Students & Education

GLOBALIST The Yale

Spring 2013 / Vol. 13, Issue 3

stu de nt s & ed uc at io n

letter from the editor 03

GLOBALIST The Yale

An Undergraduate Magazine of International Affairs Spring 2013 / Vol. 13, Issue 3 The Yale Globalist is a member of Global21, a network of student-run international affairs magazines at premier universities around the world.

JOURNALISM ADVISORY BOARD Steven Brill, Yale Dept. of English Nayan Chanda, Director of Publications, MacMillan Center Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Foreign Affairs Jef McAllister, Time Magazine Nathaniel Rich, The Paris Review Fred Strebeigh, Yale Dept. of English

ACADEMIC ADVISORY BOARD Harvey Goldblatt, Professor of Medieval Slavic Literature, Master of Pierson College Donald Green, Director, Institution for Social and Policy Studies Charles Hill, Yale Diplomat-in-Residence Ian Shapiro, Director, MacMillan Center Ernesto Zedillo, Director, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization Send comments, questions, and letters to the editor to gloeics2013@gmail.com Interested in subscribing? Log on to tyglobalist. org and click the Subscribe link in the upper right corner.

Pictures from CreativeCommons used under Attribution Noncommercial license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

This magazine is published by students of Yale College. Yale University is not responsible for its contents.

dear

Readers,

As your new Editors-in-Chief of the Globalist, we are incredibly excited to present to you the third issue of the year and our first issue, Students and Education. After two incredible issues under the leadership of Diana Saverin, the two of us have taken over for Issues III and IV. We are excited and humbled by this opportunity and the challenges it presents; living up to the standards Diana set for us in Issues I and II is no easy task. It has been a steep learning curve for us, so we wanted to start off this letter by thanking our board, editors-at-large, and staffers for their guidance and assistance over the past few months. We also wanted to thank our readers for their patience and willingness to stick with us. If you are reading this now, we truly appreciate it.

Our theme for this issue, Students and Education, was inspired by the range of student uprisings and protests worldwide in the past few years.

Students have played a large role in political protests across a variety of issues in Chile, Egypt, and China, among others. More than in any other period in recent memory, students today are standing up and speaking out—changing societies, systems, and by extension, the world today. As students ourselves, we find these stories both inspiring and challenging.

From stories about reproductive education in the Philippines to alliances between American universities and universities in the Qatar to a deep insight into the culture of Study Abroad at Yale, we hope to present a range of issues relating to education today.

Of course, it would not be a true issue of the Globalist without several amazing off-theme pieces. Articles including a look at medical care for immigrants in Bologna and the conflict of identity along the Sino-Korean border give a glimpse into other happenings in the world.

Again, thank you for your continued loyalty and readership, as well as your patience with us in this period of transition. We hope you enjoy Issue III of the year and will be on the lookout for our fourth and final issue.

With Love, ON THE COVER: Photograph and design

by Kelly Schumann for The Yale Globalist.

Anisha Suterwala & Emily Ullmann Editors-in-Chief, The Yale Globalist

www.tyglobalist.org

Map of Contents

Production & Design Editors Kelly Schumann & Sera Tolgay Chief Online Editor John D’Amico Online Associates Janine Chow, Danielle Ellison, Charley Locke, Isabel Ortiz

Editors-in-Chief Anisha Suterwala & Emily Ullmann Managing Editor Sophie Broach, Aaron Gertler, Dan Gordon, Maggie Yellen Associate Editors Rachel Brown, Ashley Dalton, Ashley Wu

Executive Director & Publisher Jason Toups Director of Outreach Margaret Zhang Events Coordinator Deena Rahman

Copy Editor TaoTao Holmes

Editors-at-Large: Raisa Bruner, Jeffrey Dastin, Marissa Dearing, Cathy Huang, Eli Markham, Charlotte Parker, Sanjena Sathian, Diana Saverin, Jessica Shor

contents 05

TABLE of CONTENTS

spring 2013 volume 13 issue 3

32

22

20

students & education 18 | Education Cities: From the Middle East to Malaysia. The transformation of education as satellite campuses gather in “education cities” abroad.

By Rachel Brown.

A semester abroad fills gaps in a Yale education, if students can find time. By Ariel Katz.

22 | Catholic, Condoms, and a Changing Culture

The Phillipines funds birth control for its poorest citizens, but not without controversy. By Aaron Gertler.

25 | White Space: A Glance at Gifted Education in Singapore. By Fiona Lowenstein.

8 | North Korea Across the Yalu River

One bridge, yet one infinitely great divide. By Minami Funakoshi.

photo essay 14 | A Visit to Mississippi

A look into the American South.

By Brianne Bowen.

For the UK government, university reform may have only complicated the system’s issues. By Charles Goodyear.

28 | Dual Language Programs: The Future of Biligual Education. By Yvette Borja.

30 | Reaching out to Women Through the Airwaves in Palestine. By Erin Biel.

20 | Getting Out, Not Missing Out

features

26 | Tuition Reform

32 | Struggles in a Silent World

Insight into the challenges of educating the deaf in Sri Lanka. By Chareeni Kurukulasuriya.

34 | An Unstable Peace.

Peru neglects youth education. By Emma Goldberg.

36 | Fusion

The story of how one woman left behind her world to inspire young people in India. By Naintara Rajan.

letter from

glimpses

6 | Egypt: Tourism After the Revolution. What the over

12 | Negotiating Identity in the Search for Healthcare

photo contest

13 | An Everyday Crime

throw of Mubarak means for the country’s tour guides. By Elizabeth Villarreal.

38 | Yale’s Best Photographers Capture the Globe

Immigrants seek coverage in the European Union. By Angelica Calabrese.

The hidden world of hacking in Japan. By John D’Amico.

06 letter from

Egypt: Tourism after the Revolution What the overthrow of Mubarak means for the country’s tour guides

By Elizabeth Villarreal

Mahmoud gestures at the Mortuary Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, site of a 1997 terrorist attack that killed 62 people (Villarreal/TYG).

A

bout three months before my family’s Christmas vacation to Egypt, the questions started.

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

“Is there still time to change your plans? It just doesn’t seem prudent.”

“You said you’d wait it out, but the political situation there doesn’t seem to be improving.”

In the weeks before I left, the comments only got more frequent, more insistent— and not without reason. On November 22, newly-elected president and Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi granted himself sweeping powers, beyond the scope of judicial review. The move was allegedly designed to “protect the revolution and achieve justice,” but critics around the world labeled it martial law. The nightly news showed images of violence in Tahrir Square that echoed those of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Front-page spring 2013, issue 3

stories told of a hastily-written Constitution and deep divisions within Egyptian society.

All coverage of Egypt seemed negative, the most frequent words “anger,” “opposition,” and “violence.” On December 12, 2012, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman raised the stakes even further when he posed a question to his readers: “Can God Save Egypt?”

But my family went anyway, ignoring all warnings from friends and relatives and boarding a plane almost completely devoid of tourists.

From above, the first thing you see of Egypt is the Nile, snaking its way through empty desert. As you approach the ground, you see miles of barbed wire, its purpose unclear and its presence intimidating. And even closer, you see the piles of trash. Trash is everywhere: In the canals, in heaps by the road, randomly scattered in the desert. Oftentimes it is burning.

The Egypt we saw was not violent. We didn’t see any protests or street fights, but we did see the more mundane effects of a fundamentally weak and inefficient government, struggling to replace an autocratic predecessor.

On a highway circling the Cairo city limits, I see roads choked with expensive BMWs, cars that might be considered vintage if seen in Connecticut, beat-up sedans, and donkeys. The only women I see are smiling white-skinned models on billboards advertising pizza. Although our guide, Mahmoud, one of several guides and drivers our family hired, vehemently denies that there is any taboo against female drivers here, this seems unlikely. As our van weaves in and out of traffic, we pass new luxury developments on the outskirts of the city and the unfinished, illegally-constructed skeletons of houses.

There are brightly colored tablecloths drying

letter from 07 in the wind, men smoking shisha in cafes on every street, falafel for one Egyptian Pound (about 15 cents), and not a single street sign.

Although I’d promised by mom back home that I’d avoid anything potentially dangerous—especially Tahrir Square—my siblings and I went there the first night, figuring any tour of Egyptian history would be incomplete without it. The tour company wouldn’t let us go unaccompanied, so we took a guide along. On the way there, we saw the dusty streets, dusty plants, dusty piles of trash become a canvass for the colored glow of nightclubs and the little LEDs jauntily ringing car taillights. The square itself is now a tent city, and although the guide had been solicitous up until that point, he refused to let us near the tents. “There’s crime there. You can buy anything, drugs, women, weapons.” My stepsister says that’s what they said about Occupy Wall Street, but I’m not sure anyone ever said you could buy guns in Zuccotti Park.

In the car, my siblings and I start asking about the revolution, and the guide, who asked not to be identified by name, calls the Muslim Brotherhood “liars.” My brother doesn’t hear him, so he rolls up the window and says it again, louder, with more force.

“They are liars!” I ask if he was involved in the original anti-Morsi protests, and after a pause he says, “I was involved.” He’s tired and he doesn’t want to talk about it. He wants to talk about the dance hall we’re passing where he was married a few years ago and the house where he takes care of his ailing mother.

Many of the guides I met would use the word “liars” to describe politicians in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Later, Mahmoud would stand in front of a statue from the Ptolemaic Kingdom—the period in which Egypt was ruled by Greeks who won popular support by adopting local Egyptian customs—and say that members of the Brotherhood didn’t truly believe in God, that they just used it to manipulate people. “If they do something wrong and you can’t question it because it’s allegedly the word of God, then our politicians are no longer men.” Mahmoud and the other guides I met had clearly spent considerable time thinking about and debating the future, the nature of democracy, and the role of religion. Given the consequences for young, educated, liberal citizens like them, living on the front lines of the revolution, it’s no wonder.

Another guide, Eman, once told me that her friend is permanently disabled after being shot in the face. “He was so handsome,” she said.

And although no guide ever mentioned it, there is a risk that if the Muslim Brotherhood or

A tour guide leads a group of tourists from a cruise ship on an excursion to the Pyramids of Giza (Villarreal/TYG).

another Islamic group radicalizes Egypt, tourists won’t come anymore. My family would not have visited Egypt if bathing suits or alcohol were forbidden, not so much for the specific inconveniences as for the general implication of such bans. At a New Year’s Eve party in Sharm el-Sheikh, a resort city along the Red Sea, I saw the governor of South Sinai, Khaled Fouda, watch a performance of what were billed as “Vegas showgirls” dance onstage.

Would he accept a turn toward Sharia law?

We fly upriver to Aswan and board a boat downstream to Luxor, hitting all the major tourist sites along the way. We see pyramids and temples and tombs. Although our itinerary crisscrosses that of the Minister of Tourism himself (on a mission of inspection), we face preventable problems every step of the way.

At the Pyramids of Giza, we can’t go inside the Great Pyramid because the lights are out all day. The taxis are unmetered and you have to tip every time you want to use the bathroom.

The streets are blocked in many parts of Cairo because no one bothers to regulate the setup of the markets. Vendors, suffering from a lack of tourism and still forced to pay for government leases on their stalls, push their merchandise aggressively, even desperately.

The number of tourists is unclear. The ministry says tourist levels are at 86 percent of the country’s capacity, a strong number, but the tour guides we met laughed at that figure.

They hear stories of cruise ships built for 130 departing with only nine passengers. They see carriage drivers who cannot afford to feed their horses. I personally met few tourists, or at least classic vacationers. One British woman visited because her mother had surprised her with the trip only days before they were to leave–

there wasn’t time to worry about security risks.

One man from Ottawa used to visit regularly for business, and was comfortable with the country. An elderly British woman, who came looking for adventure, reminisced with me about her mid-century time with the Masai.

But maybe because they are surrounded by millennia of history, the guides see this revolution as just one part of a larger picture. When I asked the guide that took us to Tahrir Square about “the revolution,” he asked “Which one?”

The guide Mahmoud said he saw tourism drop almost as much when swine flu hit. Eman, the guide from Cairo, said it was worse after the 1997 Luxor Massacre, when terrorist gunman killed 62 tourists at the Temple of Hatshepsut, and the 2004 Sinai bombing, which targeted tourist hotels and killed 34 people. Mahmoud said that even the Iraq War affected tourism, and a tour was cancelled after the conflict between Israel and Gaza just this year because of a perceived increase in risk.

There seems to be a mismatch between the actual and supposed danger of a journey to Egypt. My trip was peaceful and interesting, but the guides I met are suffering. Mahmoud left the country last year for an internship in America. He says that if he could, he’d want to be a guide for the rest of his life, but he doesn’t know if he can wait out the stagnation. He’s tired of waiting: For Mubarak to fall, for the parliament to form, for the president to be elected, for the constitution. He believes that it will get better. He believes that his country has a bright future. But he doesn’t know how much longer he can wait.

Elizabeth Villarreal ’16 is in Saybrook College.

Contact her at elizabeth.villarreal@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

08 feature

North Korea Across the Yalu River One bridge, yet one infinitely great divide

W

hen my friends and I arrived in Dandong, the largest border city in China, our first destination was duanqiao: The Broken Bridge. The bridge, which connects Dandong and Sinujiu, North Korea over the Yalu River, is a relic of the Korean War. Bombed by American aircraft, it serves as a reminder—or proof—of “American aggression,” and, according to the propaganda poster by the bridge, is a symbol of the “greatest achievement of [Chinese] voluntary army…to aid [North] Korea.”

