On April 5th, we proudly celebrated our Closing Ceremony on Graduation Day for the fourteen students of the SENS 2025 program, along with two tutors who were new to the program, and thus also students in some sense. The three-month journey seemed too short for many of us, as we had come to live and study closely as one big family. In our estimation, levels of trust and mutual caring were higher this year. This is significant because our cohort was so diverse not only ethnically and linguistically, but also in terms of religious belief and socioeconomic class. In what may seem an insignificant gesture, our female students routinely borrowed each other’s national dress; Vietnamese women wore Indian saris or Myanmar longyis, and Myanmar and Indian women wore the long flowing Vietnamese Ao Dai. Our workshop leaders or field trip hosts could rarely guess where anyone was from.
