been tough and I've been desperately homesick. For the last week of school, our IB2s were gone. I've been slowly settling into the idea of being an IB2 myself. I've been talking to new IB1s, hoping my advice is somewhat useful, hoping I manage to live up to my brave, brilliant, compassionate, insane IB2s, and hoping that the IB1s are as excited about coming to WK as I am to meet them. I've been packing and finishing last projects, (TOK presentations were a bitch, y'all) and having last dinners with friends and pr

There's a misconception about UWC. I think many of us held it before arriving here. The misconception is the idea of like mindedness. Many of our National Committees have leaned into this idea. The new idea of ' deliberately diverse' has come to mean liberal students who are passionate about politics, social justice, the environment. Students who are politically correct, try to cut down on meat consumption, want 'the UWC experience' . That's fine. I think that described me pretty well. But that wasn't the original purpose of UWC. Kurt Hahn didn't want to gather a bunch of kids from different countries who all thought the same - he wanted conflict. He wanted to gather people with fundamentally different values, stick them in a pressure cooker of an environment, and watch what happened. I think some of us have lost that guiding philosophy of UWC. At WK, there's an annual event for the IB1s called 'Common Ground.' It's mandatory - it takes