Global Outreach:
People from a “Small” College Making the World a Little Smaller

Irrigating crops in Uganda, dancing the meringue in Costa Rica, climbing up a snowy mountain to a monastery on a cliff in Turkey, and shedding tears of goodbye with a group of Chinese college students after a few hours of bonding—these can be part of the SUNY Cobleskill experience.

From the little valley in the rolling hills of Schoharie County, USA, SUNY Cobleskill reaches across latitudes and longitudes, oceans and mountains, cultures and languages with its numerous international programs, exchanges and connections. Our faculty, students, and alumni are making friends and colleagues, memories and networks across the globe from Africa to Asia to Latin America and beyond.

Sitting on a bench in a playground near a soccer field, I felt a tiny finger nudge me in my side. I turned around to find Max, a 7-year-old Costa Rican boy with an eager smile on his face. He told me, “hello,” with a proud grin. It was one of the first English words I had heard in a while. I was quite impressed with his initiative to walk up and speak to the gringa from the United States. We continued to converse with the words we had been learning at our respective schools. My school at the time, Conversa Centro Lingüístico, was up the mountainside from Santa Ana, Costa Rica, the village where Max and I roamed during June of 2004.

I could tell Max was eager to use the English numbers, colors and nouns he had been learning at his escuela. I was, too. I continued asking him questions in my limited Spanish. Max would answer in his limited English. Despite our limitations, we discovered the great strides we could make when we used our limited skills to build our understanding.
Max became a daily companion for me for the short time each morning during which I waited at my bus stop. He would wave to me from the playground across the camino. He and other small children watched, listened, pranced around and sometimes talked to the American students waiting for the bus to take us up the mountainside from the village of our host families to the renovated former Costa Rican dairy farm where we attended Spanish Language classes.

That tiny Costa Rican village with its dairy on the hill is a long way from the dairy on the hill at SUNY Cobleskill, but I consider it a part of SUNY Cobleskill’s greater campus. It was a core part of the educational experience I received from SUNY Cobleskill, and one of the best I have had!


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On the other side of the globe, in the country of Turkey, during a week in December of 2004,

The International Club at SUNY Cobleskill provides opportunities for people of all nationalities and cultural backgrounds to share their experiences, as well as good food and conversation.

SUNY Cobleskill Plant Science Professor George Crosby walked a deep, snowy path, in his dress shoes, alongside his companions from Atatürk University in Erzurum. Crosby was welcomed by the students, faculty and staff of Atatürk for a weeklong mission to initiate connections for exchange between the two colleges.

“A marvelous host,” said Crosby of the university he visited. The people of Atatürk University enthusiastically escorted Crosby to areas of interest to him and introduced him to the culture of Turkey. He was able to meet many people who were eager to know him and help him come to know Atatürk. Ready to take advantage of any learning opportunity, Crosby did not allow his dress shoes and the treacherous snow to hold him back.

A graduate student from Atatürk University took Professor Crosby to meet his family and the shop they run. Another group of students eagerly provided a tour of the campus. “They were hilarious!” said Crosby. “They spoke excellent English and did some of the greatest impressions of NPR radio personalities I have ever heard!”

While making several meaningful personal connections, Crosby was able to give presentations about SUNY Cobleskill to the 40,000-student colleg,which is a long way from and much bigger than SUNY Cobleskill’s 2,500-student campus. But, as Crosby explained about his experience, the relationship is not about the two colleges being alike.

“We are not a rubber stamp of each other, and that is okay. We are talking about building personal relationships and connections, faculty-to-faculty and student-to-student, across the cultures,” said Crosby. “There are things we do that they do not, and things they do that we do not, and that is where the opportunities for learning come from.”

Crosby’s trip was followed by a visit to SUNY Cobleskill by Dr. Telat Yanik, a member of the agricultural faculty at Atatürk University and an expert in fisheries and aquaculture. Dr. Yanik spent three months at SUNY Cobleskill during the fall semester 2005, presenting lectures and working with Dr. John Foster on a variety of grant-funded projects. Dr. Yanik and members of the SUNY Cobleskill Fisheries and Wildlife Department developed ideas for a joint commercial aquaculture venture that might yet develop.

