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Getting out and seeing the country

Riggs students hear about life in another country


PIERRE - Students at T.F. Riggs High School in Pierre had a chance to learn about life in other countries Monday morning when they were visited by participants of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

GMF is a nonpartisan public policy and grantmaking institution dedicated to promoting greater cooperation and understanding between the United States and Europe.

Presentations were given throughout the morning by five current

participants in the program in the Riggs Theater. They were Patrik Zoltvány, who is from Bratislava, Slovak Republic; Teresa Tamen, who works in Lisbon, Portugal; Timea Venczel, who lives in Budapest, Hungary; Ingrid Bertram, who works in Mainz, Germany; and Lubo Veselý from Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.

The group arrived in the United States the first week of March and has spent the intervening weeks visiting different locations and learning about the culture and the people who live there.

Dan Schenk, who works in the State Court Administrators Office of the South Dakota Supreme Court, moderated the discussions. Schenk said the program lets the visitors come to the U.S. and find out what this country is all about.

After making short presentations about themselves and their backgrounds, the group members fielded questions from the audience.

One student asked what the biggest difference between growing up in the U.S. and Europe was.

Several of the group members said it was very different for them because they grew up under Communist regimes.

Venczel likened the experience to George Orwell's dystopian novel, "1984."

"But it wasn't as bad as that," she said. "I was 18 years old when the transition took place. It wasn't easy, and we still have a lot to learn about democracy after living 52 years under communism."

Bertram said a local difference she noticed was that people don't lock the doors to their homes.

"That is something we don't do," she said. "It's too scary."

Tamen said that people's perceptions of what is old and what isn't is also different.

"We all come from old countries so what is old for you is not old for us," she said. "For you, you'll say a building that's 100 years old is old, but for us it would be something that's 800 years old."

Zoltvány said one thing he noticed was the similarity of different social problems.

"We deal with a lot of the same problems," he said. "Although we're in different parts of the world we have the same problems."

When asked something he noticed about the U.S., Veselý said, "Everything is big here."

Schenk said GMF is informative for those who participate because it allows them to see much of the country and get a feel for the differences of the varying regions.

"It's a great opportunity for them to get a flavor of what our country is like all over," he said. "The U.S. is not just New York and Los Angeles."