Summertime means a lot of things in Rehoboth Beach: sun, sand, tourists and traffic. It also marks the time when hundreds of international students, mostly from Russia but also from countries such as Turkey, Bulgaria, Poland and Ukraine, bid “do svidaniya” to their homeland and say “zdrastvui” to Rehoboth.
This year the influx of foreign students has been delayed. According to Gareth Tonnessen, assistant pastor in discipleship ministries for New Covenant Presbyterian Church and official greeter for the International Student Outreach Program, the buses carrying many of the students haven’t arrived as a result of a merger between Trailways and Greyhound.
Also, Tonnessen said, no one yet knows where the students will get off the buses, although it appears they will get off at the Wawa parking lot off Route 1 in Lewes.
Still, many students, mostly the Russians, have been trickling into Rehoboth and many of them were present at St. Edmond’s Catholic Church on Wednesday, May 28, for the first of 14 dinners the church will hold over the summer. Of the students that came to the dinner, 70 were Russian. Five more were Bulgarian; two from Turkmenistan – a former Soviet republic on the Caspian Sea, which borders Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Iran – and one each from Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
The Rev. Ray Forrester, lead pastor at St. Edmond’s, said the dinners, which the church has hosted for several years now, were an effort by the church to show hospitality to the international students.
Meals were provided and served by members of the Rehoboth chapter of Unico, an Italian-American charitable organization.
Three Russian students from the city of Ulyanovsk (named for its most famous son, Vladimir Lenin), Ilya Osokin, Yulia Shpachenko and Alexander Knyazev arrived last week via bus after flying from Moscow to New York. They are spending their second summer in the United States. Osokin said of the differences between Russia and the United States.
“Here we can easily find a job; we can easily earn money. We don’t care about our salary. We know we know we can easily spend our money; we know that after a week we will have money. In Russia we only got paid one time a month. Here we get paid one time a week. We can easily travel about the United States and see different sides of the country.”
All three said they preferred Rehoboth as opposed to where they stayed before, Albany, N.Y., for Osokin and Knyazev and New Jersey for Shpachenko. They have already made friends with some of the Americans they have come across. “It’s been very interesting to meet Americans,” Shpachenko said.
The trio also said learning English has been a challenge, although learning to speak the language has been easier than learning to read and write it.
Outside the dinner, Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT) held a drawing for 10 bikes to be used by students this summer. This year, DelDOT has engraved serial numbers on the bikes in order to identify them if they are abandoned.
Steve Bayer of DelDOT said the bikes come from private individuals, University of Delaware and abandoned bikes that are refurbished. Bayer said DelDOT would be giving away 140 bikes this summer.
One of the lucky bike winners was Gafurov Rashid of Naberezhyne Chelny, located in the Russian Republic of Tartarstan. Rashid, 20, traveled 500 miles from his hometown to Moscow to catch a flight to New York. From there, he took a bus down to Rehoboth and is in the U.S. for the first time.
“I like it,” he said of his bike. “I like this city, I like this country. It is very nice.”
source: capegazette.com