Iowa State University recently made news on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea.

Last semester, ISU’s National Student Speech Language Hearing Association (NSSLHA) chapter shipped several hundred textbooks as a gift to the University of Malta’s library.

Cheryl Gunter, adviser of the group, said she received a letter this week from staff at the university with whom she has kept in touch. The letter contained a clipping from The Times, a Maltese newspaper, announcing that the donation from ISU students had been blessed and dedicated.

Gunter, who spent 10 months in Malta as a Fulbright Scholar a couple years ago, said she was also informed of a similar article in another newspaper, The Independent.

The book drive was “something fairly easy that made people quite happy,” said Amy Pollpeter, president of NSSLHA.

Pollpeter said the group collected books on communication disorder-related subjects like psychology and human development that ISU students couldn’t sell back to the book store.

The books are very helpful to Maltese students, she said, because they do not have easy access to updated information.

“ISU students take for granted the freedom to go to the bookstore and buy any book they need, but students in Malta are not that privileged,” Pollpeter said.

While in Malta, Gunter taught several classes and helped university communication disorder therapists develop clinical instruction skills because they had never worked with students.

Gunter stayed in a small town in the center of Malta, the largest of six islands that make up the country. The island is so densely populated, Gunter said, that she could cross the street and be in another town without realizing it.

Living there, Gunter said, was like living in a small town, because everyone knows everyone else and they always help those in need. There are no homeless or hungry people because everyone looks after everyone else, she said.

Often, she read letters in local newspapers relating a tragedy in someone’s family and asking people to chip in.

The next week, she said, there would be another letter thanking people for their efforts and reporting that many donations, sometimes as much as 3,000 lira (U.S. $9,000), had been received already.

She applied to go to Malta because it was the only university in the Fulbright program with a position open in speech language pathology.

Gunter said she went “with the idea that I would enjoy it and see what I could learn.”

While she did learn a few Maltese phrases, Gunter said she’s glad she didn’t have to learn the country’s difficult dialect of English and Maltese.

Gunter said the most important thing she learned was the relationship between the United States and Malta.

“We all are very much alike no matter where we’re from,” she said. “We have the same kind of dreams for our lives, and it’s important to look for what we have in common instead of whatever differences we have.”

While most people haven’t heard of Malta, Gunter said she discovered a country full of history and “hidden treasures.”

Every Saturday morning, she said she would get up, buy a loaf of homemade bread from a vendor, eat it in the church courtyard while watching people, and then catch a bus to go exploring.

The country also has “wonderful food,” Gunter said. She named lampuki, a fish that only lives near Malta, as a personal favorite, as well as the wide variety of Maltese snack foods.

Gunter said she missed the national Malta soft drink, Kinnie, most upon her return to the United States. Kinnie is only available in Malta and in areas of Canada and Australia where there are a large number of Maltese immigrants.