Five months since our selection process, and three months since I had coffee with her in the spring, Olja struck me as a different person at this summer’s orientation camp. It took me a while to figure out why an absolute social butterfly like her kept quiet for most of our group sessions, when I knew she had so much to say. And then it hit me. In contrast to her best friend Mia [insert hyperlink] (sorry Mia, we love you!), Olja doesn’t seek out the spotlight. She is the spotlight. She is the queen of crisp replies, the master of instant roasts. Whatever someone around her does, she adds color to it. She is the lantern that makes the most invisible ink legible.

Every conversation with Olja is an experience. When she says she struggled to be herself during the pandemic, I believe her 100%: Olja communicates with every atom of her being. She keeps moving her eyebrows, making affirmative gestures with her index finger, and tapping her head in a meme-like fashion. She is а semi-adult version of that cutely annoying kid with no filter who tells her best friend in front of 20+ people that, yes, she can be mean sometimes. 

But above anything else, she never forgets to laugh her heart out. My first memory of most of our kiddos is something they said in the interviews. My first memory of Olja – despite her killer interview – is of her sincere laughter at her own group’s struggles to figure out how to allocate hypothetical UWC offers to National Committees around the world in one of our group activities. This doesn’t mean Olja wasn’t driven to get into UWC. It just means she is the kind of person who wouldn’t have been able to do it unless she was having fun doing it.

When you speak to Olja, you get the unique sensation of absolute cluelessness at what is going to happen next. In our final round, we asked her if she had any unpopular opinions. While most other kiddos got political and spoke about the clash between their liberal values and Macedonian social norms, Olja decided to… defend dating shows!? (It was a solid answer: she doesn’t get why people are OK with dating apps but not with dating shows when the latter are more controlled and thus safer.)

Olja’s wickedness comes across in her understanding of UWC, too. “By the time I got my acceptance letter”, she recounts, “UWC Mostar and UWC East Africa were the only ones left. I was praying that I’d get Tansania! What better time than now to go to Africa, see all the monkeys, go on a safari!!??”. Earlier on in the process, while her parents were nudging her to rank the more nearby – and culturally familiar – UWCs higher on her preference list, Olja was watching videos about UWC Dilijan’s reuse of rain as a plant-watering tool…

Of course, as is the case with all of us, Olja’s life is not all smiles. I don’t want to end on a downer, but she makes me think of that old cliché about how those who radiate warmth into the world have to absorb its coldness so they can continue doing so. She knows her sarcasm is easy to misunderstand, maybe even more so in an intercultural bubble like UWC. And despite her confident sense of humour, she does care about how others see her. As a kid, she did theatre; at the age of five, she bombed on stage and got so embarrassed that she stopped doing an activity she loved. 

Olja might not be the most popular kid on campus, but she’ll be adored by anyone who makes the correct choice of letting her into their hearts. I can only encourage her to stay who she is and represent Macedonian/Balkan culture in its full roasting glory, while remembering that her unique humor comes from a place of empathy, joy, and ultimately, her love for life.

I can already hear her contagious laugh fill the lawns of UWC East Africa.
 

Kristijan Fidanovski

July 2023