With Christmas just around the corner, and Thanksgiving practically on our laps, I’m sure that many of you are itching to explore. For me, that means planning a Christmas trip to El Salvador and Guatemala, for you it might just mean getting home to see friends and family. But this I know for sure: everybody wants a bargain. So it surprises me that the ISIC card is not as well known as it really should be.

Food is bigger than ever in the Happy Valley this fall, and I don’t just mean at the farmers’ markets. The season’s cornucopia is overflowing with the fruits of a visual harvest of food-themed exhibitions across the Five College area. Sponsored by Museums10, a consortium of ten of the area’s galleries and museums that includes our own Art Museum, “Table for 10” is a cultural potluck of events that has been cooking since the summer—from colonial hearth cooking demonstrations at Historic Deerfield, to sofa-sized oil paintings of jelly donuts at Smith College, to a gourmet diner on wheels with a food ethics agenda. I recently took the bus into Amherst to check out two of the exhibits before they closed at the end of October.

Peter Rosset has the knowledge of a scholar and the heart of a true activist. The passion with which he presented facts such as one describing how Mexican farmers earn a quarter of what they earned in 1982 because of free trade and the sarcasm with which he states corporate food covers all the essential food groups “salt, sugar, starch, fat, various carcinogens of pesticides…” are testimony to his interesting personality that definitely keeps his audience engaged.

This week something amazing happened. People came together for The Bride’s March in Pulaski Park, Northampton. The event was organized by Safe Passage, in commemoration of a local woman who was murdered by an abusive ex-partner on the day of her wedding to a new partner. Even in this October chill, people came to take a stand against domestic violence.

‘Focus on the Future’ is a new bi-weekly column in the MH News, featuring interviews with MHC students and alums who are involved with organizing initiatives and projects for community empowerment and social change. This week, the MH News talks to Shaina Tantuico ’10, a MHC graduate with a special major in Policy, Schooling and the Arts, beneficiary of the MHC Teacher Licensure Program, and self-described “wannabe Ms. Frizzle of the Philippines”. Shaina’s self-initiated venture, JeepNeed, aims to help rural schools in her home country.

Every day we wake up, go to class, see our friends, and follow our daily routines. Most of us are lucky enough to do this without complaint from our bodies, and consequently, most of us take our healthy, capable bodies for granted. But not everyone is.

Food 101
Tailgate Picnic
Atkins Farm
Amherst Creperie
Judie’s Restaurant
…

CTY kids somehow always find each other. Charlotte, Marianna and I are no exception to the rule. For those of you who weren’t cool enough in middle school and high school to attend this glorified nerd camp, let us explain. CTY stands for Center for Talented Youth, and it’s a summer program run by John Hopkins, where students take a college-level course for three weeks. It is not a camp—it is a cult.

By some strange twist of fate, the three of us all attended the Dickinson College program site in Carlisle (aka Middle of Nowhere, PA) and have ended up here at MoHo. So what have we learned? Well, we have learned that although we may be too old to attend CTY, we will never be too old to appreciate it.

As Jack Kerouac, the American poet and novelist, once said in his autobiography, “…Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” And to be honest, I am inclined to agree with him. To stay put is to resign yourself to never learning much about you or anybody around you. For it is in traveling that you end up meeting the closest friends, finding the greatest inspirations and concluding with the craziest stories.

Now that October break approaches and midterms become a frightening reality, returning students have had the opportunity to interact with the first-years, whose first month in this strange land has come to a close. And just as we did before them, the first-years have blended into the campus pretty well. No longer do they scamper about the campus with their lanyards, campus maps and wide eyes. They have officially become Mount Holyoke women, overachieving and self-confident.