This past summer, the exchange swung back to Turkey with a cultural visit to Atatürk by SUNY Cobleskill Associate Professor of Physics Dr. Thomas Cronin. Dr. Cronin spent a month as a visiting scholar to Atatürk. As a result of connections made during Crosby’s visit, this semester, Dr. Onder Barli of Atatürk University, is visiting SUNY Cobleskill in the faculty scholar exchange.
According to Susan Jagendorf, Ph.D., director of international programs at SUNY Cobleskill, the two universities are well-suited for a successful exchange because of their compatible programs, particularly in the areas of agriculture and natural resources. “Finding excellent partners made this a model program that can be easily implemented in other parts of the world,” Jagendorf said.
“When I come back to SUNY Cobleskill and share my international experiences, that enriches the experience of my students here,” added Crosby.


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Heading from Turkey south to the Equator and the African country of Uganda, SUNY Cobleskill Class of `92 agronomy alumnus David Waako pastors a 500-seat church in the semiarid tropical plateaus of his homeland. In December 2005 Professor Crosby met up with Waako while on sabbatical for what Crosby called a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“Much of what is done community-wide in Uganda is church based,” said Crosby. He traveled there as an irrigation specialist to provide training on bucket kit irrigation to the church community.

“In Uganda, if you are old enough to walk, you are old enough to carry water,” Crosby said. He described the country of 27 million people living in remote areas where hundreds of people can be seen walking everyday, carrying buckets from every available appendage, to support the 90% of the population made up of subsistence farmers. According to Crosby, in Uganda, “life is physical.”

The bucket kit irrigation systems Crosby was able to share with the people at Waako’s church were able to sustain the church’s community garden, which flourished with vegetables a month earlier than would be possible transporting water to the crops by hand.
When David Waako came to SUNY Cobleskill as a student in 1990, he was sponsored by a Ugandan church and charged with studying agronomy in the United States and bringing what he learned back to his Ugandan community. According to Crosby, Waako has done this quite well. “David is an amazing person—jump-starting churches and businesses in his home community. He is a very driven individual,” he said.

SUNY Cobleskill Professor Emeritus and Adunct Instructor of Humanities James Nuhlicek remembers Waako fondly and speaks highly of him. He tells his classes of the Ugandan student he had in class, who lived a few good miles from campus in Richmondville, walked to class every day in rain or snow, and still made it to every class on time.
“The Ugandan people are very social people,” said Crosby. “Their happiness is not dependent on the things we [in the US] tend to think will make us happy. There is nothing there to get focused on materialistically. By our standards, they have nothing. But the little they have, they will give you.”

Beside what Crosby described as a life-changing experience, he brought back from Uganda three kilograms of Moringa seeds, which he is growing in SUNY Cobleskill’s greenhouses as part of his doctoral research. He is using hydroponics and studying pH levels for optimal growth and re-growth patterns of Moringa trees.

“When I ask if they have heard about Moringa, people often think it is a dance,” said Crosby, referring to the meringue, (which I can say is a Latin dance I learned on a campus in the mountains of Santa Ana, Costa Rica!). However, Moringa, also known as “the miracle tree,” is a non-invasive, bitter-tasting plant with water-clarifying qualities, which, ounce-for-ounce, has more nutritional value than oranges or bananas.

“This plant can save a malnourished child’s life,” said Crosby. It was first discovered in the Southern Himalayas of India, and has become an important discovery toward eradicating hunger. To the best of Crosby’s knowledge, he may be the only person in the world growing Moringa hydroponically.

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Many have gone forth from SUNY Cobleskill’s campus to start farms. SUNY Cobleskill Associate Professor of Plant Science Chris Cash may be starting one in South Africa!
As we go farther south on the continent of Africa, we reach the place where Professor Chris Cash and his wife, Beth, spent two weeks in July 2006. The Cashes volunteered at TLC Orphanage in Eikenhof, near Johannesburg. It is a place where African children orphaned due to the AIDS epidemic are offered a safe, caring place to live and a possibility of future adoption.

Of this area suffering conflict and poverty, Cash says, “People are resilient. Two ramps and an acetylene torch on the side of the road are a car repair shop. A sewing machine set-up on the roadside is a tailor. People collect pipe from construction projects for their homes or wood for a fire to keep warm . . . whatever it takes to survive or get ahead, they do it.”

The orphanage has a home for infants, volunteer facilities for staff, and a school for youth. It is privately funded, and the funding often dries up for a time until new monies come in. “This past year they almost ran out of food,” explained Cash.

