Each year, mid-career professionals from around the world come to Cornell as part of the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program, building on their skills as leaders in public service within agriculture, rural development and natural resources management. Each Fellow in the program is paired with a Friendship Partner.
Friendship Partners are families and individuals in the Ithaca community who graciously volunteer to support Fellows as they integrate into US cultures and experiences. Many of the local partners are Cornell University faculty and staff members. These warm and kind individuals offer their time and friendship to Fellows to help them with everything from moving into their new Ithaca-based homes to exploring the local outdoors to experiencing US holidays and celebrations. And when harder challenges in life have struck our Fellows, Friendship Partners have been some of the most generous contributors of comfort and steady support to the Fellows. Our Fellows often consider their Friendship Partners to be extensions of their own family by the end of the fellowship program.
In this piece, Edson Carneiro, a 2021-22 Humphrey Fellow, reflects on time spent with the Miller family as he adjusted to life at Cornell.
When I first arrived in Ithaca in August 2021, I hadn’t secured an apartment. It took me about a week to find one. As I was looking for my new home, my Friendship Partners, the Miller family, kindly opened their home to me for a few days. The Miller family was a culturally rich and diverse family with family members from the USA, South America, and India. I felt so welcomed at their home that, from those days onward, I felt that I was also one of the Millers.
After I found an apartment, Jay Miller generously offered his pick-up truck to help me move my furniture and get settled in my new home. Jay became a great friend who also taught me new and insightful perspectives about biodiversity conservation. His views opened my eyes to new concepts of licensed hunting as a form of animal population control in the Ithaca area. When we weren’t talking science, Jay would take me out to kayak on Cayuga Creek, a small stream in western New York.
