In Iowa: Family without borders

The night the Paris attack happened, I had dinner with my sister.

Ava isn't my biological sister, and we weren't raised together. She's from Taiwan; I'm from Iowa.

We didn't know each other until about a decade ago, but I call her my sister nonetheless.

When she was an undergraduate student at the University of Northern Iowa, she connected with my parents, who live in Cedar Falls. She had moved to the United States to study, but her family remained some 11,000 miles away.

So she started coming to our house for holidays, Sunday dinners and sometimes just for long chats with my mom.

Today, Ava still keeps very much in touch. She's spent the last few years living in Bangkok, Thailand, and is currently visiting my parents in between attending education conferences in the United States and Canada. She came to stay at my house Nov. 13 so I could drive her to the airport to attend one of those conferences early Saturday morning.

As the news came in about the attacks in France, we shared a meal and conversation. We talked about all her extensive travels over the past few years, including to Paris and more recently to Turkey, where 102 people died when bombs went off at a peace rally Oct. 10.

We talked about how much we value travel, not just for new experiences but to meet and interact with new people and cultures.

It makes it harder to maintain an us-versus-them mentality when bad things happen in the world when the 'them” have faces and stories we know. It's harder to draw sweeping generalizations when we've seen how diverse the world is, and how much diversity of opinions and experiences exist in every society we've seen.

More and more, university students are participating in such exchanges of cultures and ideas, and the University of Iowa is part of that trend, according to the Open Doors Report, released Nov. 16 by the Institute of International Education.

The report says in 2015 the number of international students at U.S. colleges and universities had the highest rate of growth in 35 years, increasing by 10 percent to a record high of 974,926 students in the 2014-15 academic year.

And the UI has the 47th-highest international student enrollment in the nation, out of 1,485 higher education institutions in 2014-15.

Iowa City is sending American students abroad at high rates as well. For 2013-14, the UI's study abroad rate was 29 percent, compared to a national average of 10 percent.

Whether they realize it or not, those students will serve as informal ambassadors to the countries they study in and help make Americans more than just faces in the media to their host families and friends.

This Thanksgiving, I'm grateful Ava is joining us for our holiday meal. I'm grateful for my own time living abroad, as a student in South Africa and later in Swaziland. I am wiser for those experiences.

And I'm grateful the University of Iowa is getting more international. That diversity strengthens us all