The orphanage’s director, Thea Jarvis, asked Cash to assist with developing a farm or garden on the property that would provide some food for subsistence. With the orphanage undergoing expansion projects to double in size, many other projects must be handled before the farm can take root. Cash has corresponded with Jarvis about the farm since his return from South Africa.
“This could also be a place for the older youth at the orphanage to learn a skill and benefit the orphanage with the food produced or marketing and selling of products,” said Cash. “The youth who are not adopted will need life skills and maybe this is one way to get that and provide sustainable resources for the orphans and staff.”

“The experience was excellent,” Cash commented, “Conflicting, but uplifting to see the resilience of people and the giving of mankind to help one another.”

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Goodbyes are often sad, but what about saying goodbye to people you met only three hours earlier? Any of the five students SUNY Cobleskill Associate Professor of Plant Science Dr.

American student Kevin Stevens (center) shares a laugh with a Chinese farmer (left) and Professor Lusheng Yu (right), vice president of the Jiangsu Polytechnic College of Agriculture and Forestry.

Zhongchun “ZJ” Jiang took on a field studies trip to China would be able to give you a first-hand account of such an experience.

ZJ led the trip as the result of receiving the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Internationalization. During the one-month field studies trip this summer, five SUNY Cobleskill students traveled through cities, towns, gardens, markets, parks, historical sites and universities throughout Eastern China, learning some of the Chinese language, about China’s environmental conservation efforts, even ballroom dancing and Chinese painting. To organize the trip, ZJ garnered the assistance of former colleagues, classmates and students in China, where he grew up and taught ornamental horticulture at Nanjing Agricultural University (NAU).

Students at NAU were excited to have native English-speaking students visit and provided a very warm welcome at the college’s “English Corner,” a place where Chinese students go to practice using their English skills in conversation with one another. “Groups of ten to 20 Chinese students eagerly gathered around each of our students,” said ZJ “and personal connections were made in a moment.”

It was after a second visit to the English Corner that ZJ said, “some students had tears in their eyes, and it was an emotional time of saying good-bye after talking with these students for only the short time in our travels.”

While it was a plant-science focused field study trip, as with all international experiences, a major benefit of the trip was the cross-cultural personal connections made. This is also the area where students experienced the greatest challenge and personal growth. “It exceeded our expectations in many ways,” said ZJ.

Additional benefits derived from the trip include letters of intent to create formal exchange programs between SUNY Cobleskill, NAU and Jiang Su Polytechnic College of Agriculture and Forestry.

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Also this summer, on the opposite side of the Eastern Hemisphere, a group of 50 SUNY

The Summer 2006 Field Studies in Agricultural Business class and its faculty instructors and advisors travelled to Germany and Holland to learn theories and concepts of European agriculture.

Cobleskill students, faculty and staff, led by Agricultural Business Assistant Professors Timothy Moore and Dayton Maxwell, were on a nine-day agricultural business field studies expedition to Germany and Holland. The two-credit course “Field Studies in Agricultural Business,” first offered in 2003 to provide exposure to theories and concepts discussed in the classroom, has had mostly domestic destinations in the mid-west and southeastern United States. This year, Moore and Maxwell decided to take it across the Atlantic.

The group visited cultural and agricultural destinations, including a machinery dealership, small family farms, a wind farm, arable crop farm, robotic milking dairy farm, angus farms and vineyards, agricultural universities, the market square in Bonn, and the German Young Farmers training center. They also visited Wewlsburg Castle, the Anne Frank house, the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, and more.

“We wanted to bring an international component to Ag Business,” said Maxwell. “Just being in that culture was great!”

“It was the first time many of our students had been the minority in a situation, and the first international experience for almost everybody on the trip,” added Moore.

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The latest group of SUNY Cobleskill students to participate in the college’s summer language immersion experience in Costa Rica included student Jeremy Elliott-Engel, who got a taste of

Student Jeremy Elliott-Engel, studying international agriculture policy at Atatürk University in Turkey, is joined by professors and a friend on the steps of a 16th century mosque.

the same village I called home for one of the greatest months of my life. Like I did, upon his return from Costa Rica, Jeremy worked with a crew of migrant farm workers here in United States. Because he was willing and able to speak their language, he was also able to earn their trust.

“International experiences offer the greatest learning environment you can get. It puts you in a state of constant education,” said Jeremy. “You learn so much about yourself when you study abroad because you have to rely on yourself. It made me realize I had the ability to do this, to live and study abroad, and I really could follow my dream of working in an international capacity.”

Because of this self-discovery, Jeremy is now studying abroad once again, spending an entire semester completing his internship in Turkish Agricultural Policy and International Trade at Atatürk University.

