by Ben Quach ’27
One week ago, Bellarmine held the Unity Assembly and hosted the Global Village, an event celebrating the cultural diversity prominent at Bell. It was for students to learn, experience, and expose themselves to other people, traditions, and cultures.
The events followed in the path of a first-time exchange program for Bellarmine, where teachers and administrators welcomed students from a fellow Jesuit school, Hiroshima Gakuin, in Hiroshima, Japan, to come visit Bellarmine’s campus and the Bay Area. This week, I talked with Mr. Jemison, our principal, about this event on campus and what it meant for students and faculty alike.
The start of the exchange program began last year, Mr. Jemison explained, when Dr. Arriola, who was interim principal at the time, emailed Mr. Jemison about “a contingency of Japanese students who came on Bellarmine’s campus, and through her conversation with the boys and their teacher, [about] a school in Hiroshima that had a relationship with Bellarmine.” Part of that relationship involved many things they were hoping to find out about the school.
Mr. Jemison then reached out to Hiroshima Gakuin through email, and later visited them during his time in Japan. He got to know them, and that interscholastic relationship just developed even more. As a result, the Japanese students “came back this year for a more formal exchange program.”
Reflecting on his experience with the students on campus, Mr. Jemison enjoyed “the idea that two Catholic Jesuit schools, from totally opposite ends of the world, could meet and learn about each other.” What’s more was the understanding that “[both schools] had so much in common, despite [the] language barrier.” He told me that “smile[s], handshakes, eating food, being in classes – all those things unite [us], even though [we] may have only spent about eight days together.”
But his favorite parts of the exchange students’ time on campus were much more personal: “two things on the day they left. There were at least fifteen boys; I saw about eight of them crying because they were so appreciative and emotional about [the experience. “I think the most important thing though, was when I got on the bus, and I told the boys bye, and I said, “Go Bells!” and they said, “Go Bells!”
Looking at the time these Japanese students spent with the Bellarmine community, Mr. Jemison had some final lessons and takeaways to share, “For so long, at least for that last three of four years, post-COVID, we’ve not done any of these things – there was an abrupt stop when COVID happened. And now we’re re-engaged, we remember what the benefits are [of] cultural exchanges. We understand that we’ve learned so much from them. That there’s an educational component that far exceeds anything we can learn in the classroom. We understand diversity even more and the benefits. That we have to do this because that is part of our mission – Men For and With Others – that’s what this was truly about.”