One Room, Many Nations
Members of the International Class share backgrounds and find common ground
The International Class is open to immigrants, refugees, and anyone seeking connection without borders.
Room 327 at First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta is a place full of stories, not just those in the Bible but those of a diverse company of members of different nationalities and backgrounds. Among them are a Palestinian student who came to Atlanta to live with a family he met while they were touring the Holy Land; an Armenian woman raised in war-torn Lebanon who escaped by boat to marry a Cuban mission worker in Cyprus; a Ghana-born physician whose father’s royal family refused to accept her peasant mother and who learned from her mother how to forgive and welcome others.
Fouad Abu-Akel, Lena Galindo, and Dr. Dorothy White-Williams are just a sampling of the members of First Presbyterian’s International Class. Now meeting every first Sunday of the month, the class has members from across the globe as well as American-raised congregants wishing to broaden their worldview.
This decades-old class gave birth to Atlanta Ministry with International Students (AMIS) and helped develop Villa International, a home for scientists and doctors from other countries who are working with or studying at Atlanta institutions such as the CDC and Emory University.
Susan Farrar, a longtime leader, attended the class before joining the church in 1982—not an unusual situation. In 1978, the class was only three years old. She had moved to Atlanta from Summerville (located in the northwest corner of Georgia) and was looking for a church. First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta felt huge compared to her small hometown church. The International Class appealed to her because of an interest in other cultures she had developed while living abroad during high school and college. The class also provided the intimacy and personal relationships she was longing for within a broader church setting. “There are so many interesting people! And people are really interested in getting to know you and in your getting to know them,” she said.
Despite its reputation for “Southern hospitality,” Susan believes that Georgia can be cool to newcomers. “I think we have hospitality confused with social politeness. ‘Southern hospitality’ is just being friendly. But hospitality, according to the Bible, involves sharing meals, inviting people into your home, really getting to know them, offering them the shirt off your back, tending to their wounds. Hospitality is a lot more than being friendly.”
In the International Class, people “get below the surface and start seeing God in each other, even in people who don’t practice the same faith,” she said.
On a recent Sunday, the back row of young men were all graduate students from Saudi Arabia studying at local universities: Clark Atlanta, Georgia Tech, and Emory. Some of them were Muslim. Being Presbyterian—or Christian, for that matter—is not a requirement to participate. In fact, one of the purposes of the class is to share knowledge about one another’s religions and cultures. A winter 2022 series was titled “What Is the Arab World Like?”
Farrar shares leadership these days with Oksana Klymovych, a native of Ukraine who came to Atlanta with her now ex-husband and decided to stay. Her daughter, Daniella, a senior in high school, spoke no English when they arrived in 2008. Her mother says that she learned the language in First Presbyterian Sunday school classes.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine advanced, Klymovych arranged an online Sunday school session with her former boss, a lawyer and former member of Ukraine’s parliament, and with one of her longtime friends. They described conditions of mass torture and death that were reported on American newscasts the next day. The class itself was available online to people who couldn’t attend in person. The experience gave International Class members and friends an opportunity to hear firsthand accounts and ask questions of Ukrainians living through the ongoing war without the filter of the media.
Oksana says she has found a home in the class. “The International Class was always very welcoming,” she said. “We try to continue the tradition and welcome people who have different backgrounds and experiences in life.”
This openness to diversity has encouraged many visitors to become church members, some of whom go on to become congregational leaders.
Starting from Scratch
The late Cliff Bailey, one of the International Class’s founding members, wrote down its history in 2003. In it, he traced the class’s roots to the American Field Service International Student Exchange Program, which was active from the 1950s through the 1970s. During that time, several First Presbyterian families hosted students. In 1963, Bailey volunteered to become an area representative for Georgia.
In 1970, church members hosted a Christmas International House, a program created by the Presbyterian Church in the United States (the old “Southern” denomination that merged with the “Northern” church in 1983 to form today’s PCUSA). They turned Sunday school rooms into dormitory space for about sixty-five college students who couldn’t go home for the holidays. Some of the international students soon began to attend regular church services.
Fahed Abu-Akel was one of the early facilitators of the International Class. Despite being anxious about moving to the South, Lena Galindo and her husband immediately felt welcome in class.
A couple of years later, Rev. Bob Bevis, the church’s first community minister, recruited Fahed Abu-Akel, a Palestinian student at Columbia Theological Seminary, to intern at the church. Fahed was charged to lead a tutoring program at a nearby school and would go on to describe how the student exchange program, the Christmas International House, and Rev. Bevis’s role in the community all converged to form what is now the International Class at First Presbyterian.
The class was composed of students from across metropolitan Atlanta and church members who wanted to get to know them.
