Medley Magazine / Spring 2018

MEDLEY MAGAZINE SPRING 2018

FRIENDS OF DOROTHY

FIGHTING IS FEMALE

ADVENTURES IN SOUTH AFRICA

CITY

CAMPUS

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Local LGBT+ activists reflect on decades of effecting change

Women's self-defense classes teach empowerment

A writer shares vignettes of her experiences in Cape Town

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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words by Erica Petz

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ERICA PETZ EDITORIAL EXECUTIVE EDITOR NADIA SULEMAN MANAGING EDITOR APRIL RINK SENIOR EDITORS EMILY KELLY MEILIN QUINN

Dear Reader, Winter always lasts longer in Syracuse, but this year, we’re bringing you “Spring” in November. Since we started late last semester and then hit countless obstacles, we missed our final June deadline for a print Spring 2018 issue.

I can’t convey how much this upset me, but I vowed not to let our hard work go to waste and more importantly, not to let the stories we wrote go untold. Giving up on this issue altogether would’ve done a huge disservice to the local farmworker taking on an entire industry’s injustices (page 19), those at SU and beyond teaching women how to confidently defend themselves (page 15), Syracuse University’s e-sports community working for official representation on campus (page 26), and many others. I’m no longer a student now, but I’d never want to fail you, the reader, by moving on without producing this issue, even if it’s several months late. So even though you can’t hold the magazine in your hands this time, I sincerely hope you enjoy reading it.

ASSISTANT EDITORS JONATHAN CHAU LINDSEY MCCLAFFERTY WRITERS MARITA DEL CARMEN PEREZ DIAZ EMMA FAHEY HAYLEY GREASON ANNIE KELLY GABRIELA KNUTSON SOHWI LIM

CREATIVE DIRECTOR YINGYING YUE ART EXECUTIVE PHOTOGRAPHER CODIE YAN PHOTOGRAPHERS CRYSTAL FANG QIAN ZHU

ADVISOR MELISSA CHESSHER

cover photo by Codie Yan left photo by Yingying Yue

MEDLEY MAGA ZINE

CONTENTS

THE STARBUCKS SERENADER

Listen to this mystery musician's story page 3

FRIENDS OF DOROTHY

Meet the Syracuse activists who made strides in LGBT+ rights page 5

FRIENDSHIP ACROSS FAITHS

Discover the Syracuse group restructuring religious collaboration page 8

ADVENTURES IN SOUTH AFRICA

Follow a writer's journey through four Cape Town homestays page 12

FIGHTING IS FEMALE

Take action against sexual assault page 16

PUTTING THE "DARE" IN "DAIRY"

Witness a New York farmworker’s fight for justice page 19

TA L K TO U S

SHE SHOOTS, SHE SCORES

@MEDLEYMAGAZINE

Delve into a Syracuse basketball player’s world page 23

FIND US ONLINE

GAME ON

ISSUU.COM/ MEDLEYMAGAZINE Medley shares stories from our campus, our city, and our globe that explore the intersection of cultures from a socially conscious perspective. The magazine publishes once a semester with funding from your Syracuse University student fee. All contents of the publication are copyright Spring 2018 by their respective creators.

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Learn about the emergence of college e-sports communities page 26

MOMENTS ABROAD

See snapshots of life abroad from SU students page 29

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T H E S TA R B U C K S S E R E NAD E R A violinist turns the downtown coffeehouse into his weekly concert hall.

words & photo by Sohwi Lim

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n this rainy-turned-snowy Sunday evening, people line up to buy a warm cup of coffee at the Starbucks in Syracuse’s Armory Square while Joshua Diesti stands in the corner, tuning the strings on his violin.

Before playing, he tells each customer to notify him if the sound gets too loud.

People glance up when Diesti begins his first song of the night, a classical piece, and let him serenade them, the rich notes vibrating off off his violin strings and reverberating throughout the cafe.

Diesti’s Sunday ritual began when the owners of the Armory Square shop asked him to help pioneer a program called In-Store Live Music for Starbucks. Two years later, the 40-year-old continues to perform here, sometimes with a cellist friend, because he enjoys interacting with the customers through his music. They tap him on the shoulder as he’s playing, offering words of encouragement or just a quick hello, and people from far away towns often call the Starbucks to ask about Diesti.

