Las Vegas has two high schools that are bitter enemies; West Las Vegas and Robertson known for this. (I know, nice.) They both do a parade for homecoming as well as New Mexico Highlands University.
This week in Highlands homecoming so there are banners all of over the campus asking for votes for Homecoming queen plus banners asking people to "paint the town purple." Tomorrow will be the parade. Not sure if we are going this year because we were planning to be in Albuquerque.
Tom and I went to check our another local thrift store and it happened to be across the street from campus so we went for a walk and ended up at the Student center. Tom wanted to hang out and watch students play pool and ping pong.
There were lots of girls with Homecoming candidate written on black sashes and they were giving out candy and cupcakes and they were nice enough to voluntarily ask if Tom could have some.
A huge athletic type guy walked by us with a Halloween pumpkin tote of candy and Tom's chubby hand shot out to grab it. The guy was really nice and asked if he wanted a candy and held out the tote. Tom decided to grab the actual tote and the guy got a great laugh out of it...and Tom got M&M's.
I also felt conspicuous because I wasn't wearing purple and white like everyone else. If you thought it was being I was the only one with a toddler then you'd be wrong. There was another student working at the post office in the center holding a baby.
One of the homecoming candidates came over to talk to Tom and gush how cute he is. She was really nice and she told me about her son who is 2....seriously the girl didn't look more than 20. I mean, good for her for going to school but it's still interesting how normal that is here.
The local paper around graduation time had a huge photo layout of the graduates of the HS and university and there was a big picture of a HS graduate holding his baby.
Something else I noticed on campus was the amount of African American students. I comment on that because in Albuquerque and most of New Mexico, the population of African Americans are low. You have Anglo, Hispanic and Native American (Navajo, all the different pueblo tribes, Mescalero Apache, Zuni, etc) so it's cool to see a different group represented here. Also...I haven't seen as many but I know that there is a Polynesian presence at the university, partly because of a new member of the branch named Tina. She's Samoan and she's going to school here and finishing up her BA and going on for a MA. She started a Polynesian club at the university and she also has a daughter who is Rachel's age and I swear they are the same, bright, inquisitive, talkative girl. Love it.
On an unrelated note, I am SOOO grateful that there are SOME kids in our branch. Honestly, I thought the chances of having kids Rachel's and Tom's age at church to be nil. However, there are at least 2 active kids that are 7 years old and Tom has a two year girl to play with in nursery.
0 comments:
Post a Comment