IN OTHER FEATURES:
Saying goodbye: Some retiring professors and staff recall their years at Calvin

Feminists remain active

Tim Thompson and nine other Calvin students are spending their spring semester participating in Calvin's Multicultural Semester in New Mexico. Mentored by Education Professor Ron Sjoerdsma, they have lived in tipis, charmed rattlesnakes, played Cowboys and Indians (with real Indians, too!), caroused saloons guzzling mass quantities of whiskey and firing six-shooters into the air -- and that's not to mention what they did OUTSIDE of class!

"Oh my God, we killed Lambchop!" gasped Becky Stob after David Brasser, sawing back and forth with a blunt knife, had successfully severed the aorta and spinal column of the meek, woolly creature.

Lambchop was our lunch. We cooked her over an open fire and ate her flesh with fresh tortillas, we and our Navajo hosts.

As children of meat market mass production, the experience of fresh slaughter gave the ten of us considerable food for thought. In fact, this whole semester has been full of nourishment -- academic and otherwise, though that's not to say everything's always been easily digested.

Thanks to the unique history of Christian Reformed missions work among the Navajo people, Calvin College has a significant connection to the culturally, historically and geologically rich American Southwest -- a place called Rehoboth.

A place called Rehoboth

Rehoboth (see Genesis 26:22 for etymology) was established in 1903, in the high desert of New Mexico on spacious ranchland purchased by the CRC's Board of Heathen Missions. Between red rocks and hogback ridges, surrounded by sagebrush, this Dutch tulip in the desert has sprouted and bloomed.

Rehoboth didn't blossom overnight, of course. It wasn't until the mid-'70s that Rehoboth's school, which has long been the center of this community of approximately 100 residents, began the transition from missions/boarding school to Christian day school.

Rehoboth's boarding school, an offshoot of CRC missionary work among the Navajo (North America's largest First Nation, with a population of over 200,000), was patterned after government boarding schools, whose philosophy in approaching their American Indian students was one of harsh cultural assimilation.

The answer to America's Indian "problem" (and the key to saving Indian souls) was found in severing children from their families, their language, their culture, and inculcating them, instead, with proper Christian virtues.

Rehoboth's vision, of course, has evolved. "Today," as an official profile of the school reads, "Rehoboth has the goal of providing quality Christian education to all the peoples of this region while continuing an emphasis on serving Native American students [who make up 55 percent of the student population]."

Community life at the last homely house

Our group is the fourth from Calvin to spend a semester at Rehoboth, the last homely house of the CRC. We're lodged here in a former Rehoboth student dorm. Nine of us teacher-aid three days a week in Rehoboth Christian School classrooms, in conjunction with Education classes taught by our program mentor.

Our other professors (Geology, Art, History and Sociology) are present or former Rehoboth faculty. Some of us take additional classes (like Native American Literature, a class full of tricksters, sex and tragic wisdom) at the University of New Mexico branch in Gallup, the rip-roaring boom town one mile west of us.

Our gurus and spiritual confessors are Alan and Lizzie Philips, Wheaton grads who run a summer wilderness program at Rehoboth and live with us in the dorm. This semester, their lives have revolved around buying us cereal, milk and lunch meat.

Into the Fifth World

In the Navajo story of emergence, the first people begin as insect-like creatures in an underworld. They traverse through three worlds, until in the fourth they are given human form. It's there that they nearly lose their skin thanks to Coyote, who tries to steal Water-Monster's daughters.

Water-Monster inflicts a flood out of anger, but the people escape in the nick of time, thanks to Badger, who widens a hole that leads into the fifth, and present, world.

Our semester here has been a story of emergence too.

The Four Corners area of the Southwest is a unique intersection of cultures (American Indian, Hispanic, Anglo), histories (tribal stories and experience, the colonialism wrought by Spain, Mexico and Manifest Destiny America, the making of the modern West) and geological features (the Colorado Plateau, a geologist's wonderland, home to extinct volcanoes, lava tunnels, fault lines, ancient, lithified sand dunes and, of course, El Grande Canyon).

As Don Tamminga, our Sociology professor relates, "What I appreciate about this program is how germane all the classes are to the area of the Southwest -- and the intimate way, with a small group, that all the facets of this area can be experienced."

I couldn't even begin to tell you of the strange worlds we've traversed here. How could I capture for you the spirit of adventure we found on our weekend field trips while dozing in our van?

If I could do it, I'd tell you more of how, with teeth clenched and hands steady, we killed Lambchop on Navajo Culture Day. I'd tell you of our work as spies and undercover archeologists at Chaco Canyon, home of ancient Anasazi ruins, of how we barely escaped with our lives when Barry Horst pocketed handfuls of sacred pot shards and incurred the wrath of the deity Tamm-ing'a. I'd fill your eyes with hair-raising tales of breaking and entering by our daredevil Art Professor Elmer Yazzie to show us his murals in a church.

If it were in my power, I'd lead you through lava tunnels, where we outran rabid bats and squeezed through birth canals to escape flows of liquid hot magma. Or I'd thrill you with epic sagas to make the wildest frat house look anemic, of our Real World life together in the dorm, of how Jessica Abbott likes to party, of Burly Mountain Women and Chinese fire drills at busy intersections, of Zach Evans's joy at being awaken every morning at the crack of dawn. I'd tickle your tummy with the suspense and intrigue of Karen Mallet's belly-button ring, of Rachael Admiraal's addictive almonds (which pronounced, rhymes with salmons), of Laura Johnson's love for dogsh**, or of Ashleigh Hirdes' invisible tattoo.

I'd tell you all of this and more, but, alas, some things are better left undone.

Cemeteries, growth and discovery

Behind Rehoboth's main campus, there's a trail that I like to jog. It leads south toward the Hogbacks, those ancient uplifts of rock along a monocline fault. The trail passes a cemetery near some isolated red rocks. The largest one is named "Resurrection Rock."

In the cemetery, headstones and markers bear witness to a bicultural heritage. Navajos like Peshlakai, Yazzie and Bitsie, lie and wait with Kuipers, Swieringa and Veenstra.

On the Reservation, traditional round-roof Navajo homes of thatched timbers, called hogans, dot the sweeping, dusty landscape. They cling tenaciously to the shifting soil even as they're cloaked in shadow by machinery grinding away at strip mines.

The best days here are like the landscape, broad and expansive, brushed with shades of red and the play of shadows.

Like any good off-campus experience, this semester has had its share of growth and discovery, those all-too-elusive qualities that are all-too-often uncertain. I know this. I had never liked to be barefoot till the day I shed my socks and walked on the warm, rusty sand of the narrow trail past Resurrection Rock, in and out of the cool shadows of sagebrush.