He felt particularly touched when a woman wrote him a card. “She took the time to write a letter to Starbucks and mail it, just [to say] that she appreciated it and thought it added a lot of class and style to the area,” Diesti says.

Born and raised in Rochester, New York, Diesti started playing the violin at 11 years old after watching Sherlock Holmes passionately play the violin in a movie. He got a beatendown violin from a second-hand store and fell in love with it. This fondness

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grew over the years, leading Diesti to study violin at the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam.

However, right after graduation, Diesti’s brother encouraged him to help out at the optics business he worked for. With the aid of some on-the-job training, Diesti did this for over a year.

Then he saw an ad about ballroom dancing and decided to try it. He had always played music, but little did he know that dance was about to become a major part of his life, too. This budding interest blossomed into an opportunity to teach ballroom dancing at a studio in Syracuse called Downtown Dance, originally Franchise Dance Studio.

Diesti has taught there in the evenings for four years now, ending every day with one of his favorite activities.

Diesti teaches high-level ballroom dance for all ages, and he also uses the studio for private music lessons.

Although he identifies as a dancer, musician, and performer, he finds the most joy in his role as a teacher.

“Teaching came unexpectedly,” he says.

“It’s always changing. Each person I teach is unique, which is why I like it so much.” But for all his students, Diesti focuses on teaching them to perform for their own fulfillment rather than for recognition. Diesti emphasizes that as a performer, you need to have self-love and intrinsic motivation, making the experience more about you and the way you express yourself.

Of all his experiences in performing arts, one of Diesti’s most interesting achievements involves a bizarre Leonardo Da Vinci piece. As a present for a duke friend of his who loved horses and the violin, Da Vinci had created a playable violin-stringed instrument in the shape of a horse’s skull. “A little gross, but it was amazing that he did it,” Diesti says. Gary Radke, a former Syracuse University art history professor who took lessons from Diesti, asked

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him to help figure out how this was possible. They went to the Cazenovia College Equine Education Center where Diesti spent hours holding a real horse’s skull as he would a violin and finally found a plausible way to play it, solving the mystery.

Despite such accomplishments, Diesti finds his failures more interesting because of what he’s learned from them.

He says he took several opportunities for granted throughout his life, like entering auditions with a prideful attitude, which never ended well. One time, he had a big show, but because he had done this show before, he didn’t practice and wound up unprepared. “It was overconfidence, a tragic mistake that happens when you think you know what you’re doing,” Diesti says. “You may know, but your body doesn’t always go along with you, so you have to practice.” He learned the hard way that you can always improve.

“If you really want to do good, you have to work for it, and it can’t be just one time. It has to be every time,” Diesti says.

If Diesti could give advice to his younger self, he would say to be more understanding and accepting of others, particularly when dealing with casual students whose personalities clashed with his intensity. “In the past, I was much more quick to dismiss the person instead of trying to understand how to teach them versus having them adjust to me,” he says regretfully. Diesti believes

people shouldn’t let their feelings control them since they can change in a second, and he is guilty of this, too. “It makes you much less selfish when you’re willing to negate your feelings because it’s not about you being comfortable; it’s about helping another person,” he says. Recognizing that they don’t all progress the same way, Diesti shows more patience towards his students now.

While Diesti loves music, dance, and teaching them both, he wants to pursue other interests as well since he has a penchant for learning multiple things at once. For example, he’s always liked building things, so one day Diesti and his brother might buy some land and build homes on it. But no matter what he does next, Diesti plans to keep sharing his love of music at Starbucks on Sunday nights, so if pay him a visit if you're looking for a way to start your next week off on a good note. <<<

“ If you really want to do good, you have to work for it, and it can't be just one time. It has to be every time.”