By 1976, Bevis concluded that hosting students over the Christmas break wasn’t enough; there needed to be ongoing relationships in place between students and Atlanta-area residents. He convened representatives of twenty churches to hear his idea. Six of these congregations formed AMIS and matched students at area colleges with local families. Fahed Abu-Akel oversaw the program from 1978 until 2012. For many of those years, its offices were housed at First Presbyterian Church.
“A lot of international students are sent by their governments to study in the United States,” said Abu-Akel. “They go back to their countries and become religious, political, and government leaders all over the world.” It is in the diplomatic interest of the United States to have relationships with them, he said. “We developed stronger relationships around the world through First Presbyterian Church, the International Class, and AMIS than we could have ever dreamed.”
Then-senior pastor Dr. Harry Fifield and members Bob and Iris Eskew were among the early advocates for Villa International. The thirty-three-room residence opened in 1972 on Clifton Road near Emory University and the CDC. Since then, it has housed more than twenty-six thousand guests from 179 countries.
It was born out of tragedy, Abu-Akel said, when an African scientist working at the CDC as a guest of the US State Department, feeling isolated, committed suicide. Women from the Southern Presbyterian Church began fundraising, but other denominations soon became involved.
“From the beginning, First Presbyterian was a key supporter,” Abu-Akel said. “Our stamp is all over the place.”
A Second Generation
Abu-Akel has led several groups from First Presbyterian on tours of the Holy Land. One stop was always Kafr Yasif, the village in Galilee where he was raised. There, his extended family would gather to welcome the visitors from Atlanta. That’s how Fahed’s nephew, Fouad, met the late Bob and Iris Eskew.
Fouad Abu-Akel felt he could not get the education he sought in Israel. In 1979, with his uncle and newfound friends in Atlanta, he decided to come here to study. The Eskews opened their home to him.
“I became the youngest child of the Eskews,” Fouad Abu-Akel said. “Soon I was calling Iris ‘Mother,’ and Bob was ‘Father.’”
Everyone is welcomed regardless of background, and everyone benefits from cross-cultural dialogue.
In Israel, Fouad had been Eastern Orthodox, but after accompanying the Eskews to church every Sunday, he soon became Presbyterian.
“One of the first things I was exposed to was the International Class at FPC,” he said. “It made me feel welcome in a new country. It made me want to stay here and become a complete member of society.”
Fouad studied at Georgia State University, Georgia Tech, and what is now Kennesaw State, earning degrees in electrical engineering. For twenty years he worked for a company making the large computers that nurses wheel around on hospital floors. After the company was bought out, he opened his own consulting business.
“I wanted to do something really significant to honor the Eskews and the country I adopted,” he said. “I ended up joining the US Army and serving for six years.”
an international community
Atlanta
- 13.9% of the population are immigrants.
- 45% of immigrants come from Latin America.
- 2,600 foreign-owned enterprises.
- 1.3M international visitors (2017).
- 70 consular and trade offices and 31 binational chambers of commerce.
- Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport serves more than 75 international destinations in 50 countries.
Georgia
- More than 1M residents born outside the US (2019).
- 1 in 10 residents is an immigrant.
- Immigrants were from:
- Mexico (22%)
- India (9%)
- Jamaica, Korea, and Guatemala, each with (4%)
- 45% of immigrants had become naturalized citizens (2018).
- 22,789 international college and university students (2018).
- Georgia Tech (6,049)
- Georgia State (3,199)
- Emory (3,104)
- International students came from:
- China (30.4%)
- India (16.9%)
- South Korea (9.1 %)
- Saudi Arabia (3.3%)
- Nigeria (2.1%) and others
Sources: Atlanta Mayor’s Office of International Affairs; University System of Georgia International Education Office; Migration Policy Institute; American Immigration Council
While in the army, he married Narjis, his sweetheart from back home. Narjis lived with the Eskews while he was deployed, and when their first son was born, it was Iris Eskew who accompanied her to the hospital.
Another important influence, Fouad Abu-Akel said, was Dr. Paul Eckel, senior pastor at First Presbyterian from 1977 until 1988. “His sermons gave me a bedrock foundation to become an American who contributes positively to society,” he said.
Fouad Abu-Akel has been on the church’s session, has helped resettle refugees, and has also worked with the church’s other international ministries.
“The Eskews, the church, the international Sunday school class—all those go together in my life,” he said.
An International Marriage
Lena Peltekian Galindo is Armenian by heritage, Lebanese by birth, and American by choice. When the Young Turk government began massacring Armenians in the Ottoman empire during World War I, her parents’ families escaped first to Syria, then to Lebanon, leaving behind all their possessions. Some Armenians were forced to become Muslim, but her parents were Orthodox Christians and raised her in the church. Lena, born in Lebanon, attended a school founded by Presbyterian missionaries.
