Poignant performance at the Day of the International Student
04 Apr 2011
Is it possible to deeply touch an audience of more than two thousand international students using nothing more than a few hundred balls of wool?
On the Day of the International Student, hosted by Nuffic on Saturday 7 November in The Hague, British comedian Adam Fields proved that, yes, this is possible. At first, as he mounted the stage in the World Forum complex’s cavernous theatre, he was no more than a tiny figure.
He told his jokes, took aim at the Dutch and their guttural language… and then it began: Fields called for someone from the audience to stand up – a Kenyan student volunteered – and threw him a ball of wool. Fields himself kept hold of one end; now, he observed, there was a tie linking them. He invited his new partner to throw the ball on.
And that’s when the balls of wool began hurtling into the audience from all sides.
The culprits were staff from Nuffic, stationed at strategic spots to ensure maximum effect. In under a minute the more than two thousand participants were linked together by lengths of wool, with no one left out.
Ties
Adam Fields added a few words to make his point. You’ll never stand alone, he said, if you choose to create ties. There is always someone who will pick up the other end.
But the small man on the podium wasn’t finished yet. He asked everyone to hold their ends of the string above their heads. It was as though the audience was covered by a gigantic spider’s web. That one moment was all that was needed to create a special bond between all 2000 people – representing more than a hundred countries – making up the audience.
Next, Fields instructed everyone to hand their strings forward; within a few minutes all the tangled webs lay on the stage. It was time for Fields’ last visual lesson: tearing one string is easy, but an entire web is impossible to break apart. And that is the secret of sustainable interconnectedness.
Not alone
It was then that emotions got the better of many, with the realization that though we have our homes in every corner of the world, we are not alone. Not ever, not anywhere. Not after this experience. It was, at the close of the Day of the International Student, a graphic illustration of what the event is all about.
International students who studied in the Netherlands will always turn to each other, never more so than once they have become alumni, because – as the familiar Dutch saying goes – two heads are better than one, and unity is strength.
