Home Away from Home / Beauty Lies in Diversity

10,000 miles away from home, where everyone looks alike and speaks one language, I met the world in one location. I came to the US as my first country of travel outside of my home country Rwanda, and I met people from all over the world on a single campus at Trinity College, in Hartford, CT. It did not take long to adjust because I had a community of other international students, all trying to find a home away from home. We found comfort in telling stories from each other's homelands, sharing our cultures, and discussing the differences between life in the US and back home.

Trinity has more than 60 countries represented on campus. To me, this diversity represented beauty and inspired me to share this beauty though my photography. I was able to create portraits of students from 10 different countries from 5 different continents. Those countries are arranged from East to west respectively in the album, they are: Timor-Leste, Siberia/Russia, Bangladesh, Germany, Rwanda, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Navajo Nation, Paraguay, and Mexico. For their portraits, students wore traditional clothing from their homeland, which they carried all the way to Trinity.

Beauty lies in diversity!