In 1974, civil war erupted in Lebanon. Her high school graduation was interrupted by snipers.
During college, she worked with a Lutheran minister in a humanitarian organization. While on a vacation with friends in Cyprus, the war escalated, leaving her stranded. “I was stuck there,” she said. World Vision International, a global Christian humanitarian organization, gave her a place to stay, and she worked with the group for a while.
Upon her return to Lebanon, she met a friend at the Beirut airport who worked for Catholic Relief Services. He was traveling with a Cuban colleague named Larry Galindo, a tall, distinguished-looking man two decades older than Lena.
“I didn’t know about Cuba,” she said, “but we started talking.”
She resumed work with the Lutheran minister, in addition to her college studies, but “it was a very unsettling time,” she said. She was inside the American embassy in April 1983, just minutes before it was blown up by a suicide bomber, killing sixty-three people.
Meanwhile, the Cuban man had kept in touch. He lived in a building occupied by several American diplomats, and this apartment complex came to serve as the US embassy in Lebanon.
“How do you date in a war situation?” Lena Galindo asked. The two figured it out, meeting frequently for coffee and going for drinks at a bar called Uncle Sam’s.
“I felt so comfortable with him,” she said. “We were very different, but we were complementary. We had the same values.”
Harvard-educated Larry Galindo “could have stayed in the corporate world to make a lot of money,” she said, “but he worked in my Lebanon, helping the reconstruction of some schools.”
In January 1984, matters for US citizens in Lebanon went from bad to worse when terrorists killed Malcolm H. Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut. Larry Galindo was ordered to leave. The airport was being shelled when his plane took off.
He went to Egypt and Kenya; Lena stayed in Lebanon, but not for long. In May 1984, they met in Cyprus and married. Because the Beirut airport was closed, she went by boat. “The hardest thing I had to do was leave my parents behind,” she said. “I wasn’t sure they were going to survive the war.”
“I have never felt ‘other’ at First Presbyterian. I’ve felt part of everything the whole time I’ve been here, but I still get to be my unique self. It’s a delicate balance.”
Dr. Dorothy White-Williams
Larry and Lena Galindo traveled to France, Togo, and West Africa with Catholic Relief Services before returning to Larry’s home of New York. They settled in Brooklyn, where Lena put herself through more college classes. First, she used her linguistic skills (she speaks five languages) to translate for Sesame Street internationally. Then she joined an investment firm.
Her parents were eventually able to escape Lebanon for California, where her brother was living.
The Galindos relocated to Atlanta in 1988, when Larry was offered a job in the business world. Lena was nervous about moving to the South. “We were a mixed couple,” she said. “I thought it would be conservative. But I said to Larry, ‘Where you go, I go.’”
They moved into a condominium in Colony Square just a couple of blocks from First Presbyterian, but it was a Kenyan seminary student bagging groceries at a Kroger supermarket who invited them to the church. Several months later, Lena decided to visit.
Diversity and eclecticism provide opportunities for people to discover deeper connections between them.
“As soon as I walked into that International Class, the members were all so welcoming,” she said. “When Larry came, they welcomed him.”
Both became more and more involved with various ministries, volunteering while they held full-time jobs. Larry served as an elder, and Lena is a ministry leader. Each headed different committees.
“Larry and I always reached out to newcomers,” Lena said. “I always felt that by loving people, you’re loving God.” She celebrates how the congregation as a whole is becoming more and more welcoming to everyone across the various ministries.
Larry Galindo died in 2021. Lena carries on, reaching across pews on Sunday mornings to welcome whomever she sees.
A Gift from God
Dr. Dorothy White-Williams was born into the Presbyterian Church in Ghana. Her father was an obstetrician-gynecologist, a member of the first class of graduates from Ghana’s medical school. Her parents, both the children of farmers, met and fell in love in college, and married.
During her father’s residency, an accident at the hospital put him into a coma from which he would never recover. He died without knowing his daughter was on the way.
When the young widow approached his family with the news of her pregnancy, they refused to acknowledge the condition. Her own family member suggested she have an abortion. She insisted on having the baby, saying she was Nyamekye, “a gift of God.” Later, at her baptism, the baby was given a western name with the same meaning—Dorothy.
When Dorothy was one and a half years old, her mother met a white American Peace Corps volunteer. When she was five, they married, and at ten, her stepfather adopted her. The “White” in her surname is from him.