The Broken Bridge is also one of the few spots in China where you can see North Korea, the most corrupt nation in the world according to Transparency International’s 2011 corruption index. North Korea, a totalitarian communist regime, maintains an extreme disparity between the rich and the poor: While Kim Jong-Un, supreme leader since December 2011, enjoys a rollercoaster ride in a new amusement park, more than 30 percent of the population suffers from undernourishment.

Eager to see North Korea with our own eyes, my friends and I hopped in a battered cab that reeked of gas and cigarettes and headed toward the Broken Bridge. Within 20 minutes, we had left the city center and were driving on a deserted mountain. Amidst the trees I spotted a decrepit motel named Taiyangdao, island of the sun. Who would stay in such a place?

I thought to myself as we continued down the dark, one-way road. Where is the sun?

After an hour and a half of driving, our cab finally halted at a sign that read spring 2013, issue 3

Hekou Duanqiao, the Broken Bridge at River Mouth. Excited, we burst out of the cab and ran toward the empty bridge.

An eerie silence hung over the site—there was no one else there, except for the old Chinese woman at the ticket booth and the bronze bust of Mao Anying, the eldest son of Mao Zedong. On October 23, 1950, Anying crossed the bridge to join the Korean War. As I tiptoed down the bridge, I passed posters explaining the brief history of the bridge and the Korean War. One of them read: On March 29, 1951, American warplanes bombed Qingcheng Bridge. It was finally destroyed. The remained parts of the bridge are called as “broken bridge” today…

To commemorate the great “war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea” and the great achievement of voluntary army, the relevant departments of Dandong City built the statue of MAO Anying...

The statue at the bridge will be looked at by people with reverence forever.

Suddenly, I hit a dead-end: A metal fence blocked my way. I leaned over the fence; just a few feet away the bridge ended abruptly, its jagged, splintered edge hanging awkwardly over the water. I tore my eyes off from the drop-off, and looked up. North Korea was just a few hundred feet away.

Gray haze hovered over the shore, masking what was on the other end of the Yalu River. I reached out my arm then clasped my

By Minami Funakoshi

fingers, as if to grab and clear the fog away.

Standing there, halfway between North Korea and China, I felt as if stranded between two worlds. On the right on the Chinese shore, stood tall office buildings. On the left on the North Korean shore, stood trees. Lamps lit up the city of Dandong, bustling with activity; Sinujiu lay in lifeless darkness, with no power to defy the night, helpless before the sinking sun. Staring at the other side, it was if the bridge disappeared into a black hole.

After a while we left the bridge and headed to Hushan (Tiger Mountain), the eastern-most known section of the Great Wall of China. As we climbed up the steps, fighting against the piercingly cold wind, a panorama view of Dandong, the Yalu River, and Sinujiu spread before our eyes: Hills lush with red and yellow foliage on the Chinese side and, just across the river, barren, hay-coloured farmland. Even the few grey clouds that hung over Dandong were crawling toward the other side; as the Chinese land emerged under the sunlight, shadows shrouded North Korea.

When we reached the watchtower on the

Wall, we found a pair of mounted binoculars.

Attached was a piece of paper that said, “5 RMB (80 cents).” As I stepped toward the binoculars, a Chinese man appeared at my side. I gave him a 5 RMB bill and began to examine North Korea.

Through the binoculars, I saw huts built with wood and straw dotting the farmland.

Nothing moved. I continued to scan the

feature 09

Trees line the shore of Sinujiu in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, more commonly known as North Korea, seen here at left. The urban office buildings of Dandong, China loom just a few hundreds meters across the Yalu River, yet the distance between two places could not be more pronounced (Courtesy Jake Reznick).

shore. Finally, I spotted a lone truck driving down a one-way road: The first sign of activity. “Look, there’s a truck!” I shouted.

Then, I saw a dot moving nearby. I squinted: “There’s a man running in front of it!”

I shouted excitedly, pointing out each little thing that I saw. “A propaganda billboard! It’s red with white letters, just like in China!” “Look, farmers!”

The farmers fascinated me; ten or twenty North Koreans, all wearing the same black clothes, bent down in unison to harvest their crops. Every few minutes, they left their positions in the field to dump armfuls of potatoes onto a wheel-cart. Amongst the black-clad farmers strolled one old woman, dressed in red.

Who is that woman? Why is she wearing red?

Questions continued to run through my mind.

One North Korean left the line of farmers and descended to the shore, growing bigger in my view. He wore loose black pants, a black jacket, and black rubber boots. Despite the biting northern wind, his hands were exposed. He stood at the edge of the shore, the farthest he could go, facing me. With still a tuft of black hair on his head he seemed relatively young, perhaps in his early middle age. I could almost make out his face but he turned away, and the image I pieced together in my mind turned into a faceless blur.

I stepped away from the binoculars and realized that I could see the North Koreans with my bare eyes. And it hit me: If I can see them, they can see me—and everything behind me.

The lush mountains; the neon-lit restaurants

and hotels. The cars; the buildings; the lights on the streets. They see Taiyangdao—island of the sun, so bright and close, yet so far away.

As I stared at the desolate land, I could not help but remember what the cab driver had told me on our way to the Broken Bridge. “When North Koreans come to Dandong, they stuff themselves with our apples and dumplings.” He laughed and added, “They say the food here is cheap and good—they get so excited when they see that the dumplings are stuffed with meat.”

I asked the only other person at the watchtower—the man renting binoculars—what he thought about the life he saw on the other side of the river.“I think it’s pretty good,”he answered leisurely as he smoked his cigarette. “No stress.

Everything is organized. You just have to farm.”

“What do you think about the life here?” I asked.“It’s fine. Not too much stress here, either.”

After

climbing down the Great Wall, we headed toward the narrowest section of the Yalu River known as yi bu kua, “one step across.” This thirty-foot long “step” was perhaps too wide to hop over, but you could still easily wade your way over to the other side.

There, I found one sign titled: “National Border of P.R.C. and D.P.R.K. Reminder.” The sign requests people not to “climb or cross separation obstacles such as barbed wires,” “throw any objects over the border,” “converse or exchange objects with people on the other side of the border,” or “take pic-

tures or videos of the military installations.”

Such warnings, however, do little to stop people from crossing the river. In 2009, North Korean guards detained two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, at the Dandong-Sinujiu border. In 1999, Evan C. Hunziker, also an American citizen, swam across the river while inebriated and was detained in North Korea for three months.

“Do many North Koreans try to cross the border?” I asked the Chinese worker at the ticket booth. “During the winter, when the river freezes and you can walk over to the other side,” he answered. “But not too many try,” he added, “They know they will just get caught and be sent back.”

After talking to the Chinese worker, I walked down to the border. I spotted another sign by the barbed wires that read: “Compete to be a civilized border resident; construct a harmonious border.” On the sign were six cartoon illustrations. In one of them, two children dressed in traditional North Korean clothes stand at the shore, smiling. Across from the two North Korean children is a Chinese backpacker on a boat, who is throwing a package labelled “Food” toward them. At the bottom of the picture, the sign warns, “Forbidden to throw things to North Korea.”

Why

did the Chinese government specifically choose “food” as an example of what not to throw to North Korea?

This policy may stem from political and www.tyglobalist.org

10 feature

The landscape of North Korea exposes the country’s economic disparities. While Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un enjoys rollercoaster rides in a new amusement park, 30% of the population suffers from undernourishment (Funakoshi/TYG). practical considerations on both sides.

In 2005, the North Korean government denied the presence of famine within its borders and expelled aid organizations from the country to decrease its dependence on foreign aid. Despite such moves, however, it continued to rely on outside food aid. The warning against throwing food, among other things, to North Korea may be a manifestation of such contradicting stances.

Perhaps it is another desperate attempt

by Pyongyang to convince the world of its “self-sufficiency” and, in extension, the legitimacy of the current communist system.

This, however, could not be further from the truth. In January 2013, “citizen journalists” in North Korea reported incidents of starvation-induced cannibalism. One journalist told Asia Press, a news agency based in Osaka, Japan: “In my village in May, a man who killed his own two children and tried to eat them was executed by a firing

spring 2013, issue 3

squad…While his wife was away on business he killed his eldest daughter and, because his son saw what he had done, he killed his son as well. When the wife came home, he offered her food, saying: ‘We have meat.’”

China is North Korea’s largest trading partner and strongest political ally. Last October, the government of China’s Liaoning Province hosted the 2012 China-DPRK Economic, Trade, Cultural and Tourism Expo in Dandong.

The theme was “friendship, cooperation and development.” Why, then, does China forbid people from throwing food—among other things—to North Korea? Perhaps it is as simple as this: China, with 1.3 billion people and serious demographic issues of its own, does not need starving North Koreans, lured by food, to swim over to its side.

But as I gazed at the Chinese tourists clustered on a motorboat on the Yalu River, obsessively taking photos of North Koreans, I could not help but wonder if the Chinese

people, by doing so, were trying to forget their painful past as well. For the older Chinese generations, the North Korean famine in the 1990s perhaps stirs memories of the 1957-1961 Great Leap Forward, a disastrous economic and social campaign led by Mao Zedong that caused 18 to 45 million famineinduced deaths. During the Great Leap Forward, almost all property belonged to the state, just as is the case in North Korea now.

For China, North Korea is, in a way, a phantom of its traumatic past. When faced by North Korea, an eerie shadow of what China used to be, what do many Chinese citizens do? They take photos.

Tourists take photos of what to them seems unusual or fascinating. By transforming North Korea into a tourist site and by taking photos of North Koreans, Chinese people can objectify them as “foreign” specimens that they can observe through their lenses. With high-tech smart phones and

feature 11

Looking out at the shore of North Korea from the Chinese side of the Broken Bridge. First bombed by the the Americans in the Korean War, the structure serves as proof of “American agression” according to Chinese propaganda (Funakoshi/TYG).

DSLRs in their hands, they perhaps feel how far their country has come, and how fortuate they are to be living in China today.

And they have the numbers to confirm their sense of pride. China, according to World Bank Development Indicators, reduced its poverty rate from 85 percent to 15.9 percent in less than twenty years. In 2010 its GDP surpassed Japan’s, and China emerged as the world’s second largest economy.

Despite such economic feats, however, China is not an “island of the sun.” Shadows of the Maoist era still haunt Chinese society today, and issues such as corruption, inequality, and human rights abuse darken China’s glory.

But this country—where the government imprisons ordinary citizens at re-education labour camps for “online speech crime,” where officials drive around in BMWs while elementary school children, seeking warmth, crawl

into a dumpster, light some matches, and as a result, die of carbon monoxide poisoning—is, for those on the other side of the Yalu River, a land of hope, prosperity, light, and freedom.

Before

leaving Dandong, my friends and I went to see the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge, which, like the Broken Bridge, was also bombed by American aircraft but has since been repaired. As I stood by the bridge— one of North Korea’s few links to the outside world—I saw a truck heading toward the other side. The sun had already sunk; the truck became smaller and smaller until, finally, darkness sucked it in. What is that man I saw on the shore doing now, I wondered.

Will he find some food to eat tonight? The land remained unlit and silent as before.

Minami Funakoshi ’14 is a Literature major in Berkeley College. Contact her at minami. funakoshi@yale.edu.

“A man who killed his own two children and tried to eat them was executed by firing squad... While his wife was away on business he killed his eldest daughter and, because his son had seen what he had done, he killed his son as well.

When the wife came home, he offered her food, saying: ‘We have meat.’”

—Citizen Journalist, North Korea www.tyglobalist.org

12 glimpse

seek coverage Negotiating Identity in Immigrants in the European Union the Search for Healthcare

By Angelica Calabrese

Physician volunteers at Bologna’s Centro Sokos treat undocumented immigrants (Courtesy Mauro Picciaiola/Centro Sokos).

O

n the table between us lies a small photo ID of a five-year-old boy, blonde and smiling. We’re sitting at the reception desk of the Sokos Center, a volunteer-run health clinic in Bologna, Italy, dedicated to serving the city’s undocumented immigrant population, and Boris is here to apply for his son’s health card. Rosanna, the secretary that I’ve been volunteering with during my semester abroad, peers over her glasses at the photo: “Oh, what a handsome little guy.

Does he go to preschool?”

“No,” replies Boris, who shares his son’s blonde hair and blue eyes. “He doesn’t go to preschool.” As Romanian citizens, Boris and his son are guaranteed freedom of movement to any EU member state, but not much else. To access Italian social services, Boris must enroll in the civil registry, which he cannot do without a job. Boris hopes to enroll in the registry soon, but first, he needs a formal work contract from his employer, for whom he works unofficially as a blacksmith. “He keeps telling me he’ll give me the contract,” Boris tells us, shaking his head, “but he still hasn’t given me anything.”

In theory, their EU citizenship should ensure Boris and his son a health card and therefore access to care regardless of Boris’ employment status, but in practice, the system for “unregistered” EU citizens like Boris and his son fosters discrimination and exclusion. Yet Boris and his son have a paradoxical advantage: Both were born in Moldova, a small nonEU country sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine that formed after the fall of the

spring 2013, issue 3

Soviet Union in 1991, and both have dual Romanian and Moldovan citizenship.

Although their Romanian citizenship made it possible for Boris and his son to get to Italy, it now stands in their way. The health costs of unemployed EU citizens who are unable to enroll in the registry should be covered by their home country’s social security program. The E.N.I. card (Europeo Non-Iscritto, or Unregistered European), allows them to be treated by regular Italian physicians, relying on reimbursement of medical spending by the home country. This reimbursement system works for immigrants from wealthier European countries such as France or Germany, but Italian doctors rarely accept an E.N.I. card presented by a Bulgarian or Romanian, assuming that the reimbursements will not arrive due to the corruption and incompetence of their home health care systems. Thus, many Romanians and Bulgarians are left without care.

