Student story-Welcome to Kansas

By Bailey Buer and Erika Reals
Two hundred and ninety-four students. Fifty-eight schools. Twelve states. Visitors to the Flint Hills Publications Workshop know it’s all here, except one missing piece. Where’s Toto?

Journalism and English teacher Rebeka Fergusson-Lutz waved her hand in a sweeping motion when she described the sunflowers and wheat fields she imagined abounding along the roadsides on her trip to Manhattan, located in the Flint Hills of Kansas. These landscapes were painted in her mind by the iconic images she saw in National Geographic magazine.

Senior Jacob Casto, of Bartlesville, Okla., was expecting flat terrain with “a lot of corn.”

“That is not always true, especially close to Manhattan,” he said. “There are cliffs, hills, rocks. It was kind of beautiful closer to Manhattan – once you got away from the corn.”

Casto said it “scared” him to see how flat Kansas is – baked under oppressive heat.

“I was hoping when I came here my skin would stop feeling like it was on fire,” he said as his face flushed crimson. “It didn’t.”

Workshop visitors are not only experiencing geographical changes but social differences as well. Fergusson-Lutz said she recently returned to the United States from Qatar, located on the Arabian Peninsula on the coast of the Persian Gulf. In Qatar, she instructs students who attend the American School of Doha, an American high school with an American newspaper.

“It has a well-established tradition, but it isn’t scholastic journalism,” she said. “It’s changing, but there’s no history of free press in the Middle East.”

She calls New York state her home-base, volunteered in the Peace Corps and attended American University in Washington, D.C., but she always knew she was meant to go back overseas. A job opened in Qatar while she was studying the conflict in Palestine. She took it.

“The availability of accessible information in the Middle East is not large,” Fergusson-Lutz said. “It tends to be ‘Today, three roadside bombs went off in Iraq.’ We don’t get much past that.”

Though Fergusson-Lutz and Casto come from different backgrounds with universal stereotypes, this week they are both here for a common purpose.

“You’re sad because the people you see here, you’ll never see again,” Casto said. “It’s cool to be thrown in with people from a lot of different places. Different experiences, ideas and people all come together.”

Students, advisers and teachers have come from all across the nation. Now, some have realized that there is more to Kansas than sunflowers beside a yellow-brick road.

“Some stereotypes are true, some very off,” Fergusson-Lutz said. “But that’s the nature of the beast.”

Bailey Buer and Erika Reals are seniors at Kapaun Mt. Carmel High School and members of the advanced writing class at the Flint Hills Publications Workshop.