“Giving a scholarship to an international student is giving them the world.” Rev. Juliet Chirowa doesn’t mince words when talking about the barriers people face when seeking to study in the U.S., and the impact of donors’ generosity. “It makes life manageable; you only need to find money for accommodation and food. If I had to fund the whole program without a scholarship, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Prior to attending Garrett, Rev. Chirowa served as a pastor in Zimbabwe for 29 years. In that work, she had become acutely aware of a need and desire to learn more about pastoral care, to better walk beside her congregation. “I’ve always been a person who aligns with suffering people,” she explains. “Yes, part of being a pastor is sharing the Word. But what I love most about ministry is offering presence to those going through trauma, those who are sick—to help anyone enduring challenges know they are not alone.” The scope and magnitude of that pain, however, requires more than a compassionate heart—she needed training as a chaplain. “I knew the United States was foundational in the field of pastoral care and counseling, especially Clinical Pastoral Education” she says, “and particularly wanted to learn from the expertise here at Garrett.” But turning that dream into a reality is easier said than done.

“Even just accessing the information is a real challenge,” she explains. “Most of us in Zimbabwe don’t have computers. And that’s before you get into the difficulty of navigating the immigration office to apply for a visa.” While Garrett’s admissions team was able to assist her in the process, there are structural hurdles that the U.S. demands from anyone seeking to obtain a student visa. “You need money to do that,” she continues. “You need to have all your information at your fingertips, and even after all of that, you’re going to be coming to the United States with the last dollar in your pocket.” For someone like Rev. Chirowa, who also needs to fund her three children’s education, it takes an entire community’s resources and support to pursue a masters degree, even with a scholarship. Despite her diligence jumping through the State Department’s many hoops, she was still denied a visa in her first year. Fortunately, Garrett’s expansion of online, accessible classes meant she wasn’t forced to defer her dreams. “Garrett helped me access books and classes online that first year,” she says. “They even gave me mock visa interviews with the dean so I could prepare, walking beside me while I was still in Zimbabwe.”

That diligence paid off: Her second year, Rev. Chirowa secured the visa she needed to study in Evanston. “Student Life prepared everything for my landing,” she says with joy. “A student picked me up from the airport. When I got to my room, I had sheets for my bed, blankets to sleep on, a full refrigerator that fed me those first few days.” Programs like Eliza’s Kitchen and Closet offer yet more assistance: free winter gear, household appliances, and other essentials for on-campus living.

All this support costs money to offer and sustain, but Garrett is blessed with alums and friends who are passionate about ensuring that material obstacles don’t stand between folks like Rev. Chirowa and their ministry. Peggy Ferrell attended Garrett for a year, where she also met her late husband, Rev. Charles Ferrell (GTS ’54). “Those classes at Garrett prepared me so well for my life as a minister’s wife, in addition to my own continued studies,” she says. “But more than that, Charlie and I were blessed with lifelong friendships made at Garrett. My three seminary roommates and I not only met our husbands at Garrett, but also remained close no matter the geographical distance, and for 7 decades were caring sounding boards for each other.” When the Ferrells considered how they could honor their deep gratitude, they felt powerfully called to pay it forward to the next generation of clergy. Therefore, they funded an endowed scholarship in their names.

“Charlie and I always kept our eyes out for what we were able to do. We knew we were not going to save the world, but that’s not our assignment. Thankfully, God put someone else in charge of that,” she laughs. “I still look for ways I can be of service to God and that’s why I gave to support Garrett’s international students. We had international students live with us many times over the years”. She recalls fondly an experience of using the Bible to transcend a language barrier. “The woman didn’t speak English, I didn’t speak Albanian, and we were alone. What could we do?” Ferrell remembers. “The woman brought out her Albanian Bible and would point to scriptures that were meaningful to her, and I would do the same—that’s how we conversed. After a few exchanges, the Albanian woman put her hands together and looked toward the sky, offering the few English words she knew: ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ It was quite a touching thing.”

Moved by this experience and others, Ferrell made a significant donation to support Garrett’s international students at a critical juncture when that generosity is needed more than ever. “I see students caught in emergency situations not of their own doing and I thought, ‘Aha, God is telling me that I can do something about that,’” she says. “It may not be everything, but God takes what we can offer and increases it by grace. That’s what makes life exciting.” Through gifts from the Ferrells and many others, Garrett can offer significant scholarships to students like Rev. Chirowa that make a difficult dream an attainable reality. “We are coming from poor communities and cannot afford those fees for ourselves,” Rev. Chirowa notes. “A scholarship lifts that burden.” For Ferrell, it also creates at Garrett the kind of learning environment God desires. “Obviously, God loves diversity,” she quips. That’s why we can pick a variety of flowers and form a beautiful bouquet. And, when we rotate crops, we get a healthier soil. If you go through your life only seeing things from one perspective, all you’ll ever see are the walls of your own tunnel. We need students from all types of cultures to expand our view of God’s world.”

Increasing accessibility in theological higher education births community in which Rev. Chirowa can joyfully learn. “Garrett is a place where culture is not an issue,” she says with a smile. “It allows me to be who I am as much as I accommodate someone from somewhere else. When I looked on the website, I thought the absence of discrimination might just be words. But when I came here, I discovered it’s true: You feel so secure on campus.” After graduation, Rev. Chirowa wants to pursue additional pastoral care training in a local hospital but then wants to put those skills to use in her home country. It’s a journey that mirrors what Ferrell sought to seed with her gift. “My hope is that they will do God’s will for their lives wherever they are.” she concludes. “That’s certainly what our world needs.”

To learn more about how to give your gift and support students like Rev. Chirowa, visit our giving website.

I think of myself as a good writer, a good student, a good test taker… in English.

“In English” is likely not a caveat I would have noticed or named before coming to Garrett. It’s now one of my favorite things about this place, though, that I am so often in a classroom with people whose minds were first shaped by a different language than my own — different sounds, different multiplicities of meaning, different idioms from different contexts — and whose minds are continuously stretched and sharpened by the task of translation.

This idea — that all our minds are shaped by our particularities—is central to Garrett’s curriculum as I’ve experienced it in the Pastoral Theology PhD program. Like every PhD program at Garrett, it began with Biblical and Theological Hermeneutics, which asked us to consider how our interpretations of sacred texts are shaped by our own intellectual heritage and social context. My postcolonial theology class offered a powerful case-in-point as it examined how the historical realities of colonialism continue to shape culture and systems of power. My class in intersectionality and theology explored the interplay and implications of the many identities we all carry.

In fact, every course I’ve taken here has invited me to think deeply about my own identities, as they inform my experience, highlighting certain aspects and leaving me unaware of others. At Garrett, this reality has both ethical and theological implications: the more voices we hear and perspectives we consider, the closer to truth and justice we come, and the more of God we begin to understand.

Last semester, I served as the teaching assistant for my advisor, Dr. AHyun Lee, in her class on family therapy. I’d taken the class as a student several years earlier, but far more international students filled the class this time. That meant that when we discussed concepts like family structure or the expectations placed on certain familial roles, we were reminded that family means different things, looks different ways, and carries different expectations—even as we all have a story about what family is for us.

As a class, we were challenged to navigate nuance and grapple with complexity in a way that we otherwise wouldn’t. In doing so, our conversation highlighted differences to which we must attend in our work as counselors and pastoral caregivers, differences that might otherwise have gone unacknowledged. When so much of counseling and caregiving is about helping others feel seen and heard, being able to recognize and acknowledge those differences matters. Being a part of conversations like those in our family therapy class helps me to be a better pastoral caregiver and a better pastoral theologian.

As an academic field, pastoral theology brings psychology and theology into conversation with each other, often for the sake of providing care. One thing the two fields have in common is that they are both sometimes taken, explicitly or implicitly, as absolute truth, one in the name of science and the other in the name of God. Both are sometimes treated as though they did not develop within contexts of their own.

In recent years, pastoral theologians, among others, have increasingly written about the risks of treating psychology as though it is objective and morally neutral when it often functions in ways that are anything but. Think, for example, of diagnoses that are applied in ways biased by race, gender or class and used to discount people. Another major critique is that there is a cultural tendency in the United States to frame problems solely through the lens of mental health when advocacy and justice work are also clearly needed. This frame stifles analysis of the systems in which we live and how they contribute to our collective mental health crises.

My teachers and fellow students — international and from the U.S. — in the counseling programs at Garrett insist on a different framework, one that doesn’t avoid issues of class and of culture, one that recognizes a fuller breadth of the realities in which people live. That’s made possible by an unwavering commitment to compassion and by the wisdom that this community brings, each person speaking from their own context, in its own particularities.

As a student, I am grateful for that wisdom. I’m grateful to have an advisor who invites me to consider identity, culture and power dynamics as I learn to be a TA. I’m grateful to have teachers whose own contexts position them to critique the culture I grew up in as a white American, a culture that I may or may not be able to recognize and critique myself. I’m also grateful for the moments when I realize a conversation is happening in English because I am in the room, grateful for the kindness my colleagues extend, and for the reminder that I have work to do and languages to learn.

I’m grateful to be in classrooms with people who humble and inspire me. Humbled and inspired, it turns out, is a great way to learn.