Unemployed non-EU members, on the other hand—such as Moldovans—can apply for the S.T.P. (Straniero Temporaneamente Presente, or Temporarily Present Foreigner) card.

Each region addresses the needs of patients with S.T.P. health cards differently, and in Bologna, these needs are met through Sokos, and other similar medical volunteer organizations, which offer both general care and specialized care such as gynecology and psychiatry.

Patients with the E.N.I. card, however, are not supposed to be treated at Sokos.

But sometimes, there is nowhere else to go.

The volunteers at Sokos offer more than just healthcare: They also help people like Boris

put together the documents necessary to apply for their health cards, providing many immigrants with the only document that attests to their presence in the city. “We are the only ones that acknowledge them,” pointed out Dr. Natalia Ciccarelli, the Center’s Health Director.

Rosanna calls over Dr. Ciccarelli to discuss Boris and his son’s situation, and the two women consult Boris from across the desk.

Although it would have been more advantageous for both Boris and his son to use their Moldovan identity to apply for the S.T.P. card, Boris had already acquired an E.N.I. card at another center. If father and son have cards associated with different citizenship and different legal residences, they may run into problems with the government. So Rosanna applies for the E.N.I. card for Boris’ son, knowing that although it will attest to his presence in Bologna, it will likely not ensure healthcare. She tells Boris to come back and apply for the S.T.P. card as soon as his current card expires.

The current system, bureaucratically complex and circuitous, clearly yet insidiously discriminates against Romanians. Only a fortunate few have the ability to negotiate between identities, sometimes presenting themselves as Romanian, sometimes Moldovan, for better care. Encouraging white lies and hidden identities, the system puts the most vulnerable at even greater risk.

Angelica Calabrese ‘14 is in Morse College.

Contact her at angelica.calabrese@yale.edu.

glimpse 13

An Everyday Crime

The hidden world of hacking in Japan

By John D’Amico

Crowd in Osaka, Japan. Many access email via cell phone, or from net cafes commonly found throughout any city (D’Amico/TYG).

O

n December 25, 2011, Garicchi, a tech blogger and self-described Windows enthusiast, saw his inbox flooded with alerts. In his sent mail folder were recorded scores of virus-laden messages sent off without his knowledge to every person on his contact list. His account—and all the personal information on it—was completely compromised. When he began his blog post with the words “This was the absolutely worst Christmas ever,” he echoed the sentiments of many around Japan who found themselves victims of a series of cyber-attacks on Google Mail accounts that morning.

Until July 2011, Japan had no legislation on its books to prevent or prosecute cyberattacks in the country. Now, the government can seize data of any kind from a computer suspected of affiliation with a cyber-attack, a potential opportunity for gross abuse of police authority. Yet the recent cyber-attacks raise questions regarding the success of both Japanese and international regulations. David Thaw, a fellow at the Information Society Project at the Yale Law School and an expert on cybercrime, noted that “the problem is one of metrics—how do we determine a means of measuring effectiveness?”

The methods behind everyday cybercrime help ensure the near impossibility of tracing, let alone cracking down on, offenders. A variety of popular techniques exist for hacking into email accounts, ranging from simply guessing the password to somewhat more sophisticated “dictionary attacks” which choose from a preselected list of likely words in order to find the password. Garicchi, however, sus-

pected the crime arose from the free hotel Wi-Fi he connected to the day before. According to him, “intruders could much more easily gather relevant account information through an unsecured network.“ Iwakawa Yoshifumi, another tech-savvy blogger caught up in the recent cyber-attacks, hypothesized that the hackers gained access “via other website accounts with the users’ personal information on it,” exploiting the fact that people generally reuse passwords from account to account.

After accessing a few accounts, the hackers spammed the address lists of their victims with links which, when clicked on, would automatically hijack the recipient’s account.

While it seems like common sense to avoid suspicious links in emails, the hijacking cases spread faster and faster throughout the end of December. Professor Thaw’s succinct explanation: “Yes, people are just that stupid.”

With bloggers swapping radically different theories about the original cause of the attacks, and with hijacking more or less occurring through self-propagation past the first few intrusions, it is no wonder that law enforcement finds it difficult to investigate even the most minor cybercrimes. Further complicating the story, virtually every victim traced the illegal access to a different source, although most came from cities within America. Attacks arrived by way of computers in Mountain View, California; East Rutherford, New Jersey; Bellevue, Washington, and many other cities. Since hackers can disguise their original location through such proxies with ease, the level of transnational coordination involved often makes enforcement by any one

country alone too burdensome to pursue.

Yet the question remains—why did these hackers bother at all? After all, the moneymaking potential of the attacks pales in comparison to more newsworthy raids on corporations like eBay. Still, as the blogger Iwakawa pointed out, the connections between email accounts and a wide variety of other services “magnifies the scope of damage [and profit] of an account hijacking considerably.” Through the email account itself and any connected accounts, hackers can gain potentially valuable personal and financial data, such as credit card numbers or bank account information.

Because the attacks can self-propagate, they bear little risk or cost and largely go under the radar of mainstream enforcement. As Professor Thaw stated, “The probability margins [of profit] are incredibly small, but the marginal cost of execution is even smaller,” making such hijackings low-risk and, in the long run, potentially lucrative.

Rather than worry about punishing the cyber-attackers, the Japanese blogosphere is focusing primarily on the prevention of future attacks. As national boundaries are blurred by the interconnectivity of online interaction, new responses to the issue of cyber-attacks will have to focus on how to coordinate international efforts to hold cybercriminals accountable for their actions. Given the ambiguity surrounding even the most basic of cyber-attacks, effective countermeasures will take time to develop.

John D’Amico ‘15 is in Pierson College. Conact him at john.c.damico@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

14 photo essay

a look into the American South

photo essay 15

Photographs taken in Mississippi by Brianne Bowen.

www.tyglobalist.org

students and education “

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts. ― C.S. Lewis

”

Total Compulsory Instruction Time for Ages 12-14* (number of hours per year)

N/A < 699 700-799 800-899 900-999 1000-1099 > 1100 * Data from OECD and UNESCO

Designed by Sera Tolgay for The Yale Globalist.

18 students & education

Education Cities: From the Middle East to Malaysia

The transformation of education as satellite campuses gather in “education cities” abroad.

By Rachel Brown

T

he view could have been torn from the pages of any American college brochure—students with notebooks lounging on an expanse of verdant grass, surrounded by striking buildings. But these buildings are not built of centuries-old ivy-covered stone, as in the cliché of Western grandeur. Instead, they are a sleek, futuristic blend of modern aesthetics and traditional Islamic architecture. Elaborate white latticework screens panel the walls of the student center courtyard and medical students attend lecture in white ovoid pods that resemble grounded blimps. The students’ heads are swathed in black hijabs, and the grass grows green thanks to heavy irrigation. In the middle of the Qatari desert, these students attend a university within Qatar’s “Education City,” a unique educational model now blossoming in the sands of the Middle East.

Education City combines numerous satellite campuses of different foreign universities—six American, and one each from France, Britain, and Qatar itself—on one 2,500-acre campus. Education City and a similar endeavor, Malaysia’s “EduCity,” reflect the modern reality that schools and the students that attend them can easily traverse borders.

The former began in 1998, when Qatar realized its economy wouldn’t run on gas and oil forever. According to the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, the nation decided to begin a “journey from a carbon economy to a knowledge economy,” in order to provide future national economic security. Starting with the recruitment of Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar began investing its abundant resource wealth into an education hub for the whole of the Middle East.

Through Education City, Qatar hoped to not only draw students from outside to study in Qatar, but also to reverse its troubling “brain drain”—the best Qatari students often went abroad for college and never returned. Now, rather than sending students abroad to America, Qatar is bringing American universities— including Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, and spring 2013, issue 3

the Georgetown School of Foreign Service— to its students.

Universities participating in “education cities” in both Qatar and Malaysia are attracted by the opportunity to interact on a global scale and to increase their presence in regions with emerging political and economic importance.

Everette Dennis, dean of Northwestern’s Qatari campus, explained that a critical factor in the school’s decision to expand overseas was the “desire to have a window into the Middle East.” It doesn’t hurt that the costs of satellite construction are largely underwritten by the Qatar Foundation, which was founded by ruling emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani; ten-year contracts eliminate most of the financial risks of expansion.

Malaysia’s aspirations are similar to those of Qatar. In 1995, nearly 20 percent of Malaysian students studied abroad, but overseas education was expensive and meant lost revenue from domestic tuition. To reverse these losses, Malaysia started its own kind of Education City – EduCity, where tuition will be significantly lower than tuition abroad. Construction on EduCity began in 2008 and the project’s main developer is Iskandar Investment, a partial subsidiary of Khazanah National, the Malaysian government’s strategic investment fund.

EduCity officials invited predominantly British universities to set up branches in the city of Nusajaya, including the University of Reading, Newcastle University, and the University of Southampton. Malaysia was once a British colony, and its education system still retains traces of this colonial legacy. According to Tony Downes, provost of Reading’s Malaysia campus, the university, like Northwestern in Qatar, saw a campus abroad as helping his university gain global prominence. Setting up a school in Malaysia, Downes said, was “part of a strategy to increase international and global visibility.”

Economics are another key factor in the overseas college phenomenon: More and more international students demand and can afford high quality education, but may not be able to actually go abroad due to visa restric-

tions and other factors. Through satellite campuses, universities can meet this demand. Still, the schools claim they aren’t seeking financial gain in such pursuits—at least, not primarily.

“The venture is expected to make a modest surplus in time, but the interest is reputational rather than strongly financial,” said Downes.

But pursuing an international reputation is risky. The University of Reading’s Malaysia campus is the biggest development project in the school’s history, and it bears the same risks, reputational and otherwise, of any massive expansion. If schools spread themselves too thin in attempts to “globalize,” they could be reduced to brand names.

Domestic critics of satellite campuses, ranging from journalists to academics, fear that British and American universities cannot replicate the academic freedoms and fierce intellectual debate they foster back home.

Qatar is a conservative society, with numerous religious and political sensitivities that must be considered. A current draft law, which has yet to be approved by the cabinet, would ban speech that could “throw relations between the state and the Arab and friendly states into confusion,” among other prohibitions. Malaysia has also been criticized by NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Freedom House for maintaining repressive media and internet policies. Particularly controversial is the University and University Colleges Act, which prevents college students from joining political parties and restricts political speech. The exact specifications of how the Act will be applied in EduCity remain to be resolved, but it is likely that universities within EduCity will be subject to its provisions as well. Provost Downes also cited the challenge of introducing “the idea of questioning and challenging everything—including one’s professors” to some Malaysian students who have been steeped in a culture of learning by rote memorization.

Dennis, however, dismissed as “nonsense” concerns that the Qatar campus could tarnish the reputation of Northwestern. While he recognizes the complexity of navigating the fine line between local traditions and international

students & education 19

The University of Reading Great Hall in the United Kingdom (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons). standards on freedom of expression is complex, he also maintains that the entire endeavor is one “worth doing.”

Nikhil Lakhanpal, an American student studying at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service campus in Qatar remembers his concern over “taking the ‘Problem of God’ class with conservative Muslims.” But, he says, “the university [Georgetown SFS] has never backed down [with regards to unbiased teaching],” and the Qatar Foundation guarantees academic freedom within Education City.

Even with such guarantees, important questions remain regarding the degree to which schools in Education City and EduCity are able to achieve the same educational experience as their home campuses would provide. This question is complicated by the fact that satellite campuses in both Qatar and Malaysia are “niche” venues, specializing in certain academic areas; multidisciplinary education emerges only when all the campuses are viewed as a unified whole. To their credit, both education cities put students from different universities in shared dormitories.

Additionally, students at Education City can cross-register for certain courses. But the focus of each school remains relatively narrow.

Will simply using the same curriculum and teaching methods have the desired effect, or

do curricula become imbued with new value based on the broader student experience?

Dennis described his school’s campus in Qatar as “Northwestern with an Arab accent”—but at what point does education go from being spoken with an accent to being translated into something unrecognizable?

When campuses travel abroad, some aspects of the quintessential American college experience are inevitably lost in translation.

Fierce rivalries over intramural sports and huddles of students working on problem sets in Education City, would be a familiar sight to American visitors, but the restrictions on girls entering boys’ rooms? Not so much. Lakhanpal explained that within the dorms of Education City there is “not as much of the dating, drinking, or ‘going out’ culture” as is found at most U.S. universities. Such behaviors might be considered distractions from the true purpose of education, but their absence undoubtedly alters the nature of the overall experience. For many Westerners, after all, university education is as much about learning how to independently navigate unfamiliar or awkward situations as it is about a professor’s lecture or discussions at the seminar table.

But campuses abroad also create unique opportunities for Western academics and students to gain a better understanding of for-

eign affairs and interact with regional groups in new ways. Universities joining EduCity hope it will provide a gateway for professors from the UK to collaborate with academics across Southeast Asia. Students and staff in Education City have witnessed the Arab Spring firsthand. Northwestern University in Qatar actually played a part in these events, hosting members of the Libyan National Transitional Council as they designed new rules for media freedom in their country. As the Middle East and Southeast Asia confront issues of religious and social freedom, higher education and its related ideas may turn out to be the most important Western exports in coming decades.

