Page 4 - 2016Bella.June

South Arkansas again — all positioning her to take on the role of mentor to teens who are just starting to make their own way in the world.
In addition to academic programs, Upward Bound helps expose students to a variety of cultural experiences by sponsoring trips to colleges, museums, major entertainment venues and highly rated restaurants and hotels.
Upward Bound groups have traveled to Branson, Mo., and Memphis, stopping for college tours along the routes. A trip to St. Louis has been planned for this summer, Howell said.
Traveling and exposure to different cultures are experiences with which Howell is accustomed.
She was born in Monroe, La., and attended Gardner Elementa- ry School in Strong until the fifth or sixth grade, prior to school integration there.
When her mother remarried a U.S. Army serviceman, Howell, along with her siblings — a brother and sister — was plucked from small-town life as she had known it in eastern Union Coun- ty and transplanted to Okinawa, Japan, where her stepfather was stationed.
“My mother had been in Okinawa for six months and our stepfather adopted us. Talk about a culture shock. When I moved to Okinawa, I had not even been to Little Rock — maybe to Hot Springs, but not much farther than Strong,” she shared.
While Japanese was the dominant culture, Howell said she also mixed and mingled with military children and families of differ- ent nationalities.
She found that the educational system was not much different than in America, explaining that her teachers were Americans who had applied for jobs overseas.
“My first teacher was from Alabama. We went to school in huts and we changed classes from hut to hut,” Howell said. “It was kind of hard at first. I remember crying and wanting to come back and live with my grandparents again.”
Helping to ease the transition, Howell said non-Japanese students participated in culture classes, where they learned the national language, dressed out in traditional Japanese clothing and partook in the country’s food and drink staples.
Her parents also invited a Japanese student who was looking to learn more about American culture to work in their home to teach the family more about Japanese culture.
“She worked with us one on one. She helped us a lot,” Howell said.
The family lived in Japan for three years before Howell’s step- father was transferred to Korea. She returned to Strong for a year and then moved to Fort Knox, Ky., after her stepfather received another transfer.
Still a high school senior, Howell moved back to Strong to marry a man she had met while visiting her hometown during the summer.
“We communicated by phone and by letters. I moved back to Strong with my grandmother and she signed for me to get mar- ried, with my parents’ permission,”
she said.
Howell graduated from Strong High School in 1976 and imme- diately snagged her first job, a sales clerk at Woolco, which was located in Mellor Park
Mall at the time. Then tragedy struck.
Howell’s husband was killed in a car accident and she
was left with two young children who would
grow up without their father.
It was a painful moment that Howell recalled with audible strain in her voice. The incident
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