Inspirational Person of the Week: Aila Stammler

I liked Aila from the very beginning—even though the beginning was just a “business” email. I had written to her to ask some questions about her German language course at Friedensau Adventist University, in which I was thinking of enrolling. She responded very promptly with detailed and helpful information, and somehow I could tell just from reading her email that she was a very nice person. I quite enjoyed our “business” correspondence over the next few months and, when I finally arrived in Friedensau in the fall of 2014, I found that she was just as friendly and thoughtful in person. She invited me to her house for dinner when I arrived and personally showed me around the campus, introducing me to people as we went along. She also gave me a package of “goodies” and a card. It said, “Dear Ethan, I can’t tell you how happy I am that you have come to Friedensau.” She hardly knew me, but somehow I knew that she meant it; she radiated genuineness.

There was another German course I had considered, but the chap I emailed for info about it wasn’t as helpful as Aila—so Aila got the student. But she’s not just warm and friendly for PR purposes—it’s just who she is. She regularly goes above and beyond the call of duty to get to know her students on a personal level and to look out for their wellbeing. Aila helped me feel at home in a foreign land. During my time in Friedensau she regularly invited me to her house for dinner, board games, movies, etc. And because she knew I was into music, she took me to concerts in places like Leipzig and Berlin. She also was my biggest cheerleader when I performed music on campus, and even when I performed out of town once, she sent me a message of encouragement.

Aila ia a great teacher. She is always thoroughly prepared for her classes and takes great delight in coming up with new and entertaining ways to teach certain concepts. She’s patient and helpful when students get confused; she fosters an environment in which the students feel comfortable trying out what they’re learning—in which they don’t feel embarrassed about making mistakes. One senses that she takes great joy in her teaching, and it’s contagious. Some people consider language barriers to be annoying and the learning of foreign languages to be a “necessary evil,” but to Aila—who speaks fluent English, German, and French, along with some Italian thrown in for good measure—languages are beautiful and are a unique expression of the cultures to which they belong. She wants her students not only to learn how to communicate in German, but to enjoy doing so—to enjoy its idiosyncrasies, to appreciate the language on an aesthetic level, delighting even in the nuance of how the words sound. As a musician, I appreciated this perspective very much.

When I had questions or needed advice, even about things not pertaining to the German course, Aila was the person I went to. In the spring of 2015, near the end of my time at Friedensau, Aila found out that I was struggling to decide what to do with my life. Going to Friedensau had been a way of trying to postpone that decision, but when the year was almost up, I was not really any closer to a revelation about what the next step should be. If anything, I was farther from it. It didn’t help that I had let my OCD flair up again (something I had struggled with for years). Somehow I started to feel panicky—I had an obsessive, irrational fear of some kind of impending apocalypse, and was at a loss to decide what my next steps should be in a world that seemed to be crumbling around me (people with OCD often deal with existential dread of things beyond their control). Aila didn’t know all of that, but she knew I was in the proverbial valley of decision. “Would you like to talk about it?” she asked. “You’re future is important to me.” She invited me to go on a walk that evening with her and her husband, Wolfgang, and, after listening intently to all of the crazy stuff I had to say, they offered down-to-earth, levelheaded advice. It had a calming effect on me and helped check some of my irrational thoughts. And it just meant a lot that they cared about me.

Aila recently told me that one of her former students called her from America, overjoyed, to say “Guess what! Guess what! I got engaged!” Aila told me that she was surprised and very flattered that her student, thousands of miles away, would think to contact her personally to share the glad tidings. But, to me, that’s not surprising at all; I’m quite sure that Aila’s student contacted her because she knew that Aila would genuinely care. It’s the same reason that I often find myself contacting her, even about trivial things: she always cares. I want to learn to care about people like Aila does.

Daniel Hayes and I with Aila in December, 2016. We were both former students of Aila's and happened to be visiting Friedensau at the same time.

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For more about Aila's German course, click here.

This is the third in a series of articles about people who have changed my life for the better. For some background information on what inspired me to write this series, click here.