November 26th, 2014: A Special Thanksgiving – Thank you, Gemma!

November 26th, 2014: A Special Thanksgiving – Thank you, Gemma!

Me, Gemma, and Nick at our send-off dinner.

When the most unlikely paths cross, the doors to the most extraordinary opportunities open.

As Gemma Buckley, the “doyenne of Monash Debating” and second best speaker at the 2014 World Universities Debating Championship, started her one-year journey in Seoul as a debate coach, I was just barely (and very happily) advancing to the eliminatory rounds of the Junior YTN-HUFS tournament.

I didn’t have the slightest hint that one day, she would be in the front row cheering her heart out as the emcee announced that my two newfound debate friends and I were, “in a 5-4 split decision, the winners of the Grand Finals of the 2014 YTN-HUFS Junior Division!” Neither did she have the slightest clue that she would be listed as the role model of one certain freshman school secretary on her student council poster. (It was a breathtakingly close tie between her and Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General.)

Gemma was, and will always be, the mother duck and my team the three ducklings. The special kind of love in our friendship is something I can’t exactly portray in words – we are both best friends, mother and children, and mentor and mentees.

I still remember how she handed us each a carefully wrapped package at our victory celebration Indian curry dinner.

“When I was still training back in Monash, I had a coach – an Australian debate legend, of sorts. And the day he told me he would become my mentor, he gave me a book! And now, sweethearts,” she said with her loveable smile and Australian accent, “here are yours!”

Our following effort to suck our tears back into our tear ducts was thankfully interrupted by my partner, Nicholas’, happy guess that the packages were books from the New Testament. (It wasn’t.) Opening the package to find a copy of ‘The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Effort to Help the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good’ was the sweetest Obiwan-and-Luke moment I’ve been part of to date.

Last October, the three of us found out that Gemma would be leaving early December for a new job in Malaysia. No matter how many times one goes through it, having a friend move away never gets any easier.

The summer of 2014 will forever be bending over in laughter nearly spilling my orange salad dressing as Gemma passionately elaborates on the illegitimacy of Korean pizza traditions, namely the infamous taco pizza – complete with tortilla chips and lettuce toppings! (Don’t ask.) It will be our bubbly giggles at wide-eyed Nicholas’ constant bombarding of questions: Is it enforced by law to wear sunscreen in Australia? What if the goalie tucked the soccer ball under his shirt and ran across the field into the other goal? Would his social experiment idea of running for the Communist Party in the student council elections be illegal? Peach cobblers – oh, wait, cobblers make stones, right? It will be the occasional air-conditioned hours of solemn case-drafting, then the following intellectual epiphany-inducing talks about (the former Monash philosophy department chair) Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, representative democracy, and the basis of human rights.

I know Malaysia will greet Gemma with open arms and great opportunities, including a chance to coach public school students alongside her university debate colleagues, an incomparably huge debate circle, and, of course, she added, weekly tournaments with quite a sum of prize money!

As she told me “to be a good child” with the slightest hint of sadness hidden under her usual merry smile, knowing so to be true helped me realize that that wasn’t the last page of our story – in fact, that we will have many more epilogues to come.

This Thanksgiving, I’d like to thank Gemma for coaching my team, for all of the opportunities she has given us and for all of the doors she has opened for us. We will forever be your ducklings.

Gemma, I am so thankful our paths somehow crossed! I hope it keeps crossing – I’ll miss you so much. I’m already looking forward to your visit for the 2015 Australs! Learning from you truly changed what debate means to me. I wish you the best of luck in Malaysia!

Diana (: