Lesson in preconceptions

Letter from the editor

I'll admit, I was a little nervous about Saturday's assignment — covering the International Fellows.

I didn't know what to expect from a group of about 60 military leaders from around the world or how they would react to me, a journalist and an American woman. I wondered, "Would they even talk to me?"

Instead of rigid men in uniform who were uninterested or above speaking to a small town newspaper, I found something else.

Here they were in jeans and T-shirts laughing, chatting and snapping photographs — just like any other visitors to the Village.

Instead of being aloof or timid, officers would come right up to me and just start talking, asking questions about Bigfork and the Flathead Valley. And I thought I was the one conducting the interview.

The weekend was meant to shatter these officers' preconceptions of each other, but it also did the same for me and I imagine for other Bigfork residents who met them.

The lesson resident Marilyn Graham told me she had discovered as she traveled proved true, "Wherever you go, the moms are moms and the children are children," she said. "We are all people."

—Jasmine Linabary