Family reunited across continents
Published: March 10, 2006
After nine long years apart, Janet Bowen was reunited with her father last April.
“My Dad has been working here for nine years,” Bowen said. “He wanted us to come here and go to school.”
So in the spring of last year, the Bowen family — 12-year-old Janet, her mother and five brothers and sisters — packed up their belongings from their home in Nairobi, Kenya and made the move to Charlestown, where Janet’s father works as a medical technician for the Medical Center of Southern Indiana.
Moving from a house made of timber and tin in the lush greenery of Nairobi to rural Charlestown was quite a transition for the sixth-grader.
“It’s terribly different in Nairobi,” Bowen said. “There’s no winter and the people are louder.”
One of the things Bowen said she was most shocked by was the way Americans treat their pets.
“I saw my neighbor playing with her dog and she let it lick her mouth,” Bowen said crinkling her nose. “I would never let a dog lick me.”
At school in Nairobi, Janet had two years of English language classes under her belt, and though she occasionally still struggles with grasping the meaning of some words, her teachers have been bowled over by the international student’s eagerness to learn.
“She has a passion for learning,” said Sharon Criswell, an English and language teacher at Charlestown Middle School. “This is my 35th year of teaching and I’ve never had a student work this hard.”
Bowen is enrolled in a typical sixth grade English class, but gets one hour of additional help with her schoolwork each day from English As a Second Language teacher Carolyn Waters.
“Not only does she do all her work, she encourages other to do theirs,” Waters said.
Bowen said she is quick to help others who are struggling because she understands their fear of the unknown. As her confidence and abilities develop in the classroom, she has become a unwitting role model to her peers.
“The students respect her…they admire her willingness to try,” Criswell said.
Part of Bowen’s quest to learn more comes from the love she has for her new homeland and friends.
“Even if my Dad was not here, I really wanted to come here,” she said. “I wanted to know how the people are, how they speak and what they do.”
While she’s still in the process of mastering English, Bowen is running circles around other competitors as a member of the distance track team at Charlestown Middle School. Even though she’s only in sixth grade, she’s already carved out a spot as one of the school’s top runners. Running is a family sport in the Bowen family; her dad, older brothers Hillary, Robert and Amos and younger sister Mercy are all practice the sport.
“When we were in Africa, they made us run in P.E. and I just grew up running,” Bowen said. “It keeps me in good shape and makes me feel confident.”
Over the school year, as Criswell has grown to know and care about the hard-working Kenyan transplant, she has also been forever changed by knowing her.
“She inspires me to be excited,” Criswell said. “This is the end part of my teaching career and it’s been like an exclamation point.”
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