With a distinctly visible moon casting a pale glow over campus, several dozen students gathered at The Rock on Farm Lane for a candle light vigil on Sunday night to honor the departed in the wake of recent terrorist attacks around the world.
Put on by the MSU French Club and Arab Cultural Society, students laid down roses, lit candles, and wrote well-wishes and prayers upon The Rock to stand in solidarity with those who suffered from the recent terror attack in Paris and suicide bombings in Beirut and Baghdad, among other horrible occurrences.
"It's kind of to show MSU students that even though it is far away from home, you know we're in small East Lansing and these things are happening thousands of miles away, it's still something super important," Nagham Awali, a pre-med sophomore and e-board member for the Arab Cultural Society, said. "These lives are affected by it (terrorism) daily and we just want to show that we care about that."
Similar sentiments were shared by others during the vigil's open forum, where students could share their feelings towards the recent attacks and the outpouring of support that's come in its wake.
"We stand here together to support the victims and to grieve the losses that happened because of these acts of terrorism and we're not here to blame, we're here in the name of peace," Emma Dunn, a French secondary education senior, said.
It wasn't just students who turned out to show their support. James Dorsett, the director of the Office of International Students and Scholars, and Terrence Frazier, assistant vice-president of Student Affairs, stood by The Rock.
Both offices were involved in helping to organize the logistics of the event and be available to any students afflicted by the events that transpired.
"From the very beginning, we realized that the institution needs to support the students from the affected countries and we wanted to get a notice out very early to them that if they felt that they were affected directly or if any of their friends and families had been affected that there was a variety of services available on campus to support them such as the Counseling Center," Dorsett said.
One of these students directly affected was Leyla Rigoreau, a French international student and member of the French Club who lives in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, the district in which most of the attacks took place.
"This time when they attacked us we really felt like it was our friends who were attacked," Rigoreau said. "For instance, I went to that bar, I went to that restaurant, I went to that concert hall, it's really, really famous so it just felt like the whole of Paris was attacked."
Rigoreau was fortunate in that none of her friends or family were hurt in the attacks, though she mentioned people her friends knew died over the course of the night.
In spite of this, Rigoreau said she and other Parisians seem stubbornly intent to defy the fear that comes with such terrorism.
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