Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Librarian gets 'summer vacation' of a lifetime

If teachers get to write “what I did on my summer vacation” essays, Portales High School Librarian Heather Christensen will have a winner come August.

She is one of 12 educators (six high school and six college) from New Mexico and Arizona selected to spend a month this summer in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, “two countries I could barely spell and had never thought about before,” she said.

Christensen said she received an email invitation last fall to apply for the program. It’s officially called the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Curriculum Development program, and it’s a joint project between New Mexico Highlands University and University of Arizona Russian Department and Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

She initially didn’t take it too seriously.

“I went home that night and told my husband I got a really strange email, expecting a good laugh,” Christensen said. “But his first response was that I should apply.”

“I found myself searching for information about the two countries and was surprised to find some similarities between them and eastern New Mexico,” Christensen said.

The more she learned, the more intrigued she became.

“Running through my mind the whole time was something another librarian in the state had said in a workshop I attended a few years back,” Christensen said. “She had recently returned from a Fulbright exchange program, and said, ‘If you ever get a chance to participate in one, grab it.’”

She applied and found out in November she was one of the lucky dozen who will spend three weeks in Kazakhstan and a week in Uzbekistan studying literature, history, folk music, and culture in a seminar called “Central Asia: Crossroads of Civilization.”

“The area is home of the ancient Silk Roads,” Christensen said, “and as a result are a crossroads for a number of different cultures.”

Christensen is a familiar face to many in the Portales area. She was the youth services librarian at Portales Public Library from 2007 to 2010, and a cataloger and reference librarian at Eastern New Mexico University’s Golden Library from 2010 to 2013. She’s in her fifth year at Portales High School, where she also teaches two sections of honors English, and accompanies the high school choir on piano.

Christensen’s first major out-of-country travel took place in 2013 when she journeyed with the Eastern New Mexico University choir to Italy, and she’s eager to use her passport again.

“It’s such an incredible experience to leave everything you find familiar and comfortable, and experience something completely different,” she said. “It's more than a little terrifying to be in a place where not only the language, but the food, the customs, the ways of looking at things are all so different from what you’ve always experienced. You can’t help but be changed in that discovery.”

Betty Williamson is plotting a way to hide in Heather Christensen’s luggage. You may reach her at: [email protected]

 
 
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