When Dorothy was in middle school, the family moved to Ohio, where her stepfather had a job. The family traveled frequently between the United States and Ghana. It was on one of these trips, at the airport, that Dorothy first met her birth father’s family. She was twenty years old.
“I saw someone who was about my age,” she said, “and, although he was male, he looked like my mirror image.”
The young man was with his father who immediately started talking to Dorothy’s mother. He was Dorothy’s uncle, her father’s brother; his son was her cousin. After the encounter, her mother told her the story of her birth.
Dr. Dorothy White-Williams discovered class when her mother was in town visiting and has been coming back ever since.
“With that, I learned forgiveness,” Dorothy said. “My mom had truly forgiven them.”
Dorothy graduated from Oberlin College, where she met her future husband, Brian Michael Williams, and went on to attend medical school in Ohio. Williams, who’s from Decatur, Georgia, “was pretty blunt,” she said. “He said if we were going to get married, we weren’t staying in Ohio.”
With that in mind, when she began applying for medical residencies around 1996, she concentrated on Georgia and North Carolina. She was matched with Emory. Afterward, she set up a family medicine practice in Clarkston.
At the time, she was visiting Presbyterian churches. She tried some that were predominantly Black and some that were predominantly white but had trouble finding a connection, she said. She wanted a church home where her Black family and her white father would feel equally at home.
A member of her home church, St. Andrew Presbyterian in Columbus, Ohio, suggested that she visit First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta. Dorothy was pregnant with her second son, Kwasi Asante Williams (now fifteen), and her older son, Ofori Kwaku Williams (now seventeen), was just a toddler. When Dorothy’s mother came to town for a visit, the two of them decided to attend service.
The late Joseph Wallace, an effusive greeter, was welcoming members and guests before Sunday school, Dorothy recalled. When a member of the International Class walked by, Wallace introduced them. Dorothy and her mother attended the class, and she’s been coming back ever since.
“I have never felt ‘other’ at First Presbyterian,” she said. “I’ve felt part of everything the whole time I’ve been here, but I still get to be my unique self. It’s a delicate balance.”
In the International Class, she has gained familiarity with many different cultures, abandoning old misconceptions and stereotypes. “It’s a huge world, but the class brings us all much closer together,” she said.
She is impressed not just by the welcome extended to people from other countries but by the services and hospitality offered to people experiencing homelessness. One of her gifts, besides leadership on the session, has been to work with Community Ministries providing flu vaccines at the Sunday morning breakfast.
During the COVID pandemic, her parents moved from Ohio to Lilburn. Now her mother is a member of the church and of the International Class.
Culture to Culture, Person to Person
Jack and Caroline Hardin and Dr. Jim and Carol Dew are among the longtime members of the International Class. All of them are American born and eager to gain a greater understanding of the larger world.
“Jack and I are huge travelers,” said Caroline Hardin, “and we love to learn about other cultures.”
They have enjoyed meals with international students who attend the Sunday school class and refugee families who have been resettled by the church. A bicycle trip in Syria gave the Hardins much to talk about with a Syrian family on an outing at the Georgia Aquarium with their grandchildren. And on a trip to Botswana, they were able to reconnect with a former class member—a Botswanan woman who lived in Atlanta while pursuing a doctorate degree at Georgia State University.
Jim Dew is an ophthalmologist who served in Japan during the Vietnam War. He and Carol lived on a small base south of Tokyo. Later on, he eagerly accepted a position at a hospital in Saudi Arabia in order to once again experience living in another culture. He, Carol, and their children spent five years there.
“‘Southern hospitality’ is just being friendly. But hospitality, according to the Bible, involves sharing meals, inviting people into your home, really getting to know them, offering them the shirt off your back, tending to their wounds.”
Susan Farrar
Over the years, the Dews have connected with several international students through AMIS, most recently a young man from India. They first met Oksana Klymovych when she came to Atlanta at Christmas to be with her then husband, who was their AMIS student.
The Dews have also been involved with the Georgia Council on International Visitors, hosting people who have mostly been brought here by the US State Department. Martin Luther King Jr. was still living when they first connected with the organization, Carol said, and they were very conscious of the fact that race was “such a limiting factor in where people could go and what they could do. I felt like this was something I could do to help open things up.”
Having lived abroad and gotten to know people in other cultures, “you want to pay it back,” Carol Dew said. Culture to culture, person to person. That’s the appeal of the International Class: classmates with different backgrounds are able to form lifelong friendships with those who share a desire to understand one another.
Month by month, the students in room 327 try to live up to their motto, which was adopted in 1976 from a Hindi saying, translated into English, and designed into a banner by a German artist: “Walk together, talk together, all ye nations of the World. Then, and only then, shall ye have Peace.”
