Recollections of Woodstock

Almost a half-century ago, Vivia Tatum was among the 120 or so students attending Woodstock School, an International Christian school in Mussoorie, a town in the foothills of the Himalaya mountains in India, northeast of New Delhi.

She and her fellow students were a true melting pot. Many were the children of missionaries, spreading various Christian faiths across the Asian subcontinent. Others were sons and daughters of diplomats, working in a part of the world where Western nations were battling Communist philosophy for control of countries that now are among world economic leaders - India, China, Singapore, Malaysia.

Each year, students who attended Woodstock School gather for a reunion. Those from Tatum's Class of '63 also gather, even though not all of them graduated with the class. "We've had people who were there for fifth grade," says Tatum, who attended Woodstock in grades 7 through 11, 1958-1962. Her brother, Jackson, attended from 1954 through 1959 and graduated from Woodstock.

Vivia Tatum's parents were United Methodist missionaries to China until about a year after the Communist takeover. They left in 1951 and were assigned to Malaysia, then Indonesia. While they were in Malaysia, she attended a boarding school because the school in their town was for boys only. Woodstock was some 3,000 miles from Indonesia, a trip of about a week and a half to two weeks, Tatum says. She traveled by ship for two days to Singapore. "I stayed in Singapore with missionaries," she says, until several students could assemble to travel together. They then flew to Calcutta, then on to New Delhi. The group traveled up the mountain to Dehra Dun by train and were joined by other student parties along the way. Buses transported the students up the mountain to Mussoorie. "We would then walk," she says. "There were bearers who carried our luggage and trunks."

Students attended from March through November, traveling home during the coldest months. Winters at the 7,000-foot elevation were extremely cold, Tatum says. "We were up in the mountains and there was no heat. We wore coats all the time."

Being in the foothills of the Himalayas meant attending school at Woodstock was different in other ways. The girls, whose activities were more restricted than those of the boys, had to walk a half-mile uphill to the school each day. Some classes had only two or three students per teacher. Students sometimes took hiking field trips in the mountains. Dorms housed students in large rooms. The dorm for seventh- and eighth-grader girls held 20 students, and the dorm for elementary-age girls held 40. There was one hour in the afternoon when hot water was available for bathing.

The students formed strong bonds with one another. Tatum says they felt they didn't have a physical home because the countries where their parents served were not home, yet their own countries, such as the United States, also did not feel like home because they were seldom there. Someone coined the phrase "third culture kids." "Our allegiance is not to a place but to relationships," Tatum says. "We did not have a physical home. We had formed our own culture that was based on relationships."