Julia Prager-Hessel 
is the Deputy Communications Director for a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, serving in the U.S. Congress. Three years ago, she served as an English Teaching Assistant at Gymnázium Chotěboř. In November 2022, she hosted an unforgettable Thanksgiving for her Czech students, colleagues, and fellow grantees who had no plans for the holiday. What seemed a Herculean task at first turned into “cultural exchange in its purest form: joyful, messy, loud, communal, and, true to Thanksgiving culture and Czech cuisine alike, punctuated by a ton of heavy food,” complete with traditions and Cotton-Eye Joe dancing. Because of this and many other experiences, the town of fewer than 10,000 grew close to Julia’s heart. She returns whenever possible: “Chotěboř grounds me, and reminds me why I do the work I do, why community matters, why listening matters, why showing up matters.”
Three Thanksgivings ago, I stood at the back of the attic event hall in Panský Dům, the pub and beating heart of Chotěboř, the town where I spent my Fulbright year. I watched my students dance with my fellow ETAs as my Czech colleagues smiled and cautiously shuffled along the edges of the floor. Pride doesn’t quite capture how I felt; it was a mix of awe, relief, and the thrill of seeing an idea come alive.
In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving 2022, my colleagues at Gymnázium Chotěboř had asked me to teach lessons about the holiday in all of their English classes. They wanted pilgrims, turkey hands, and worksheets where students could mad-lib their way through a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, filling in the popular menu items. At first, I thought that was easy enough, and planned my lessons. While I genuinely loved seeing the beautiful and occasionally chaotic turkey hands my students created, it quickly became clear to me that I could do more for my students. In fact, as someone placed in Chotěboř for just one year, it felt like my responsibility to try.
So I approached my mentor between classes with the idea of hosting a small Thanksgiving gathering. Initially, I imagined a table in the school hallway with samples of traditional food students could graze between classes, or maybe a small dinner just for the oldest classes. Instead, he suggested we ask Panský Dům to host a full dinner for any student who wanted to come. Only two months into my time in town, that felt absurd. I’m from New York; you don’t just walk into a restaurant and ask them to cater an entire event on a few weeks’ notice.
But in true Czech fashion, he simply said, “Why not? Let’s go ask them now.” Seconds later he was out the door, and I was jogging behind him as he raced to the pub before our next class. Ten minutes and a few rapid-fire Czech exchanges later, we had a venue, a menu, and a plan. All I had to do was walk the waitress through some of the details (yes, marshmallows go on top of the sweet potatoes) and send an estimated headcount the week before Thanksgiving.
With an event to prepare for and an anxiety that my students wouldn’t show up, I started manically advertising in my classes and clubs. The more I encouraged students to RSVP, the more compelled I felt to expand what I taught in the classroom and offer a fuller, more honest version of Thanksgiving. So while I continued hand-turkeys and shared the fondness many Americans feel for the opportunity to gather with loved ones and focus on gratitude, I also started exposing my students to the harder truths behind the holiday’s origins in greater detail. And paradoxically, the more authentic I became, the more excited my students grew. One student shared that moving beyond what she had already learned in textbooks actually piqued her interest. RSVPs poured in. Eventually, I had to call Panský Dům and warn them about our numbers.
At the same time, I thought about my fellow ETAs across the country, many of whom had shared how difficult it would be to spend Thanksgiving away from their families. Before arriving in the Czech Republic, I had focused only on preparing to build community in town. I hadn’t anticipated how important it would be to lean into the community amongst my fellow ETAs, the people living parallel versions of my experience in towns scattered across the country. My mentor was thrilled when I asked if I could invite a few of them; most of our students had never met one American, let alone a dozen.
That Thanksgiving ultimately encapsulated everything Fulbright, to me, was about. My American friends shared their favorite traditions. My students listened and offered their own Czech holiday customs in return. We danced the Cotton-Eye Joe and the latest Czech teenager dance craze in equal measure. My cohort peers wandered from table to table, and I beamed as I watched them connect with students in ways I hadn’t thought to, bringing students out of their shells over interests I didn’t necessarily share. It was cultural exchange in its purest form: joyful, messy, loud, communal, and, true to Thanksgiving culture and Czech cuisine alike, punctuated by a ton of heavy food.
Moments like that in Chotěboř are what cemented my desire to pursue work with tangible community impact when I returned to America. Now, working in Congress, I feel that overlap every day. I serve one of the country’s most diverse districts, where connecting across cultural and linguistic gaps is critical. I realized that teaching, moreover, trained me to be a good advocate; as an ETA, I worked to ensure students felt seen, supported, and empowered to pursue their dreams. Working in political communications now, I rely constantly on the skills I honed in Chotěboř: learning about a community, understanding its needs, and finding the right words to represent it.
Still, even fulfilling work can be exhausting. In a bureaucracy like the House of Representatives, it’s easy to feel like any progress is slow or fragile. The quick pace of the job, on the other hand, can be overwhelming. In the Congressional minority, in particular, there are demoralizing days when I feel like I’m not making a difference at all, taking political loss after loss. But in those moments, I find myself thinking back to Chotěboř, a true world away from Washington. I knew when I started my Fulbright that, when I left, not every student would be fluent and not every neighbor would have a perfectly nuanced understanding of America. And yet I was satisfied with the incremental progress and connection I achieved in my short time; I remember creating moments of connection like that Thanksgiving, doing everything possible to make each student’s English just a little bit stronger, and showing every student that whatever their dreams were, I would be there in their corner cheering them on.
While not actually a Czech spa town, I often called Chotěboř my vacation town, in that it taught me to slow down and look around once in a while. More than that, my time there taught me to find purpose in serving a community, even if progress only comes one step at a time.
Three years later, another Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I’ve just returned from my second visit since the end of my grant period in the spring of 2023. In that short time, my Octava and 4A students are in their final years of university, preparing to start their lives as doctors, lawyers, politicians. My Kvinta and 1A students are high-school seniors, showing me photos of their Maturita ball gowns and sharing anxieties about university decisions. On my most recent trip, which I returned from just two weeks ago, some changes were jarring: students inches or even feet taller, voices deeper, faces more adult. Yet in other ways, nothing has changed at all. Panský Dům stands strong, the regional bus fare is less than a dollar, and smažený sýr continues to change lives. Moreover, the students now in university or even graduating from gymnázium have the same questions I once did, that I still sometimes struggle with: How do I maintain my relationships from far away? What do I want to do with my life, and how do I make a difference in the world? How, exactly, am I supposed to leave Chotěboř behind?
I left a piece of my heart in Chotěboř when I left in 2023, tucked into the classrooms where I taught, the cobblestoned walk between Gymnázium and Panský Dům, and the laughter-filled chaos of that first Thanksgiving. I know I’ll keep visiting long after my last students have graduated, long after they’ve built lives of their own. Returning to Chotěboř grounds me, and reminds me why I do the work I do—why community matters, why listening matters, why showing up matters. And every time I step off that last bus from Prague and breathe in that familiar air, I’m reminded that the lessons I learned there will continue guiding me, no matter how far I wander from the place that really taught me what meaningful service truly looks like.