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Back in the US at Golding Elementary School in the village of Cobleskill, a young boy from

Visiting Fulbright cultural exchange scholar Hadeer Abou El Nagah, Ph.D. is the author of books written to increase understanding of Islam by non-muslums. She has delivered talks to faculty and staff, and is organizing SUNY Cobleskill’s first Muslim Student Organization.

Egypt is starting his 6th grade school year. Yusef is the 13-year-old son of Dr. Hadeer Abou El Nagah. Dr. Hadeer received a Fulbright scholarship for cultural enrichment and, as the result of a budding relationship between SUNY Cobleskill and Misr International University in Cairo, is studying Arabic women poets and teaching at SUNY Cobleskill.

An assistant professor of English Literature, Dr. Hadeer is the author of ten books, published in English and Arabic. The books introduce Islam to non-Muslims.

“After living in the United States I was shocked at the very small knowledge people have about Islam here,” she said to an auditorium of faculty, staff and students during a presentation to the campus community. “My religion is presented to half the world in the wrong way, and it upsets me very much. I was inspired to write these books because I feel it is my duty and your right to know the right information.”

Dr. Hadeer’s stay at SUNY Cobleskill follows a visit to Misr International University by SUNY Cobleskill’s Dr. Susan Jagendorf. Dr. Hadeer explains that “when I heard Dr. Susan tell us at Misr that ‘our students are like yours’ I admit, I thought ‘yeah right.’ But, now that I am here, I can see it is true.”

According to Jagendorf, establishing a partnership with a university in Egypt may open doors for other academic relationships in the Middle East. “SUNY Cobleskill has a diverse student population and a nurturing faculty,” said Jagendorf. “We are flexible and very student-centered, things that are important to the success of international exchanges.”

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SUNY Cobleskill is being enriched by other cross-cultural experiences right here on the campus. The college has 62 students enrolled from other nations, including: Anguilla, France,

Valemtina Shcerbakova, director of the Russian International Academy of Tourism in Tula, Russia and her interpreter greeted faculty and staff upon their visit to SUNY Cobleskill. Several students from the Academy have visited SUNY Cobleskill, and the two educational institutions are working to develop formal exchange programs.

Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Namibia, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Several relationships ease the path to studying here for students in Japan, Turkey and Anguilla, and we are working on establishing new programs in those countries and in Egypt, China, Poland and Russia.

“We are very impressed by the SUNY Cobleskill campus, its beautiful nature, your learning equipment, and most of all with your relationship with your students.” These words, spoken in Russian and translated with the help of interpreter Svetlana Drozhenko, came from Dr. Valentina Shcherbakova, director of the Russian International Academy of Tourism in Tula. Dr. Shcherbakova visited SUNY Cobleskill in September to learn more about the college and visit with two students from Tula currently studying here. Three more are expected next semester, according to SUNY Cobleskill Director of International Programs Susan Jagendorf.
SUNY Cobleskill was the first college to begin exchanges with Tula students through this program, a partnership of the Albany-Tula Alliance and SUNY.

“We hope our relationship will develop and we are hoping for your students and faculty to come to Tula, and we hope to arrange it as well as you did,” said Dr. Shcherbakova.

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I had a chance to revisit my international experience with every shared story it took to compile this trip around the globe. As I first learned on the playground with Max, great strides can be made when two very different people from very different places dare to take a step toward one another, maybe lightly nudge someone in their side or exchange a smile and a hello, hola, jambo, or ni hao, and learn from one another’s worlds.

“I wish everyone studied abroad for at least a part of their college education,” proclaimed Jeremy. “I want to make an effort for that to become more real for SUNY Cobleskill. I used to think ‘what is my limitation?’ but now, I embrace challenges. I developed a longing for that through my international experience, and now I know what I want to get out of graduating.”

Professor George Crosby sums it up pretty well: “It is one thing to have an academic experience, but it is always enriching when it can be combined with a social experience in a shrinking world . . . it breaks down walls and stays with you forever.”

“People from a ‘Small’ College...” was written by Amanda Tabolt, who earned her Bachelor of Technology in Agricultural Business from SUNY Cobleskill in 2004. In summer 2003, Amanda was one of the college’s first participants in the Costa Rican Spanish Intensive Language program, some of which she shares here. Amanda now serves as editorial assistant in the SUNY Cobleskill Office of Communications and Public Affairs.