Lakhanpal also spoke of the Arab Spring: where else, he asked, would an American student have the opportunity to study alongside “the actual revolutionary youth of the Arab world?” Like the democratic uprisings that swept from Tunisia to Yemen, education cities are spreading across the Middle East and Asia.

Even tiny Bhutan has introduced plans for such a venture. From the sands of Qatar to the jungles of Malaysia – and now perhaps to the mountains of the Himalayas – once-foreign ideals are effecting a new, educational, revolution.

Rachel Brown ’15 is in Saybrook College. Contact her at rachel.brown@yale. www.tyglobalist.org

20 students & education

Getting Out, Not Missing Out

By Ariel Katz

A semester abroad fills gaps in a Yale educationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if students can find time.

Helen Morris, who spent her junior year in Peru, atop Huayna Picchu. (Morris/TYG) spring 2013, issue 3

students & education 21

I

n May 2012, McKenna Keyes went on strike. At the Universidad de Sevilla, where Keyes spent her sophomore spring, students were walking out of their classrooms to protest the rising cost of tuition.

Meanwhile, in New Haven, Yalies wrote final papers and stressed about their exams.

As a student studying abroad, Keyes welcomed the month away from class and used the time to travel around Spain. “I was not going abroad to just take classes. Every single moment is a cultural experience, and you’re learning something all the time: About yourself, about the host culture. You’re opting for a different type of education when you go abroad.” Keyes said.

One hundred and eleven students went abroad during the 2011-2012 academic year, according to Susan Evans, associate director of study abroad at Yale’s Center for International and Professional Experience (CIPE). This number is relatively low, compared to the number of students that go abroad at Yale’s peer institutions. At Duke, around 600 students, in a school of 6500, go abroad each year, according to Margaret Riley, director of the Global Education Office for Undergraduates at Duke. “With nearly a third of a graduating class choosing to study abroad, obviously [study abroad] has evolved to become an accepted, if not expected, rite of passage for a Duke student.”

At Yale, however, spending a semester in another nation can invite stigma. Keyes says there’s an assumption that people leave because they dislike Yale, though in her case, nothing could be further from the truth. As a peer advisor, Keyes tries to remind students that “people who love Yale can still go abroad.”

Here, we often become caught up in groups: Suites, a cappella, cultural houses, publications. Going abroad for a semester forces students to let go of that, to find independence and a new perspective. Helen Morris, who spent a semester abroad in Peru, described days when she would wander Lima’s streets, trying to find the best way to get from place to place. Caroline Barnes, who spent a semester in Scotland, discovered her interest in Scottish literature, which ended up being the topic of her senior thesis. Kyle Hutzler, who studied last semester in Shanghai, described how happy a Chinese tutor of his was when he shared his Yale VPN with her, allowing her to connect to websites blocked in China. Keyes applies the Spanish saying “no pasa nada” (no worries) to her life at Yale, and as a result finds herself better able to deal with stress. Being abroad, these students agree, allows much

needed time to figure out certain things about oneself and Yale. Hutzler described his experience abroad as “being no less intellectually occupied or engaged, but less frenetic, in a way.”

It’s a strange contradiction: Yalies are wellinformed and curious about the outside world, yet unwilling to step out of the Yale bubble for an extended period of time. This means that study abroad culture at Yale has come to place a lot of emphasis on summer work.

But half a summer isn’t the same as a semester. After her junior year, Morris spent five weeks in Argentina with Yale Summer Session.

“If I’d just done a summer abroad, I might think a summer was sufficient. But with a semester abroad, you realize where you are four or five weeks into the semester and how much more you still have to figure out at that point.”

Evans agreed that there is value to both forms of study-abroad, but that students should recognize differences in structure.

During a semester, students integrate more fully into local communities, giving them more time to work on language skills and receive a cultural education. Keyes, who spent five weeks in Croatia over the summer, described that experience as closer to tourism. While Yale classes and summer programs expose students to different cultures, they often lack the struggle and consequent personal evolution that comes with living for an extended period in a foreign country. Yale tries to bring the world to students, but that is not the same as bringing students into the world.

“The ability to learn about other places and see that there is a bigger world—you definitely get that here,” Morris said. “There are professors and other students from all over the world and you are taking classes in which you can learn about cultural things But a personal global education? I think that’s very much about the experience of living through a different education system, seeing how they do it differently, seeing what their policies are, engaging with students in that university.”

Nothing will ever make Yale harder to leave, but students should take comfort in the fact that it will still be here when they get back.

Sometimes, when Hutzler talks to friends about going abroad, he asks them about their semester first. Their descriptions are almost painfully short, he said. “They’re saying ‘well, I didn’t really do much this semester.’ It was reaffirming of the decision to study abroad.”

Ariel Katz ‘15 is in Morse College. Contact her at ariel.katz@yale.edu.

www.tyglobalist.org

22 students & education Carlos Celdran, briefly imprisoned following his 2010 protest in Manila Cathedral. He may soon return to prison if his conviction is not overturned (Courtesy Carlos Celdran).

Catholics, Condoms, and a Changing Culture

The government of the Philippines funds contraception for its poorest citizens, but not without controversy By Aaron Gertler

S

eptember 30, 2010, was an afternoon Mass like any other, until the parishioners saw the man in the top hat.

Carlos Celdran, dapper and furious, strode to the front of Manila Cathedral, in full sight of the mayor of Manila and some of the Philippines’ most powerful bishops. He thrust a sign into the air. “DAMASO”, it read—the name of a villainous priest featured in the novel Noli Me Tangere, written by national hero Jose Rizal, and required reading for every high-schooler in the Philippines.

“Stop getting involved in politics!” Celdran shouted, addressing the leaders of the congregation. His words echoed in the vast space.

Everyone heard.

Though he later apologized to the churchgoers for “ruining your day,” Celdran—a tour guide and performance artist with 180,000 Twitter followers—told reporters that his actions were justified. After all, he said, the Catholic officials he addressed were, through ferocious lobbying and a campaign of mass disinformation, delaying the passage of a crucial reproductive-health bill.

The “RH Bill” as it is called throughout the country, leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

Reading through its provisions, I saw promises, some specific but most vague, of greater support for women’s health, medically compre-

spring 2013, issue 3

hensive sex education in public schools, and government coverage of contraceptive costs (though abortion remains totally illegal). In the context of the Philippines, where the population has doubled since 1980 and the poorest fifth of the nation’s women have, on average, over twice as many children as the wealthiest fifth, the bill seemed sensible.

And to some extent, it must also have seemed sensible to the thirteen senators who voted in December 2012, just before their Christmas vacation in the world’s most Catholic nation, to finally pass a bill first proposed fifteen years before. Though the CBCP refused to heed Celdran’s demands—the PR battle was furious up to and including the day of the vote—their efforts fell short. Eight Senate votes against, each from a conservative Catholic, were not enough, and so the RH Bill became RH Law.

W

hen I spoke to Carlos Celdran over Skype in January, the bill for which he’d fought so hard was due, the next day, to officially pass into effect. Still railing against what he saw as the outsize influence of a small bloc of conservative Catholics, Celdran celebrated the victory of a law that would shrink the gap between rich and poor by ensuring the latter had access to the same contraceptives the former

could pay for out of pocket. The Senate vote, he said, was “the Philippines’ chance to prove to the world that we aren’t the Catholic version of Iran”—and his nation passed that electoral test with flying colors.

Senator Loren Legarda, one of the thirteen “yes” voters, used more moderate language in explaining her support, but her satisfaction was clear. In an email, she wrote: “Our people wanted this bill, and they wanted it now. It heralds the mainstreaming of what used to be the marginal sector of women’s health rights.”

Though she referred in Senate deliberations to the Philippines’ “struggle to see the truth,” Legarda welcomed what Celdran called antiBill disinformation as crucial to the democratic process. “The members of the Roman Catholic Church are well within their right as citizens to express their stand on various social issues, such as reproductive health”—but in the end, they were outvoted.

Jo Imbong, a spokeswoman for the young, pro-Catholic political party Ang Kapatiran, explained things differently: “The bill is not about health, but about controlling the fertility of women.” Though it may poll well, the RH Bill’s seeming popularity comes from “40 years of propaganda” by the government, the national media, and various NGOs. Imbong sees it as a potential stepping stone to active popu-

students & education 23 Celdran, tour guide and performance artist, interupts Mass in Manila Cathedral to protest the role of the Catholic Church against the RH Bill in 2010 (Courtesy Carlos Celdran).

“It’s obvious now that what I have been saying all along is true, that this is a foreign imposition for [the United Nations] so-called Millennium Development Goals, one of which is to depopulate third-world countries” —Vicente Sotto,

lation control—something along the lines of China’s one-child law—which would be disastrous for a nation whose families have always been large. Vicente Sotto, one of the senators who opposed the bill in the final tally, made the same point in sharper language.

“It’s obvious now that what I have been saying all along is true, that this is a foreign imposition for [the United Nations] so-called Millennium Development Goals, one of which is to depopulate third-world countries,” said Sotto, in a speech three days before the RH vote.

U

ntil recently, propaganda or no propaganda, the side of Sotto and Imbong held firm control over the fate of various failed RH bills, one or another of which has been sitting lifeless in Congress since 1998. Once put to a vote, however, the bill’s current incarnation passed through both houses of Congress in the span of a week—an electoral landslide. Why? Carlos Celdran proposed a long list of factors: Conflict within the Catholic Church, support from a motley mix of Muslims, freethinkers, and members of the homegrown religious group Iglesia de Cristo, and the death of Jaime Sin, a charismatic archbishop Celdran called “a big teddy bear … so cute and cuddly you forgot he was actually a misogynist pig.” He calls his own role a modest one, though he’s proud

to have “sexified” for Filipino youth an issue with a musty reputation. “After [the Manila protest], the bill was no longer associated only with angry lesbians at the University of the Philippines.” Other sources pointed to a major compromise added to the bill in the course of deliberations: Filipinos under 18 will require parental permission to access reproductivehealth services unless they are or have been pregnant before.

The most influential force behind the bill’s passage, however, was likely President Benigno Aquino, son of ex-President Corazon Aquino. The latter entered office with massive popular support when dictator Ferdinand Marcos was forced from power in 1986; soon after, she cut the contraceptive funding of the Marcos regime, with the blessing of the Church. Her son, though also a member of the Liberal Party, took a different approach.

“It’s obvious to anyone who’s been following this that it’s the President’s push,” said Red Tani, who founded the pro-RH Filipino Freethinkers in 2009 and now runs the country’s most popular blog. Without Benigno’s demand for a vote, Tani thinks that a “major strike” from the CBCP could have sidelined the bill once again. But once push came to shove, influential female Senators and “young stars in Congress” regained political momentum and

Senator

found just enough votes to get by (the House of Representatives supported RH just 113 to 104, with many abstentions).

Imbong sees the same cause for the bill’s coming to a vote, but considers Aquino’s “flexing his political muscle” as an imposition on the independence of Congress. “This corrective influence of the executive branch […] did not fit well with the culture at all.” Historically, Imbong said, Filipino elders usually move in with their families when they lack the means to support themselves. The RH Law, by discouraging large families, bodes ill for the future of workers who haven’t yet had children.

Lance Katigbak, a filmmaker and sophomore at the University of the Philippines who has been protesting RH legislation since 2008, put forth a similar argument. “Funding contraception is unsustainable,” he told me in an email. “Yes, it might be easier for [the poor] to get by if they have fewer mouths to feed.

But at what expense? They might be less poor, but they’ll still be poor. And when they grow up, they’ll have fewer children to take care of them, fewer children to till their land.” Like Imbong, Katigbak favors a redirection of RH funds to better schools and maternal care, rather than birth control; a common anti-Bill slogan attacks “reducing poverty by reducing the poor.”

www.tyglobalist.org

24 students & education Translation of message in image at left (Courtesy Carlos Antonio Palad).

“Condoms for the poor, say RH Bill supporters. Food for the poor? Speak out against the RH Bill.”

—Advocates for Life

These attacks on the bill—which invoke the specter of a “demographic winter” after old retirees overwhelm the resources of the young—are common in secular debate on the bill, from editorials in college newspapers to Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile. Enrile, in a press conference, argued that no law should interfere with the production of the Philippines’ “top export”—young workers who emigrate overseas and send money home.

When I asked Dr. Junice Melgar, the codirector of women’s-health NGO Likhaan, about these potential long-term pitfalls, she shrugged them off: “It’s a common argument, but not very well-rounded.” A member of the health commission now planning the implementation of the new law, Melgar made the point that nations whose birthrates drop almost always see major social and economic benefits afterward. Other supporters of the bill mentioned Thailand, a nearby nation with similar demographics, which began a national family-planning campaign in the 1970s and now has a GDP twice that of the Philippines.

But Melgar can’t seem to get her points across to her fellow commissioners—one of whom is an anti-RH doctor, and two of whom come from a policy group, the “Bishops and Businessmen’s Conference”, that wears religion on its sleeve. Melgar sees those who persist in fighting RH (lawsuits have been prepared against it in both local and national courts) as a minority, but powerful even so, and “connected with moneyed agents, even in the U.S.,” who she says meddle in Filipino politics from afar, much like the NGOs Imbong attacked.