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FR I E N D S OF D O R OT H Y Longtime Syracuse LGBT+ activists bring the community together.

words by Jonathan Chau & photos by Codie Yan

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n the last Thursday of March, the Friends of Dorothy held their monthly fundraising dinner at All Saints, a Catholic church on Syracuse’s Lancaster Avenue. In October 1992, Michael DeSalvo and Nickolas Orth founded the nonprofit, named after the LGBT+ slang for gay men, to provide hospitality, emergency assistance, and other means of care for people affected by HIV and AIDS. An hour after the doors opened at 5 p.m., attendees

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occupied the folding chairs at dozens of tables outfitted with disposable table cloths and plastic utensils. Rows of hanging mini twinkly lights created a warm glow. Open donations for the HIV hospice house started at $0 “so no one would be excluded,” DeSalvo emphasizes. With guests of various ages, races, and sexual orientations, the event showcased diversity and served as a gathering for local activists past and present.

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M I CHAE L D E SALVO & N I CKOLAS ORTH

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eSalvo and Orth met while protesting nuclear weapons in the mid-80s. DeSalvo — who now owns the Hairanoia salon in northeast Syracuse’s Hawley-Green neighborhood — worked in jail ministry, where he met an HIV+ person for the first time. Orth, a classically trained chef, worked with the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker providing shelter for homeless families in Washington D.C. After dating long distance and working separately, the two combined their efforts to fill a void in Syracuse.

Due to the negative stigma against gay people and AIDS, nursing homes didn’t accept people with HIV. When ACR Health co-founder Michael Casler asked DeSalvo to give his friend David a haircut, DeSalvo and Orth realized David, who had AIDS, lacked a place to live, so they took him in as their first Friends of Dorothy guest. “During those

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days there was a lot of fear,” DeSalvo says. “People were not treated with respect, and it was just the natural thing to do.”

The monthly dinners began over a decade ago as a benefit at Pastabilities, but the duo wanted to create a space where people of different backgrounds could interact when they normally would not. “I saw a lot of disconnect from people in [the] Catholic left, [the] progressive political circle, and people dying of AIDS,” says Orth, who plans and cooks the meals with volunteer help. “I thought if I brought them together, something would spark up.”

Fewer people die from HIV now, but Orth and DeSalvo still keep their doors open. They’re currently expanding their range of work with a house specifically supporting exploited migrant and undocumented workers.

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B OB F OR B E S

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ccording to 84-year-old activist Robb Bacon, politicians generally didn’t advocate for LGBT+ issues in the 1980s — with the exception of Bob Forbes, a middle-aged man with a boyish smile. “He was there with us fighting for gay rights,” says Bacon, sporting a rainbow headband. Over the last 30 years, Forbes has supported all aspects of the queer community: pride, human rights, trans visibility, drag queens, even the leather kink daddies.

When he moved here, Forbes established The Boys from Syracuse, a grassroots institution helping the HIV+ and striving to erase the disease’s stigma. “When you went to the hospital like Upstate, [the staff ] would not come into the room where the AIDS patients were. They put the tray at the door,” Forbes says. “They wanted us [visitors] to totally gown up, like face mask, everything. So impersonal.” Now, Forbes serves on a health advisory board for New York State under Governor Andrew Cuomo in addition to his work as president of CNY Pride, through which he coordinates events like the week-long Pride celebration in June.

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M I CHAE L CAS LE R

When the AIDS Memorial Quilt debuted in 1985 to commemorate assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, Michael Casler and his then-partner traveled to Washington D.C. for the event. They returned feeling inspired and created Act Up Syracuse, now called ACR Health, to fight the stigma of AIDS. The group began by confronting the mayor about the AIDS epidemic. Members dressed up, wrote a press release, threw a party, and marched the four blocks from Casler’s home to City Hall to bring the mayor their cardboard coffin symbolizing the nation’s 55,000 AIDS victims. This, Casler says, kindled pride in Syracuse.

During the early 1980s, pride had remained closeted.

“Gay pride was just a bunch of people hanging out,” Casler says. His organization led the city’s first pride celebration: 90 people with a wheelbarrow for a float parading from Armory Square to Columbus Circle. Common negative associations of gays as “freaks” and “diseased” made some wary of revealing their sexuality. For instance, schoolteacher Henry Yocum, afraid of losing his job, wore a paper bag over his head. But they still showed up to advocate for their community.

