2022 Slack Farms Interns

One week before our 2022 Slack Farms Interns were set to arrive in the US for our July Interns Program, Johns Hopkins announced that it was canceling its Center for Talented Youth summer program. It was the end of June, and Austria had just relaxed its requirement for Covid testing prior to boarding flights.

It was also the end of a long Spring with vagaries of Covid infections and variants pressing against our will to enter normalcy again. The students from HBLA Elmberg were set to arrive July 7th and they were undeterred. But Hopkins reputation for the CTY summer program and the possibility that its esteemed infections disease team was signaling an epidemiological fallout gave all of us on the farms a long pause.

Like much from Life in the Time of Covid, uncertainty shapes the everyday as decision-making is unnaturally compressed. Yes the student’s parents were worried as always and the students were initially timid in the use of their English even with twelve years of study.

But at this program we have a fool-proof maneuver to jettison shyness and unleash restrain.

I am terribly hard of hearing. As I explained at our first meeting on Saturday July 9th, we would begin every work day with yoga and they would soon be the teachers. They were excellent.

And they would have to yell Yoga instructions on the dock at Woodlawn or the pool deck at Jubilee because otherwise I will never hear the commands. And they would have to yell at the table, too, because otherwise I would never hear their words. And they would have to yell English very loudly all the time and, if you try it, you’ll understand that it’s hard to use a language shyly when you have to yell it.

And that is the basis of removing shyness and instilling confidence from the very first day. When they left for New York at the end of their month-long internship, I knew they would be ready for a city where yelling English was necessary to be heard above the hustle bustle of commerce and community that define New York and New Yorkers. And here in pictures is their journey.

Because they were so busy writing (4 papers in English) and adding new vocabulary from their readings of articles from the New Yorker (654 new English words), the pictures I post will be annotated by them now that they are back in Austria preparing for their last year at HBLA Elmberg. The postings from New York are their own, though, and you can see that this summer was a bit of a coming of age story. They hit New York with gusto. And maybe, just may, we’ll be able to reconsider the requirement for a U.S. President to be born in the U.S., as I know Bob the Builder would be just as good as Arnold Schwarzenegger would have been.

In a bit I’ll post a section on the 2022 Slack Farms August Interns, including two Elmberg graduates whose 2021 experience was cancelled due to Covid, and a Ukraine intern from the Ukraine Global Scholars Program.

Congratulations to a wonderful class of 2022 Slack Farms Interns, including Lily Yeatman from St. Mary’s Count. Lily is our first local Slack Farms Intern who is heading to Syracuse University for her first year.

Maggie O’Brien

August 20, 2022