Still, despite the difficulty of implementation, Melgar is optimistic about the bill’s future effects. Likhaan has already put many RH techniques into practice in small-to-medium spring 2013, issue 3

towns: Educating women, distributing contraceptives, and keeping husbands under control. “We have come across men who charged us with being marriage-wreckers, with teaching their women to talk back,” she tells me, “but eventually we win over most of them. Some of them even join us to help.” Melgar hopes the RH Bill can effect such culture change on a national scale, preventing some of the horrors she’s heard about or seen firsthand: Men pulling out their wives’ IUDs, or women who don’t know how to tell their husbands they don’t feel like sex on a given night.

ypical Pinoy macho shit!” declares nonprofit manager Amie Perez on her blog, referring to the behavior Melgar mentioned, carried out by men who Perez tells me “come home drunk and want to have sex, or [their wives] get hurt.” She also hopes the RH Bill, whatever its legal effect, can help overcome Filipinos’ fear that condoms are somehow unmasculine. When I Skype her, she’s in her office, situated in the midst of a trash-picker community. She works with the children of some of the Philippines’ poorest families, and has seen schools where sixty kids fill one classroom— and then leave, so that sixty more can come in the afternoon. Perez thinks it unlikely that RH money can help that many children find diplomas, but notes that this hasn’t stopped billboard advertisements from featuring children holding platters full of contraceptives: “I Can’t Eat Condoms,” as the slogan goes—so spend those 2.5 billion pesos (50 million U.S. dollars) elsewhere.

During our conversation, Carlos Celdran inverted the spending argument: “If a condom is 10 pesos, and people in this country are so poor that they’d rather buy an egg with those

“T

10 pesos, the choice is easy.” When he isn’t leading tours, he often delivers contraceptives to low-income communities, so that they won’t have to make such choices.

But that’s on hold for now. A week after we spoke, Celdran was suddenly jailed for violating Penal Code Article 133, which prohibits “offending religious feelings;” it’s a charge he faced in 2010, but for which he paid bail and never mentioned when we spoke. Red Tani, now in the process of helping Celdran organize his legal defense, told me that even antiRH advocates are shocked by his sentence— over a year in prison. Tani also noted that foes of the bill have an advantage in this respect: There is no law against offending the feelings of women’s health advocates.

His comments made me think of something Celdran told me: “Condoms exist here.

I can walk to 7-11 and buy condoms right now. The RH Bill just levels the playing field.”

Nowhere in the text of Senate Bill 2378 is any Filipino forced to limit their family size. But now that the bill is law, they will at least share the opportunity to do so with their wealthier countrymen. Lance Katigbak is right to call for stronger maternal health care—but Melgar is also correct when she asserts that a woman’s control over her own body is the first step to better health. The speed and scope of the bill’s impact remain uncertain, but as this Catholic nation begins to give contraception a chance, a future without 60-child classrooms may be within reach.

Aaron Gertler ’15 is in Timothy Dwight College. Contact him at aaron.gertler@yale.edu.

students & education 25

White Space: A glance at gifted education in Singapore

By Fiona Lowenstein

T

he popular perception is that “jeeps don’t really mix,” Thung Yee Meng says, laughing. He sits on the grass while a rugby game is played behind him. He looks to be about sixteen and wears glasses.

“Do you feel like your friends are discriminating against your jeep-ness?” Koh Choon Hwee asks from behind the camera. Hwee is a student at the National University of Singapore whose recent documentary “Conversations About the Gifted Education Program” follows students who participated in Singapore’s Gifted Education Program, known colloquially as the GEP, pronounced “jeep.”

The GEP was instituted approximately 20 years ago, and places students in the top one percent of each grade on a separate academic track. Currently only available in primary schools, the GEP has been replaced in many secondary schools by a curriculum known as the Integrated Program.

The Singaporean school system requires that students take an exam after four years of secondary education to determine whether they will continue on a track to prepare for entrance to universities. This exam determines much of the curriculum, forcing many educators to rigidly teach to the test.

The Integrated Program was invented for students who were talented enough to skip this exam, allowing them time to engage in “enriching classroom activities,” rather than having to study for the test. Approximately 20 percent of students are selected for the IP. Raffles Institution is a prestigious secondary school in Singapore that was one of the first to begin offering the IP. Jason Tan Chong Lee, Dean of Academics at Raffles, says that his mission is to get students to “exercise their character,” rather than simply prepare for exams. “White Space” is the term educators at Raffles use to describe the time put aside for extracurricular enrichment activities.

Students may visit a senior citizen center to

interact with their community or meet with a museum practitioner to learn about the methods of documenting history, fieldtrips that Lee explained would be unlikely in a traditional school. “We don’t want [students] to be confined to a syllabus that is exam-oriented,” Lee explains, “I think that’s what makes teaching at RI special… I have that space.”

Students gain entry to a school like Raffles through two routes. Most students sit for the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE); their scores are considered with the rest of their application to Raffles. However, some students at GEP primary schools gain entrance through a sort of early-admission system, whereby they don’t have to sit for the PSLE, but submit an application detailing their academic and extracurricular interests. This gives students tracked into the GEP for primary school a leg up when applying to secondary schools.

Raffles Institution is partially state-funded, but—like most schools in Singapore—requires that students pay tuition. A spokesperson for Singapore’s Ministry of Education said that the Ministry provides financial aid to needy Singaporeans, but that aid can also come from individual schools. Schools like Raffles tend to receive substantial funding from the Ministry of Education; it is rumored the Ministry wants to encourage such enrichment programs. According to the spokesperson, the Ministry believes that “a broadened definition of giftedness has opened up new pathways and different approaches to learning.” Lee says admissions at Raffles are need-blind and financial aid is based on family income rather than merit. Still, only 20 percent of students at Raffles receive aid.

In Hwee’s documentary, students describe being shocked when they left GEP, because of the lack of both intellectual and ethnic diversity within GEP. Daniel Lee, a graduate of GEP, discusses his year of mandatory military conscription. “When you’re in school it doesn’t

matter, everyone is of a certain intellectual level, but when you go to the army—oh my god—every single person in my company, their highest qualification was O-levels!” Nurul Jihadan Hussein, a Malay graduate of GEP, who looks to be in her early 20s, explains, “All the jeepy kids are Chinese, except for those few of us.” She sits in a school courtyard and wears a white hijab. “People who don’t speak Chinese are kind of a bit of a freak… I was very bilingual before, but when I went to GEP… I didn’t have a lot of Malay friends.”

Hussein said she returned to teach at the GEP school she had attended. When asked what she taught, Hussein replies, “Jeep, of course.”

GEP no longer exists in Singapore’s secondary schools, but many GEP primary school students end up in schools with the IP, and socio-economic divisions remain. Poorer students are underrepresented in both GEP and the IP. This may be a result of less transparent admissions processes than the one described

by Lee, or a consequence of a racially and economically divided society. The question is whether programs like GEP and IP exacerbate these divisions. At the end of the film, Thung Yee Meng tells Koh “I think jeeps are very different, but I think they’re more different by conditioning than by statistics.” Despite their complaints of elitism and isolation within GEP, the former “jeepers” in Hwee’s film also display a sense of nostalgia for GEP’s unique, close-knit community and creative opportunities. As the credits roll on Koh’s film, what remains are questions about an imperfect program, but also a sense that GEP created a haven for many students who would not have benefitted from traditional education.

Fiona Lowenstein ‘16 is in Saybrook College.

Contact her at fiona.lowenstein@yale.edu.

www.tyglobalist.org

24 students & education

Tuition Reform For the UK government, university reform may have only complicated the system’s issues By Charles Goodyear

J

ust over two years ago, London was burning. The educated youth, politically radical and working-class took part in widespread rioting, which spread to the heart of London. Protesters stormed the ruling Conservative Party’s headquarters, ransacked upscale shopping areas, and vandalized war memorials across the capital. The largest demonstrations spanned two months. During this time, the police arrested hundreds of people.

To those looking on from abroad, the violence came as a shock, shattering the perception of the island nation as a peaceful, civil society.

So what began this upheaval? What was the source of this populist rage? In 2010, during the recession, the UK government cut its subsidization of education, causing university tuition fees to skyrocket. Maximum tuition rose from £3,375 to £9,000, equivalent to $14,000, thus pitching the government, the people and the universities in a financial battle against each other. U.S. students might dismiss spring 2013, issue 3

such comparatively low tuition rates, but in a country where university was virtually free, such an increase was bound to cause debate.

Undoubtedly, this has placed pressure on lower income families. Alison Richard, former Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, sees these tuition reforms as not being “narrowly defined by budget cuts,” but instead by a “philosophical judgment,” an attempt to rebalance payment for higher education, which had previously been funded more by the public than by the individual receiving the education. Since society as a whole and the individual being educated both benefit from higher education, an equal contribution from both is a fair compromise.

The three critical players in this battle have much at stake. The government undertook reforms to reduce university dependence on subsidies, and thereby reduce spending. But universities, for their part, struggle with maintaining student enrollment numbers while

attempting to expand their endowments.

Students (especially those from low-income backgrounds) will now be under greater financial strain, and the quality of their higher education may suffer from rising enrollment.

Naturally, the students made themselves heard. “Everything exploded in the winter of 2010,” said Barnaby Raine, a high school student and self-admitted activist. Articulate and passionate, Raine describes the demonstrations as symbolizing the unpopularity of these reforms with those whom they impacted most: The students.

In response to the tuition hike, he helped to organize the 2010 demonstrations, and declared that “our protests attracted people from across the political board, with non-politicized students becoming politicized.” Citing the £50,000 worth of debt that the average student accumulates before graduation, Raine blames “Tory policies” for discouraging the poor from receiving higher education. The results of the

students & education 25

Student protests outside of Parliment in London in November 2010 (Courtesy Bobby D’Marca/London). tuition increase are favoring his argument: “In the face of everything the government promised us, numbers of students applying to university has fallen dramatically over the last two years, especially among poorer students.”

Given the rising tax and tuition rates, most believe higher education has been reformed to favor students who can afford the higher fees. Raine is sympathetic to such an argument: “If I were from a working class, deeply indebted family, and had the choice between immediately joining the workforce, or spending three years increasing my family’s debt (and a low chance of employment post-graduation), which would seem more reasonable?”

But these points trigger counterarguments. Said Richard: “It has long seemed to me that there are deeper, more fundamental questions underlying this issue.” She sees the current debate as one that must be viewed from a wider perspective. She believes these changes are moving towards a fairer system,

with the amount of public money going towards university being reduced to make room for funds from the individual students.

Acknowledging that the reforms leave room for improvement, she strongly disputes the idea that they are a step in the wrong direction. “The way the UK approached the issue was philosophically wonderful,” with “a refined system supported by state and individual beneficiaries” in a balanced manner.

She also took issue with the idea that university was becoming less accessible to the lower class, referencing the tuition payment system. This system ensures that the financial burden of the reforms falls on the government, not the students. The fees are not paid upfront, as they are in the US. Instead, students receive loans from the government to pay tuition, and then repay the government post-graduation through the tax system, at a rate dependent on their income.

A huge caveat to the system, however, is the loophole that allows graduates who earn less than £21,000 annually to avoid repaying their education loans for up to 25 years. As a result, the UK government doesn’t expect to regain even one third of the money it will lend out to students. Students may technically graduate in debt, but it is likely to be written off by the government.

Far from suggesting that the reforms will burden lower income families, Richard asserts that funding university education will be too great a burden for the government to handle. Perhaps government fears that they could not finance the reforms led it to increase taxes for lower income households, shouldering the financial burden of the reforms back onto the citizens. The isolation of tax hikes to the lower class supports the idea that the reforms are placing unfair pressure on those whom the government allegedly set out to help in the first place.

In addition, since the tuition increase, the vast majority of UK universities have begun to charge the maximum fees possible to students.

As a result, many institutions of higher education are escaping the reach of poorer students.

Ruth Collier, head of Information and Press for Oxford University, is involved in expanding outreach and accessibility to lower income students. While she acknowledges the difficulty these fees may impose on poorer students, the overriding belief is that prestigious universities “remain committed to increasing the diversity of their student body,” in socioeconomic and ethnic terms. Collier pointed out that over 70 percent of Oxford’s revenue will be put toward student financial support, a result of an ‘Access Agreement’ signed be-

tween universities and the government. However, the drop in numbers of poor students applying to university shows that this measure is not making education sufficiently accessible.

As tuition rates increase, university income is following suit. The Financial Times estimated that by 2014, the income of British universities will reach £26 billion, up from £24 billion this year. Interestingly, universities are not attributing this newfound cash to higher fees. Instead, premier UK institutions are reaching out to alumni and trying to expand their endowments. From Oxford and Cambridge to less prominent universities like Bristol, donations from alumni and corporations have led to a greater interest in fundraising among universities. New tax incentives have aided premier institutions in expanding their endowments.

This model of fundraising, however, will not work for all. While “the private sector will more than make up the costs for Oxford and Cambridge, the majority of universities with less renown and fewer alumni will suffer.” For example, according to Collier, Oxford has raised over £1.25 billion from alumni recently. But even among reputable colleges, private sector contribution cannot make up for subsidy cuts.

The prestigious University College London, for example, is now cutting its humanities staff by the same number as it is adding to its prosperous engineering department. As a result, only select universities—or particular departments within universities—will be able to prosper.

British popular dissent is still palpable, but given how universities are profiting from the reforms, it is clear that its ire has been misdirected. While on the surface populist theories view the government as the criminal, the reality is more complicated, since the loan system over time will fiscally pillage the government.

In fact, premier institutions are the sole groups profiting, but it is impermissible to castigate them as villains in what is a flawed system.

Regardless of whoever is most at fault, a disaster of growing scale looms just over the horizon. One thing is clear: The government cannot fund higher education forever. The financial time-bomb the government is taking on will explode at some point in the coming decades, triggering further tax hikes and spending cuts with it. For true progress to take place, Britain needs a reform of the reform, especially of the unsustainable loan system.

