A Guamanian Out of Water

Catherine Ysrael, the two-year co-captain of the Harvard women's water polo team, recently received All-America honors at the Harvard-hosted women's water polo nationals. She was also Harvard's leading scorer and Most Valuable Player this year. A native of the Pacific island of Guam ("Guam is Good" reads her favorite sweatshirt), Ysrael was a member of the all-Guam swimming, softball and basketball teams, though she claims she is "really bad" at the latter two sports ("They were desperate for people," she explains, "that's why they picked me.") The English concentrator and Eliot House resident, who plans to return to Guam eventually, will spend her next two years at Oxford on a Rotary scholarship.

The most important thing I've gotten out of playing water polo at Harvard is the different people that I've gotten to meet, not only on the Harvard team but also on other teams we've met when we've gotten to travel.

Travel outside of Harvard was really exciting to me, because I'd never been to New England before--and I'd been to New York only once. So this was a great chance to travel to places like Brown--that's in Rhode Island, right?--and improve my knowledge of geography (laugh).

Outside of Eliot House, the water polo team is my closest circle of friends-they're really the only ones I knew at first outside of the house.

The whole novelty of water polo was exciting, also. I'd never played water polo before I got here. Back home in Guam I swam competitively for eight years, but that was about the extent of it.

I'd never played the sport, but my two older sisters went to Stanford, and they played water polo there. And from there I heard about the sport--my brother played also.

It's really a lot of fun to play. I quit swimming when I was in high school because I found it was a little too individually oriented--I was really tired of just swimming up and down lanes. It's not a real team-oriented sport. Track and swimming are the two sports where a lot of the competition is individual.

Two-thirds of my classmates from high school went to the University of Guam, and then most of the other ones went to the University of Hawaii. A lot of it is expense--it's so expensive to get off the island.

I came to Harvard ... partly because I wanted the "Big Thrill"--because my two sisters had gone to Stanford, and my brother was in a California school. Of course, there was Harvard's reputation, first and foremost.

I came here in September expecting it to be snowing. I told my mother, "Oh my God, mom, I need my ski jacket immediately."

Part of the whole reason I've consciously tried to come to school so far away, and am going even farther away to England next year--experiencing all these different cultures and meeting lots of different people--is that I eventually want to return back to Guam. So this is my big chance now to get exposed to as much I can outside of Guam and the Pacific region before I return home.

It's a hard decision to make, because many people say, "Won't you feel that you're over-qualified or over-educated if you return home?"

For a lot of Guamanians, it's a typical brain-drain phenomenon--come to the States experience all sorts of new things, and decide to stay in the States. It's still a hard decision for me.

You come here and you find there's theatre, there's ballet, there's so many other things that you can't have back home. But at the same time you have so many benefits. Growing up on an island, there are so many advantages.

I am a regular walking travel agent for Guam--I should be the Guam visitors' bureau. Guam is south of Japan--it's about 9000 miles from Cambridge. It has 110,000 people, loads of great beaches. See, you can just make out my house here on this poster.

That's what I have the most fun doing, really--talking about Guam or water polo.