About 50 family, friends, faculty, staff, and students attended a brief program and reception in Smith Center on the Hesston College campus Sunday afternoon, November 16, to honor the memory of Miriam Hershberger.

Hershberger, a 1974 graduate of the college, died in a pedestrian accident in Philadelphia on March 10, 2005. Following her untimely death, her family-her mother, Gladys Hershberger, Goshen, Ind., and her brothers, Paul (and Lorie) Hershberger, Pittsburg, Texas, and Del (and Michele) Hershberger, Hesston, Kan.-established the Miriam Hershberger Endowment Fund.

During his welcome, President Howard Keim said, “We’re gathered to honor Miriam Hershberger and to give thanks for an endowment fund set up in her honor to assist our ESL (English as a Second Language) program, which was a passion of Miriam’s, as well as international understanding between various peoples and cultures.

“I’d like to say thank you to the Hershberger family for your generous gifts for this fund,” he said. “It’s of great importance to the college as a whole and our international student program.”

Keim said a plaque will be installed in Smith Center, which reads, “The Miriam Hershberger Endowment Fund honors the memory of Miriam Hershberger ’74, whose passion was international friendship and cultural diversity.”

Paul Hershberger provided a brief background on his sister Miriam, a 1972 graduate of Hesston High School. “Today, we specifically remember Miriam’s love of persons from other languages and cultures,” he said. “As a student at Hesston College, Miriam traveled on a January interterm to Spain,” beginning a lifelong passion for connecting people from different cultures and languages.

After graduating from Tabor College (Hillsboro, Kan.) in 1976, Miriam Hershberger served in three locations with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) from 1976 to 1990, first teaching ESL to adult students in Lancaster, Pa., then teaching English to elementary students in Thailand, and finally teaching ESL at Hanoi (Vietnam) Foreign Language College. “She was one of the first MCC workers to return to Vietnam after the war,” Paul Hershberger said.

The family of Miriam Hershberger gathers for a photo with some of Hesston College’s international students, all of whom are or have been ESL (English as a Second Language) students. After Miriam’s untimely death in March 2005, the family established the Miriam Hershberger Endowment Fund to assist the college’s ESL program.

The international students in the front row (left to right) are: Marie Tomura, Tokyo, Japan; Shuyan Liu, Tianjin, China; Jungmin Oh, Seoul, Korea; Belinda Pramono, Semarang, Indonesia; Birat Pandey, Nawalparasi, Nepal; and Manabu Hisamoto, Osaka, Japan..

From 1990 until her death, Hershberger taught English to kindergarten, first, and second-grade students at Southwark Elementary School in Philadelphia. Most of her students were from new immigrant families.

During her lifetime, she also traveled to and interacted with the people and cultures of Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cambodia.

Dave Osborne, international student director, expressed his heart-felt thanks for the Miriam Hershberger Endowment Fund designated for the college’s ESL program. He reported that 40 international students are enrolled this fall. Of the 23 new international students, about half are in the ESL program, taught by Osborne or faculty member Patty Meier.

“We don’t have an intensive English language center as most schools do,” he explained. “International students in ESL classes attend those classes as well as regular academic classes. They’re courageous in that regard.”

Osborne said the Hershberger Endowment Fund has given the college new opportunities to support ESL students who work hard to stay up with everything and to make progress as quickly as they can. “They do make progress quickly because of what we’re asking them to do,” he said.

Osborne said endowment funds have been used to identify conversational partners, coupling an international student with someone on- or off-campus who can on a regular basis engage in conversational English with ESL students. Other examples include special tutoring in classes where students may be having difficulty, purchasing individualized materials for certain students, and for field trips.

“It’s meaningful to think about Miriam’s life and her commitment to ESL for people from other backgrounds,” Osborne concluded, “and to have a fund that actually connects her to our international students and our ESL program.”