Charles Goodyear is a freshman in Pierson College. Contact him at charles.goodyear@ yale.edu.

www.tyglobalist.org

28 students & education The world map housed inside John C. Daniels reflects the school’s mission to foster responsible global citizens (Courtesy Flickr Creative Commons).

Dual-Language Programs: The Future of Bilingual Education

By Yvette Borja

E

very aspect of John C. Daniels Elementary School actively promotes a language-loving atitude. The pre-K through eighth grade school’s website logo features the word “welcome” in ten different languages wrapped around the image of a globe. All classroom materials are provided in Spanish and English, and the school library is stocked with books in both languages. The magnet elementary school began implementing these changes in 1996, when Daniels became a dual-language school.

A dual-language model, also referred to as two-way immersion, operates with the goal of having students graduate knowing two languages. In an ideal setting, half of the children

spring 2013, issue 3

in a classroom are dominant in English and the other half in a second target language. For Viviana Ortiz, a Spanish language teacher who underwent the switch while working at Daniels, the new model presents successes as well as new challenges. Ortiz and her colleagues at John C. Daniels promote the benefits of bilingualism, but a mismatching of priorities between the state, district, and John C. Daniels often creates difficulty for the school to faithfully execute the model. Though the district of New Haven provides some support, it also imposes mandates on John C. Daniels without the specifics of its dual-language curriculum in mind.

The pressures of standardized testing suc-

cess present an added obstacle for those working in dual-language environments. At the elementary school level, the only two subjects that are tested under No Child Left Behind regulations are math and English.

This greatly de-incentivizes fidelity to duallanguage instruction. The fact that New Haven is a “high priority” district under NCLB because of its demographics and poor testing history only spurs more scrutiny from the state. Given the variability in which grade children enter the dual-language program, carrying out grade-level mandates in a second language can prove challenging.

Edith Johnson, principal of John C. Daniels, cited appropriate professional development

students & education 29 as one of the main reforms she would like to implement in the dual-language model. Support materials sent by the state are often written only in English, providing only marginal aid to the Spanish-language instructors.

“They always have more work than, I think, the English only teachers. When the district sends us a program for us to use, nine times out of ten, it’s in all English. When the state comes down with these mandates, we’re going to spend $50,000 on these materials, a portion of that needs to be in Spanish,” Johnson said.

Neither the district nor the state adjusts their regulations to align with these programs, placing full responsibility on the staff of John C. Daniels.

One of the largest difficulties for dual-language instructors is effectively differentiating instruction to children who are at wildly different places in their language knowledge.

Although some dual-language schools deny entry above a certain grade level, schools in New Haven have not followed suit in order to give families more say in choosing where to educate their children.

“So you would have kids that can write the standard, which is to write a paragraph. I have kids that can only write a sentence. For me, all those mandates, I have to carry them out in Spanish. So, the Spanish classroom has to support the English classroom and they’re not always applicable because learning a second language is different,” Ortiz explained.

Although it is not known for progressive language policies, New Haven implemented a dual-language model when high-quality bilingual education was largely de-prioritized nationwide. The Department of Education reported in 1997 that only 29.5 percent of those teaching English Language Learners were trained and qualified to do so. Despite the growing demand for bilingual and bicultural teachers, no entity made any concerted effort to recruit teachers qualified in these areas.

Certain states even embarked on campaigns to eliminate such programs.

The timing was hardly ideal—the 1990s saw an influx of 14 million immigrants to the United States. The numbers of enrolled English language learners in public schools increased to 10.5 percent of the total school population.

While New Haven was making strides towards a revolutionized educational philosophy that promoted multilingualism, California was implementing a state-enforced Englishonly mantra. In 1998, Proposition 227 was passed in California, a referendum law that

banned native-language instruction in the state’s public schools. Within five years of the passage of Proposition 227, Arizona and Massachusetts followed suit with similar laws that banned native-language instruction. Meanwhile, New Haven made progressive strides.

The district expanded its dual-language offerings to another Pre K-8 school: Columbus Family Academy, also located in Fair Haven.

Johnson noted that a shortage of bilingual educators persists today. No teacher preparation programs have committed themselves to better prepare the workforce. Indeed, bilingual educators are the least likely subgroup of teachers to be properly certified. “Staffing.

Finding highly qualified, dynamic, bilingual teachers. That is absolutely a challenge,” Johnson said.

The issue of staffing, paired with a sub-par prioritization on the district level, has hindered the program from reaching its full potential.

Although dual-language programs are looked to as the most progressive and effective solution for English Language Learners, and although the district of New Haven has made strides in improving bilingual education, a re-prioritization of funds and resources at the district-level needs to occur before these models are expanded and become as successful as possible.

Despite the multiple issues that duallanguages programs face, they are still the optimal choice, as compared to previously implemented bilingual models. Bilingualism activates the area of the human brain related to problem-solving and memory skills. While in school, dual-language programs can provide opportunities for students to interact with students of different demographic backgrounds.

The 50/50 ratio of students dominant in English and dominant in a second target language provide a natural forum for promoting multiculturalism. Importantly, knowledge of a second language is also increasingly seen as an essential tool for success in the workplace.

“Society is changing and we need to prepare our children for that change,” Johnson said.

Previously, John C. Daniels operated under a transitional bilingual model, which is the approach that the majority of New Haven public schools currently take in educating English language learners. A traditional transitional bilingual model places English language learners in separate classrooms, with a mixture of native-language support and English language instruction. These models typically have the goal of exiting students within two and a half years and “mainstreaming” them

into English-only classrooms, despite the overwhelming body of research that cites a minimum of five to seven years for students to comprehensively learn a second language.

Such programs can be particularly difficult for English language learners who have had poor quality schooling in their home country or who have not developed a strong literacy base in their native language. For these students, daily school tasks involve deciphering and learning content in two languages, neither of which they feel fully comfortable with.

“There’s all these little missing pieces of the puzzle because you haven’t made all those connections and now they’re throwing this new language at you and there is nothing to connect it to,” Ortiz explained.

Kalill Declet, now a sophomore at The Sound School in New Haven, found the approach used at John Martinez difficult while he was learning English. Declet, a native Puerto Rican, remembers initially enjoying Martinez because many of his peers knew Spanish. Indeed, Declet was placed into Martinez’ transitional bilingual program, where most of his peers were native Spanish-speakers attempting to learn English. When Declet was mainstreamed into an English-only classroom in third grade, he struggled to comprehend the daily lessons.

“At Martinez, I understood them, but not as much as I should have been,” Declet explained.

His mother eventually decided to switch him to the Fair Haven School, which allows students to remain in bilingual classrooms for longer than the strictly enforced two and a half years of Martinez’ transitional bilingual program. Declet was ultimately satisfied with the Fair Haven program because it taught him how to speak English, a language he felt he needed in order to achieve success.

As for the future of dual-language programs, Johnson is in support of expansion, particularly at the high school level. Although nearly 30 percent of incoming English Language Learner students entering the system at the high school level, there are no dual-language programs offered for that age bracket.

“We are a diverse community, and it would be great to have more languages offered. Dual language should be an option for all families,” Johnson said.

Yvette Borja is a Junior in Saybrook College.

Contact her at aleyda.borja@yale.edu

www.tyglobalist.org

30 students & education Nisreen Awwad hosts the morning show Qahwa Masboot, the most popular show on NISAA FM. (Courtesy Womanity Foundation)

Reaching Out to Women Through the Airwaves in Palestine

C

ruising around Ramallah in June 2010, Yazan Samara, a thirty-two -year-old music and production supervisor, was fiddling around with the dials on his radio. “I felt like listening to some other genres of music than the ones that I have on the CDs in my car, which led me to check the local radio stations. Surprised, I heard one of them stand out with the name ‘96 NISAA FM!’” Samara recounted.

NISAA FM’s radio sweeper, the pre-recorded promotional used by radio stations as a segue between songs and programs, lilted across his radio [in Arabic]: Wherever you are (female “you’’) We shall talk about you extensively and in details So you won’t say We have forgotten you We have thought a lot about you

spring 2013, issue 3

Nisaa means “women” in Arabic, and NISAA FM is the first and only radio station in the Middle East solely dedicated to women’s issues. “It grabbed my attention that we have a women’s radio station in Palestine, which is unique, and from that point I started listening to it,” Samara recalled. A month later, Samara heard that NISAA FM was hiring. The US-trained information technology specialist left his job at the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation and joined a team of what is now six women and three men, plus a number of volunteer stringers, who compose the staff at NISAA FM. While his gender may make Samara seem an unlikely candidate for a radio station focused on women’s issues, Samara does not view his job in gendered terms—and neither does the station. As Maysoun Gangat, the director of NISAA FM,

By Erin Biel

explained, “we recognize the importance of men as partners for change, rather than enemies or partisans.” As such, the radio station commonly interviews both male and female experts on a given program topic, and the daily segment Eileh (“Family”) caters to both husbands and wives.

However, the radio station does not gloss over the evident gender disparities in Palestinian society. A 2009 study published by the Gaza-based Palestinian Women’s Information and Media Centre found that 67 percent of Palestinian women reported being subjected to verbal violence on a regular basis, 71 percent to psychological violence, 52.4 percent to physical violence, and 14.5 percent to sexual violence. Aware of the hurdles that women face in society, NISAA FM aims to project a discourse of women’s empowerment, rather than victimization.

students & education 29 “NISAA FM is all about inspiration and empowerment. Inspiration is very important in our society.

Through [the] airwaves we can share our experience and knowledge, and support women to realize themselves.”

—Maysoun Gangat,

director of NISAA FM

Gangat believes that by focusing on women’s stories of achievement, female listeners will realize their own potential as well: “NISAA FM is all about inspiration and empowerment. Inspiration is very important in our society. Through [the] airwaves we can share our experience and knowledge, and support women to realize themselves.”

The radio station first began as a web radio station in December 2009 with the support of the Womanity Foundation, a Swiss non-governmental organization that launches women’s empowerment programs around the world. Yann Borgstedt, founder and president of the Womanity Foundation, decided to test the concept in the Palestinian territories after starting a similar radio station for women in Afghanistan. Through personal contacts, Borgstedt was introduced to Gangat, then the managing director of RAM radio station, the first English radio station in the region.

Funded by a South African businessman, RAM sought to connect Palestinians and Israelis on issues that concerned both parties through a neutral language. Having caught the “radio bug” while working there, “I came to NISAA FM with a spirit to create a station [that would] connect Palestinian women

together…[and] engage more women in senior positions in media and empower them through media,” Gangat explained.

Borgstedt, impressed by Gangat’s experience and entrepreneurial spirit, provided her with the seed money necessary to officially launch NISAA FM in June 2010.

Now the radio station can be heard in the central, northern, and southern regions of the West Bank, and can also be streamed online. While most of the listenership comes from the Palestinian territories, there is also significant listenership among European nations, the United States, and Egypt. In 2011 the station ranked as one of the top five most popular stations in the central West Bank, according to Jawal Telecommunications Company.

NISAA FM is markedly non-political and secular in a region commonly characterized as otherwise. As Gangat asserted, “Personally, I do not believe that religious beliefs fuel gender inequality. Islam as a religion has called for the equality between men and women… We still see some Christian families in Palestine who are more conservative than Muslim ones.” Only during the month of Ramadan are issues related to women and Islam tackled extensively.

During the rest of the year, the station runs three live programs that span 7 am to 6 pm on Sundays through Thursdays. The NISAA FM audience is diverse, reaching a blend of listeners based in urban, rural, and refugee camp areas, along with Palestinian diaspora communities throughout the world. As such, the programming is equally varied. The morning show, called Qahwah Mazboot (“Coffee Moderately Sweetened”) remains the most popular and commonly utilizes NISAA FM’s volunteer reporters who provide stories from the rural villages. Segments range from Turath, which seeks to unite the Palestinian community by highlighting various aspects of Palestinian culture, to Tamkeen, a daily segment that hosts women from rural and marginalized areas who have started projects through microfinance loans. By noon, the station transitions to heavier issues, such as domestic violence, poverty, and early marriage, targeting the housewives who tend to listen in at this time. The late afternoon show addresses issues related to Muasassat (NGOs), Eileh (family), and Iktisadiyat (economics). Topics include women’s rights in the workforce and how to

launch social enterprise endeavors. Listeners are even encouraged to call in and explain ideas that they would like to develop.

Despite NISAA FM’s rapid success, the radio station has had to work hard to sustain itself. As Gangat explained, “there are 43 radio stations in the West Bank, so you can imagine the competition for the listenership and for the market share…. The economy is donor dependent and very volatile.” In an effort to reach out to even more women and augment their programming, NISAA FM has secured grants from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other international organizations operating in the West Bank. Last year, with the additional UNESCO funding, NISAA FM was able to train four community reporters who now work at the station on a volunteer basis. Going forward, NISAA FM would like to hold focus groups with women to discuss their radio content. The station also hopes to extend their daily programming to 7 pm and add a Saturday weekend program.

Gangat was recognized in 2011 by the Palestinian Ministry of Women’s Affairs for helping to place women’s issues on the national agenda. As just one marker of women’s increasing empowerment, the proportion of women in Palestinian universities has been growing, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, such that there are now more women than men pursuing post-secondary degrees. Maysoun wants to see that trend continue, and she believes that radio is the answer: “Radio is a cheap, accessible communication medium for all socioeconomic groups; it also has a personal approach, [is] mobile…and reaches remote areas.”

Just as education has long been viewed as the “great equalizer,” Maysoun views the radio, and the wisdom that it can bestow, as the new great equalizer for women— whether these women reside in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank or the more urban neighborhoods of Ramallah.

