MORGANTOWN – Liz Finklea still has to chuckle, all these years later.
She was a married woman by the time she moved to the U.S. from the U.K. more than four decades ago.
As a young lass in Scotland, her bookkeeping jobs took her the width and breadth of her home country on the North Atlantic.
She had a plum sales and marketing job with a Scottish company that had also landed her in London, which couldn’t have been more of a marquee post, she thought.
Yep, Finklea was indeed feeling pretty worldly.
Until she wasn’t.
She had met her husband Harry Finklea, a professor emeritus at West Virginia University and former chair of the chemistry department while in London – where the South Carolinian was completing a research fellowship at the Royal Institution.
A job offer at a college in neighboring North Carolina brought the newly married couple across the pond to a place, she said, that was … well … foreign.
To her. She was surprised.
“Having grown up watching American movies and television shows, I naively believed that we spoke the same language,” she deadpanned in a voice yet to lose its Scottish moorings.
Still, the people were great.
The food was too.
Finklea, with culinary exuberance, went native.
“I did get introduced to the joys of good East Carolina barbeque.”
Many of WVU’s international students, in contrast, don’t have American spouses to help them navigate.
The university generally boasts an enrollment of 900 students, representing more than 110 countries, and when said sojourners arrive – it’s usually with the most spare of suitcases or travel bags.
Which is where “Homestart Closet” comes in, Finklea said.
That’s the nonprofit organization housed in WVU’s Stalnaker Hall that sets up such students with pots and pans, bed linens, silverware and the like.
Given her passport pedigree, Finklea has worked with international students on campus and in Morgantown since she and her family arrived in the city in 1986.
She can chart Homestart Closet’s origins all the way back 35 years ago, in fact, she said.
“Everyone first started talking about it in 1991,” she said.
Fundamentals are the rule, she said. Such as freshly laundered bedsheets, a marquee Homestart Closet item, she said.
“That’s important,” Finklea continued.
“You don’t have to sleep on a bed with no sheets during your first nights in a new country,” she said.
Visit https://campuslife.wvu.edu/advocacy-center/international-homestart-closet for all the contact information and all the particulars on how you can donate.
“I was made to feel welcome when I got here,” Finklea said. “I want them to have the same experience.”
