Stouffer Place offers community

By Trigg Edwards

Thursday, February 26, 2009

For some international students, living in Stouffer Place apartments can help them cope with the overwhelming process of leaving home, country and family.

About 80 percent of the estimated 2,300 residents in Stouffer Place are international students, or those students’ family members. This gives the apartments an environment where different cultures and heritages are tolerated and shared.

Sometimes residents will go years without seeing any friends or family from back home. One such resident is Hector Codoceo, Iquique, Chile, who came to the University of Kansas from Chile because his wife received a Fulbright Scholarship.

“I knew nobody,” said Codoceo. “You can find somebody from your country or the same area.”

Codoceo and his wife have been at Stouffer for more than eight years now, and plan to return to their native Chile as early as May.

“We now are so used to being here,” said Codoceo, “It’s going to be kind of chalky in a way ... cause we have a life here already with friends. It’s going to be difficult to leave our life here.”

The residents of Stouffer hail from a vast array of countries including Chile, China, South Korea, India, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

Seyool Oh, Ph.D. candidate, Jinhae, South Korea, is the president of the Stouffer Neighborhood Association.

“Stouffer Place is a unique place,” said Seyool Oh, Jinhae, South Korea doctoral student and president of the Stouffer Neighborhood Association. “Off-campus apartments don’t have a community”.

Because most of the students are international students, the established community can greatly ease the transition to a new environment and culture by surrounding students new to the country with others in the same position.

The Stouffer neighborhood is self-governed by the SNA. They deal with policy rules and community building. Occasionally there will be meetings that deal with communal issues. The communal issues affect every resident, student or nonstudent.

Actually, the family members outnumber the students, Most of the residents who live in the apartments are family members of students. SNA is funded by the University, but the funding is disproportionate because the school funds the group for each student, not the resident.

Donald Claus, vice president of the Stouffer Neighborhood Association, has lived at Stouffer for more than seven years and has seen many of the residents’ kids grow up in that time.

“I was fortunate to live in Stouffer,” said Claus. “You have people of all ages and people of many nationalities and so here at Stouffer there are lots of things we do that allow people to meet very quickly”.

Throughout each year, the neighborhood will host a various assortment of activities from throwing charity fundraisers to putting a slip and slide on top of Daisy Hill.

— ­— Edited by Liz Schubauer

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