Erin Biel ’13 is a Global Affairs & Ethnicity, Race, and Migration double major in Ezra Stiles College. Contact her at erin.biel@ yale.edu.

www.tyglobalist.org

32 students & education

Struggles in a Silent World

Insight into the Challenges of Educating the Deaf in Sri Lanka

By Chareeni Kurukulasuriya

Students at the Reijntjes School racing during their recess (Courtesy The Reijntjes School for the Deaf ).

I

watched carefully as the young girl moved her hand to tap the side of her head with two fingers where her large silver barrette was clipped. She then gestured at me to imitate the sign as she went to the front of the classroom and printed her name on the cloudy blackboard in Sinhala characters. Latika. With no way of hearing the sound of their own names, the students at the Reijntjes School for the Deaf have to invent their own signs to replace their names so they can address each other. Latika turned to me, smiling, and showed me her right hand with her thumb up. She then pinched her fingers together and spread all five in a flicking motion. Good morning. That was the first phrase I learned in Sri Lankan sign language.

At the Dr. Reijntjes School for the Deaf in Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, hearing-impaired children are given an opportunity that they would otherwise never have: The chance to receive a proper education, which less than half of Sri Lanka’s disabled school-aged children receive. spring 2013, issue 3

Village schools especially are ill-equipped to teach the hearing-impaired, and the families of the children are unable to take their children to receive appropriate medical attention.

Many also do not know that special schools for the deaf exist.

The Dr. Reijntjes School for the Deaf stands out from other schools in its commitment to providing free education for hearing impaired children from the poorest of families. As the founder-principal, Tineke de Silva has made it her personal quest to ensure that her school for the deaf gives students the best education she can possibly provide them. De Silva originally worked in her home country at the Deaf School in the Netherlands, but she visited Sri Lanka with her husband Susiri to help schools in remote villages. Eventually she took the initiative to start a school for the deaf in Sri Lanka that could serve impoverished areas. What began in 1982 as six children and two teachers sitting in a circle on the floor of a leaky building has now become a residential school with

20 staff and boys’ and girls’ hostels on-site, capable of accommodating 100 students.

Establishing a school, let alone one for the deaf, in a foreign country is difficult enough.

De Silva’s choice to do so outside of the framework of an existing charity or organization meant forging her own path and facing additional obstacles in order to guarantee the success of the school. However, her decision to run the school independently allowed her to maintain control over how she ran the school.

While Sri Lanka has multiple schools for children with disabilities, they often become overcrowded, especially as most serve a mixed population of disabled students. Very few schools are solely devoted to deaf education; they attempt to teach the mentally disabled, hearing impaired, and visually impaired children all at one institution, something which de Silva believes does not benefit any of the students in the class. Similarly, restrictions are imposed on how these schools operate if they are associated with a religious organization.

students & education 31 Financial issues were the first challenge de Silva faced when she started the School for the Deaf. However, her connections from her previous position as a teacher at the Prof.

Huizingschool in Enschede helped her to get support from the Dr. Reijntjes Foundation in the Netherlands. About 90 percent of the funding for the Reijntjes School comes from donors in the Netherlands, while only 10 percent comes from Sri Lanka and other countries. The Sri Lankan government does not provide any financial support to private schools like the Reijntjes School apart from an annual grant from the Social Services Department. Various Dutch churches, schools, and organizations for the welfare of the handicapped make donations to purchase new equipment for the students and renovate the school. The Liliane Foundation in the Netherlands is currently the school’s biggest sponsor.

“I keep in contact with them so they continue to sponsor children, and they regularly send people to visit the school and see how we are managing. Maintaining good contacts with the sponsors is extremely important. Mostly I take the initiative to raise funds, though filling out all the forms and questionnaires can be quite frustrating,” de Silva said.

While increased funding for special schools can certainly help, de Silva also believes that public awareness about the different handicaps that affect children should also be promoted. Local organizations and Sri Lankan families often make private donations and sponsor children at the school. Due to the prevalence of Buddhism and Hinduism in Sri Lanka, religious charity is an important part of the culture in the country, making it the eighth ranking country on the Charity Aid Foundation’s World Giving Index, higher than any other developing nation.

Having overcome the considerable difficulties involved in establishing the school and supporting it financially, de Silva was able to focus on instructing the students and optimizing their chances for success. In countries like Sri Lanka, deaf children are often treated as mentally handicapped children and don’t receive any education at all. “So many of the parents are uneducated and many of the fathers are unemployed or alcoholics,” said de Silva. “As a result, it is difficult for these parents to guide their deaf children properly. When I worked at the Deaf School in the Netherlands I was never confronted with all these extra social problems.”

In a country like Sri Lanka, schools are primarily challenged by the extreme poverty

that affects a majority of their students. “A lot of our parents have minimal incomes and can’t afford to pay for a hearing aid, school fees, or even clothes and shoes for their children. The school purchases those for the children, and we also pay the travelling costs to travel to and from school for the holidays,” said de Silva. “We have even built several houses for some of the extremely povertystricken families of our pupils, who were living on the street.”

One of the most powerful benefits offered at the Reijntjes School is its vocational training program. The older students are equipped with the skills necessary to get jobs in garment factories, offices, agriculture, bakeries, and other fields of work, allowing them to provide for themselves. The school guarantees its students that they will find them jobs, and de Silva stays in touch with the graduates to ensure that they are able to support themselves and lead independent lives, despite their handicap. Many of the students from the earlier graduating classes are married, all of them to deaf partners, and some have children whom they also send to the Reijntjes School, proving how de Silva’s school is already making an impact for multiple generations.

Students are instructed in all the basic school subjects through the method of total communication. They are taught in Sri Lankan sign language, but also learn to lip read as the teacher speaks the lessons aloud as well. The students also learn to use the standard finger alphabet, read, and write in both Sinhalese and English. As the students are placed into grade levels based on their performance and cognitive level rather than their ages, “the largest challenge for instructors is getting the children to communicate their feelings clearly to others,” said Chanika Tillekerathne, a teacher of level 1 at the Reijntjes School. “We want the deaf children to be able to express themselves to their family members, classmates, and friends.”

According to de Silva, one major problem facing special education in Sri Lanka is that schools don’t have the proper programs and teachers that are needed to best assist the students. Her school ensures that the students have the opportunity to express themselves through the arts via dance, theater, drawing, and painting.

Maintaining a well-trained teaching staff is something that de Silva still struggles with, though. “Most teachers are not properly educated in how to teach disabled students, and it is really difficult to get well educated teach-

ers and to keep them,” de Silva explained.

The challenge for deaf students is being able to remember associations made between signed words, written words, and the meaning they convey. So much of their learning in the early stages is based on comprehension and sheer memorization and retention.

Beyond learning vocabulary, other concepts such as multiplication and division are also a challenge to explain to younger students, as they are more abstract than addition and subtraction. The level 3 students, most of whom are 12 years old, struggle to learn which new signs shown to them by their teacher correspond to the images and words they copy into their workbooks. The amount of information presented is vast and teachers must be highly-qualified to present it effectively.

Teachers of the school are required to have an A Level diploma and a diploma in Montessori teaching and then go for further training to learn Sri Lankan sign language and how to teach students in the Deaf School. After that, teachers follow a diploma course in special education at the National Institute of Education in Maharagama, Sri Lanka. “As teachers, we try to take advantage of the different seminars on special education that are available from time to time. We also follow the developments being made in our field through articles in magazines and on the internet. Visiting other deaf schools can also give us insight into how other programs achieve success with their students,” Tillekerathne said.

De Silva says she does her best to send teachers to special courses or to invite specialists to give lectures. “However, the teachers themselves are often from remote areas, so when their families suddenly arrange their marriages, my teachers can’t teach at the school anymore because of the distance. So there is still a long way to go even in just providing better training for teachers who work in the special education field,” she said.

For the 90 children currently studying at the Reijntjes School, though, their education is something they value and enjoy, proven by their smiles each day that they attend. They thrive in this environment where they are accepted by their peers and their teachers, and though progress still needs to be made in the field of special education in Sri Lanka, their schooling enables them to ultimately lead successful, independent lives.

Chareeni Kurukulasuriya ‘16 is Morse College. Contact her at chareeni.kurukulasuriya@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org

34 students & education

An Unstable Peace

Peru Neglects Youth Education

By Emma Goldberg

“S

ome think this is the big defeat.

This is a bend in the road. Nothing more!” These were the ominous last words shouted by Peruvian rebel leader Abimael Guzman as he was put under arrest on September 12, 1992. With his arrest, the Maoist insurgency movement he had led—a terrorist group known as Shining Path, which advocated violent overthrow of the nation’s wealthy elites—fell into discord. But, as Guzman predicted, it did not die. The group’s terrorist activities live on today, even in postwar Peru.

The Peruvian civil war began in 1980, when Guzman, claiming to promote the interests of Peru’s impoverished rural underclass, called for a coup against the central government.

The movement he led initiated a twenty-year guerilla campaign that brought widespread destruction—and the death of 77,552 civilians. These deaths were largely the result of Shining Path terrorist activities, though the government’s military action was also harmful to civilian populations.

The government claimed military victory over the rebels in 2000. And in the ten years since the civil war ended, much of Peru’s urban population has moved on. Aarti Daryanani ’15, who lives in Lima, said that most Peruvians, particularly those in major cities, do not encounter any of the damages wrought by the war in their day-to-day lives. She and her friends sometimes discuss the suffering that the peasant class endured throughout the war in the context of community service,

spring 2013, issue 3

but they rarely discuss the Shining Path, because the group no longer poses a danger to her community. Daryanani was born as the war was ending, and though her parents have told her stories of bombings near their home and violence on the streets of Lima, these memories seem distant to her—they’re history.

Today, though, much of the Peruvian rural population continues to live with deep fears of resurgent Shining Path violence. The rebels remain active in low-income communities in the mountainous Andean region, terrorizing peasants and capitalizing on the cocaine industry for profit. Though the Shining Path has many fewer active participants than at the height of its power, it is quickly recruiting members to its ranks, and the prospect of an eventual resurgence of violence seems real to those living in the countryside. “I’m convinced they want to resume the armed fight,” public prosecutor Julio Galindo told the New York Times in May 2012.

To peasants living in the Andean Mountains, the threat of the Shining Path feels salient, demanding an immediate response— but wealthier Peruvians in cities like Lima don’t feel the same urgency. Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein has been the leader of Peru’s largest Jewish congregation since 1985, and has been a major voice for progressive values among Peru’s wealthy elite. Bronstein says that because wealthy citizens, particularly business elites, no longer think about the brutality of the war, it is difficult to mobilize

his congregation to discuss Peru’s problems with inequality and political instability.

“In Lima and major cities, people want to move on with their lives,” said Tyler Bridges, who served as the Miami Herald’s correspondent to Peru in the years following the civil war. “People in the mountains are the ones who remain really focused on peace and justice, because they were more directly affected by the war.”

The gap between the rural poor and the urban elite continues to widen, particularly in these populations’ attitudes toward the civil war. This divide appears to be in part the fault of Peru’s educational authorities. Said authorities have refused to take a proactive role in shaping the historical narrative of the war transmitted by educational institutions, and little effort has been made to memorialize the conflict in schools and public memorials or educate youth about the violence of the Shining Path. Angie Hanawa, a Yale student who lives in Lima, confirmed that her history classes in high school rarely addressed the country’s history of civil war and economic inequity.

But schools aren’t the only institutions capable of preserving the memory of war. The government has also avoided attempts at public commemoration through museums and monuments. Hanawa said she does not know of any museums in Lima that teach about the history of the war. In 2012, museum curator Fernando Carvallo announced plans to build a public center memorializing

students & education 35 Design based on the flag of the Shining Path, a Maoist insurgent group in Peru (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

the conflict, which would be called Place of Memory and used as a means of educating youth about the events of the war. Authorities, however, refused to support his educational efforts—President Alan Garcia publicly announced his opposition to the memory museum, claiming in an Economist interview that the building would not “take all perspectives into account,” and Carvallo had to rely on foreign funding from the European Union.

“People don’t want to spend a lot of time reflecting on this violent part of our history,” Hanawa said.

The Peruvian government is not unique in its decision to avoid teaching about a history of conflict. According to Yale Political Science Professor David Simon, it is almost standard practice for war-torn nations.

“You would think that teaching a historical narrative would be an apolitical thing,” Simon said. “You would think political leaders would dedicate themselves to passing on an accurate account of history. But you really don’t see that happen anywhere at all.”

Instead, according to Simon, countries tend to fight hotly-contested battles over the lessons of war. Often, governments choose not to teach about conflicts at all.

Government avoidance of war education is particularly prevalent in countries like Peru, where the state itself, in the name of counter-insurgency, played a large role in terrorizing civilian populations during the war. According to the Peruvian Truth and

Reconciliation Commission, the Peruvian government was responsible for approximately 45 percent of the civilian deaths that occurred during the war, because its aggressive military operations aimed to destroy the Shining Path’s presence in rural villages, even at the expense of innocent bystanders.

For the government, commemorating the war might mean calling attention to its own abuse of the civilian population.

The Peruvian government’s refusal to focus funding on peace education and war commemoration is irresponsible, and a direct threat to the country’s unstable peace, according to Pamela Baxter, Peace Education Coordinator for the U.N. High Commission on Refugeees. While in the immediate term, education can be used to transmit life-saving messages to youth including information about trauma response and health, it also has important long-term functions. History has shown that a population more aware of its nation’s past will be better able to sustain post-war peace. In Rwanda, for example, school teachers are required to lead frequent class trips to educational centers commemorating the 1994 genocide, conveying to their students the truth of the country’s dark history.

“Society needs skills for a new beginning and behaviors that are constructive, positive, and based in Human Rights,” Baxter said. “Only a quality education system can provide that.”

Some activists have speculated that the

government has avoided an emphasis on educational programs regarding the war because initiatives that commemorate peasants’ suffering often provoke demands for victim reparations—demands that the government has been dodging for years. But an ounce of prevention can sometimes be worth a pound of cure—especially when forgetting can bring about fatal sickness in a nation’s unsteady peace. In a 2012 interview with The New York Times Francisco Soberon, executive director of the Peruvian Pro-Human Rights Association, put his finger on the importance of post-conflict education in Peru.

“The fundamental thing about memory is that it has to help us prevent the rise of projects that can bring us back down that road of violence and terror,” Soberón said. “Memory acts like a vaccine.”

Daryanani said that she is not often forced to reflect on historical memories of the war.

But she also knows that her everyday reality differs radically from that of peasants who remain exposed to the Shining Path’s violence.

“Everyone acknowledges the divide between those in cities and people in the mountains but I don’t see the government making much of an effort to close that gap,” Daryanani said. “Here in Lima, we’re not living in fear.”

But maybe they should be.

Emma Goldberg ‘16 is in Saybrook College.

Contact her at emma.goldberg@yale.edu.

www.tyglobalist.org

36 students & education 38 Lisa Heydlauf posing with books in her office (Courtesy Lisa Heydlauff ).

Fusion

L

The story of how one woman gave up her world to inspire poor young people in India. By Naintara Rajan

isa Heydlauff has a beautiful voice. It is a musical blend of accents—British, Canadian, and a hint of Indian. With an airy laugh she explains casually, “I decided to come to India because I wanted to lead an unpredictable life. One where you didn’t know what was going to happen, and had to sort of believe in possibility. I didn’t plan to be here for fourteen years!” She speaks to me from her office in Kailash Colony, New Delhi, a generally residential neighborhood only a short walk from the hip M Block Market of Greater Kailash, and a convenient stop on the surprisingly swanky and modern Metro system. Yet as cutting-edge as New Delhi may seem, it is culturally worlds away from London or New York. And therein lies the true remarkability of Heydlauff’s story: Her incredible courage. She gave up her western life to travel to unknown country, turning the cloudy dream of helping children into a concrete organization that is changing the world.

In fact, the ambiguity of “western” fits Heydlauff perfectly. Born in the UK to American parents, Heydlauff left to attend boarding school in Canada at the age of fourteen, and remained there for college. She refuses to identify with any particular nationality, insisting that it is complicated, and “I’m a fusion.” Nevertheless, the story of how she gave up her western life and moved to India to work with children began in a fairly simple manner: With a book. spring 2013, issue 3

Going to School in India is Heydlauff’s meticulously constructed children’s book containing glossy page after page of popping colors and brilliantly honest photos and stories depicting how all sorts of children in India attend school despite the odds against them. The stories include those of children who go to school in the dark and study by the light of kerosene lamps because they cannot during the day. The books were distributed through government schools, turned into short films, and played as radio programs. Heydlauff’s message was simple: Inspire children to go to school. The book was incredibly successful, and in 2001 she founded Going to School (GTS), a non-governmental organization that uses the media to promote education among India’s poorest children and young adults.

When I first stepped inside Heydlauff’s office in 2009, I was a naïve sophomore in high school coming to interview for a summer internship; GTS was certainly nothing like what I expected the flagship of a successful NGO to look like. The walls are painted bright red, violet, and striped blue and white. An idea mural of sorts is tacked to one side, bits of paper of all shapes and sizes. Framed powerful photographs and pages from the original Going to School book are arranged as well. The atmosphere is light and artsy, handwritten notes float breezily from the air conditioner; before you can even utter ek glass pani chahye, Je-

evan Ji, a man in charge of “office well-being”, has filled your cup with water. And though children aren’t often present, the place gives off an airy, child-friendly aura.

Indeed, Heydlauff’s initial interest in media and writing can be traced back to her early childhood in England. “My mother brought children’s stories back from America every year in giant suitcases, just beautifully designed children’s books,” she reveals. “And that was probably it. I think in the end we had around ten thousand books, and I thought I’d just really like to be a writer. Though,” she adds, “how I started to do this is a different line of expression.”

In 1997, still fascinated by the idea of using media, Heydlauff began working for an experimental school in the United Kingdom where she was teacher to 16 six-year-olds. While other teachers adopted the standard approach to History, teaching Ancient Greece and Rome from dusty textbooks, Heydlauff took a different path. Her approach was ambitious and vivid; she attempted to bring Indian culture to life for her students through the Lonely Planet travel guide. She taught them about the Pushkar camel fair, and ventured out to the Indian neighborhood of Southall to buy saris and sweets. Heydlauff was able bring the sights, sounds, and smells of Indian culture to her six year olds, so much that one student, Oliver , asked for her personal knowledge of “What is

37 students & education 39 it like to go to school in India?” Fascinated by the question, Heydlauff promised if she ever went to India she would find out. Six months later, inspired in part by Oliver, she left for New Delhi.

“Why India?” I ask, pointing out that Africa and South America are also exotic places where education standards are poor. I couldn’t quite understand what about India entranced her so much and persuaded her to fly 5460 miles away from home. The answer, it turns out, is simple.

“I’m an English and American mix, I didn’t really fit in anywhere. It was only my friends from India who understood that, they would say ’That’s fine! In India chaos is fine, not knowing what you are is fine.’” And it was true, she found. In India “it’s easier to side with someone who is just ‘foreign’ than one who is American or British.” Finally, being a fusion was an advantage.

In 1998, Heydlauff booked a flight and left for India. She knew no Hindi, had almost no contacts, and had never set food on the continent before. Kavita Parmar, founder of IOU Project, recalls Heydlauff arriving in India with “her head full of dreams”. Heydlauff herself is modest, insisting, “it was stupid, not brave. I look back on it and think, I was crazy.” Though a spontaneous move like still Heydlauff’s seems shocking today, it was borderline scandalous when she did it. Her father threatened never to speak to her again, enforcing a ‘if you need anything, don’t call’ policy.

It simply wasn’t done, and certainly not by single women. “For a young girl to move to India alone,” continues Parmar, “with no network to help and build a ground breaking project that GTS has become today is a story I share with young people I meet as an example of incredible generosity of spirit and the Bravura to dream big.”

A desire to help and effect change has allowed Heydlauff to take root in what was once utterly foreign soil. When discussing her life in India she explains, “I feel at home here. I understand not everything [about the culture], but I understand some things. And I think it’s like being anywhere, if you’re a part of it you engage and you make decisions, you make things better.

Wherever you are in life you have to be committed to engage.”

Today, Lisa is finding new ways to engage through GTS’s most successful and innovative project to date, “Be! an entrepreneur.” In Lisa’s words “what do you do if you don’t have heroes for the time you are in? Do you wait for the real story, or do you look at using media to inspire new heroes to come forward?” That, in essence, is the idea behind Be!: Using fictional books and movies to reach out to the poorest young adults and inspire them to find a problem in their community and make a change by developing a business to address it. The success of the project

is unparalleled. The movies were seen by over 100 million people, and thousands of young adults called in to offer their ideas for small businesses. Be! has chosen to fund and follow 25 for three years, and plans to tell their stories.

Heydlauff is adamant “Be! is the way to go” and suggests in the future, GTS plans to expand this model to other countries around the world.

Dilip Advani, a New York based businessman, assists Lisa with the Be! fund. “Lisa has a very engaging personality,” he explains. “She’s so totally absorbed by what she does. Her work is so atypical of NGO work, her standards are high when compared with corporate India and unmatched among NGOs.” He admits being struck by the creativity and novelty of Be!, detailing how it goes much further than micro lending. “This is five lakhs to individuals without credit history who have a desire to do something to improve their communities, but don’t have the resources.

It’s just innovative on so many different levels.”

Heydlauff has now been in India for 14 years, ten years of which she has lived in a flat ten minutes from her office, working day and night to help the poorest children in India, many of whom she has almost nothing in common with and will never know. Heydlauff’s unmistakable passion comes through in even a two-minute conversation. As Parmar adds, “her incredible sense of aesthetic pushes everyone around her not only to do a good job, but to do it beautifully,” the heavily awarded and gorgeously designed GTS books are a testament to that.

And yet, what is most striking is her incredible bravery as a woman growing up with western ideas and customs transitioning suddenly into the chaos and culture that is India. She speaks to this, saying, “each day you live here is extremely challenging and fun. But it can also be very difficult and very sad, and the unpredictability of it is hard,” she adds, acknowledging for the first time the hardships she faces as a result of her life-altering decision. She pauses, and suddenly I feel what it is that makes Heydlauff different, the passion that propelled her to actually take the leap instead of simply talking about it. I sense what eventually persuaded her father to let her go, what allowed everyone from UNICEF to Advani to believe in her enough so as to let GTS become a reality. “In the end,” she says finally, “you have to choose what you want and what you believe in. You have to fight for what you want to keep.”

Naintara Rajan ‘15 is in Branford College. Contact her at naintara.rajan@yale.edu.

“It’s like being anywhere, if you’re a part of it you engage and you make decisions, you make things better.”

—Lisa Heydlauff [Top to bottom] A page from Going to School in India, featuring Indian girls riding bicycles. A page from the book showing a girl dying paper. The logo for Haydlauff’s organization.

(Courtesy Lisa Heydlauff). www.tyglobalist.org

38 photo contest

GLOBALIST The Yale

10th ANNUAL

Photo Contest

category: festivals FIRST PLACE

Wedding Ceremony Caroline Lester, ES â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;14 Hometown: Brookline, MA A Javanese wedding ceremony. Before the daughter moves out, the parents bathe her one last time. The bride is wearing a headband and shawl made from woven flower buds.

spring 2013, issue 3

photo contest 39

SECOND PLACE

Jazz Age Festival, Governor’s Island, NY Florian Koenigsberger, SM ‘14 Hometown: New York, New York

THIRD PLACE

Untitled

Geoffrey Litt, SM ‘14 Hometown: Tokyo, Japan Aoi Matsuri is one of the three major festivals held in Kyoto, Japan each year. The participants show grim faces as they parade through the sweltering hot streets dressed in traditional Japanese clothing.

www.tyglobalist.org

40 photo contest

category: places

FIRST PLACE

Phewa Lake, Pokhara, Nepal.

Erin Biel, ES â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;13 Hometown: Carmel, IN

Small boats amass for travelers to rent and paddle around Phewa Lake, the second largest lake in Nepal.

Some people steer their boats toward the vibrant Barahi Island Temple in the middle of the lake. Others temporarily dock their boats on the southern edge of the lake in order to trek through the hillside and visit the brilliant-white World Peace Pagoda, a massive Buddhist stupa overlooking all of Pokhara.

spring 2013, issue 3

photo contest 41

SECOND PLACE

Aliyah

Cody Pomeranz, BR ‘15 Hometown: Cincinnati, OH Surveying the disputed Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a man prays.

THIRD PLACE

Untitled

Geoffrey Giller, F&ES ‘13 Hometown: Madison, CT A cheetah searches for his next meal on the Masai Mara.

www.tyglobalist.org

42 photo contest

category: people

FIRST PLACE Man in open food market, Seoul, South Korea Victor Kang, TC â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;14 Hometown: Christchurch, New Zealand

Korea in the last 50 years has developed in leaps and bounds from a war-torn country to one of the strongest economies in the world. Despite the flood of Western culture, from Starbucks to Hollister t-shirts and lavish buffet restaurants, Koreans still enjoy visiting and eating in open food markets. This particular photo is of a large street food market near the Great Eastern Gate of Seoul.

spring 2013, issue 3

photo contest 43

CATEGORY:

PEOPLE

SECOND PLACE Girls in the Sahara Charley Locke, CC ‘14 Hometown: Oakland, CA

Two young girls outside of Merzouga, Morocco.

THIRD PLACE Prayers

Cody Pomeranz, BR ‘14 Hometown: Cincinnati, OH In the heart of conflict in the Middle East, three men pray at the Kotel, its crevasses filled with the written prayers of millions.

www.tyglobalist.org

44 photo contest

category: editor’s choice

Man Collects Reeds to Build his Home, Las Islas Uros, Lake Titicaca, Puno, Peru. Amelia Earnest, PC ‘14 Hometown: Montpelier, VT This photograph shows a man gathering reeds. The man is resident of Las Islas Uros, a series of manmade islands on Lake Titicaca, and a descendent of the Urus, an ancient Andean people who first made the islands after an invading enemy drove them from their grounded territory. Although no water is visible, the entire scene is on the lake. The man stands on a small boat, woven together from dried reeds, and gathers fresh reeds, which grow up through the water in dense clusters. Behind him, houses built from reeds sit atop small islands—also comprised of reeds—attached to the lake floor to prevent them from blowing away. In the far distance, the city of Puno is visible on the shoreline. spring 2013, issue 3

photo contest 45

Alone

Victor Kang, TC â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;14 Hometown: Christchurch, New Zealand School violence is a serious issue in South Korea, but the government has only recently begun addressing the problem. This photo was taken in front of the National Museum of Korea, which is a popular destination for school field-trips.

Morning Shave

Caroline Lester, ES â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;14 Hometown: Brookline, MA A man from the island of Sumba in the islands of Southeast Indonesia shows off his machete.

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