Casler still attends LGBT+ events but has let others take the lead. “It is always going to be the same unless new people take reign,” he says. “I still support, but in a different way.” <<<

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F R I E N D S H I P AC R O S S FA I T H S The importance of interfaith dialogue in the Trump era

words by April Rink & photos by Crystal Fang

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ven to an unaware outsider, the inside of Congregation Beth Sholom-Chevra Shas in Jamesville seemed a little different on the cold Feb. 5 night. Rather than only the synagogue’s usual Jewish devotees, Women Transcending Boundaries (WTB) and InterFaith Works teamed up to bring at least 18 different faiths together for the annual World InterFaith Harmony Assembly. The event was created to celebrate World Interfaith Harmony Week, established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2010.

The attendees made powerful speeches, sang, danced, performed skits, and shared laughter. Their overall purpose:

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learning more about one another, finding the commonalities, and building ties between different world religions.

Syracuse is immensely diverse in its population. This is due in part to its status as a sanctuary city, which means local law enforcement doesn’t comply exactly with federal immigration authorities when it comes to undocumented immigrants.

According to NYS Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, from 2007 to 2016, 9,538 refugees arrived in Syracuse from 52 different countries, including Somalia, Iraq, Sudan, and Myanmar, all mixed in with the city’s Caucasians, African Americans, Asians, and Native Americans. Onondaga County’s

population also varies in religion, with the most populous faiths being Catholic, Methodist, non-denominational, Evangelical Lutheran, and Islam.

At times these groups clash, but events like the interfaith assembly unite a variety of people and drive the purpose of organizations like Women Transcending Boundaries, an egalitarian community for women of all faiths and cultures to come together to learn about different beliefs and concerns.

Betsy Wiggins, a Presbyterian and one of the grassroots organization’s co-founders, remembers the moment she conceptualized WTB. One Tuesday, Wiggins anticipated a typical day of speech pathology work, helping

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< Congolese members of the congregation at All Saints Catholic Church sing a song.

Abbot Shinge Roko Sherry Chayat Roshi takes the stage with fellow Buddhists from the Zen Center of Syracuse (Hoen-ji). >

< Gurdeep Singh, director and cofounder of World Sikh Watch and Syracuse's Khalsa Day Festival, speaks to the audience.

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a patient recover from a stroke at Community General Hospital. Instead, on Sept.11, 2001, she heard loud noises coming from another room, so she went to ask her co-workers to lower the volume on what she thought was a movie. Soon after, she watched the second plane hit the Twin Towers.

“I just had this urgent feeling. I kept saying to my husband Jim, ‘I want to do something and I don’t know what to do.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you call the imam at the mosque,’” Wiggins says. When she called, she confessed to the imam, “I’m ignorant about Islam, and I want to do something to help the women of the mosque. What can I do?”

The imam at the Islamic Society put Wiggins in contact with Dayna Wellmon. The two connected, and conversation flowed naturally.

Each time they met, they brought friends. The group quickly outgrew Wiggins’ home, and the members named themselves Women Transcending Boundaries.

Similar interfaith groups popped up across the country after 9/11 to combat the stigma against faiths like Islam. According to Mehnaz Afridi, director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan University, the World’s Parliament of Religions of 1893 was America’s first interfaith organization. She estimates that roughly 250 interfaith groups exist in the U.S. today. “Now, there is a flowering of interfaith dialogue, scholarship and even jobs,” Afridi says.

Almost 17 years after 9/11, the mission of Women Transcending Boundaries is more urgent than ever.

Shortly after his inauguration in Jan. 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to “protect the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the U.S.” The order halted the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, immigration

benefits like the issuance of visas, and U.S. entry for Iranians, Iraqis, Somalis, Sudanese, Syrians, and Yemenis.

Trump’s dedication to “America first”, building a wall to keep others out, and similar rhetoric from others adds to the separation and xenophobia.

“Trump has made Women Transcending Boundaries realize we’re still relevant,” says Wellmon. “We are not something that’s just going to go away.”

According to the Pew Research Center, anti-Muslim hate crimes reported to the FBI increased from 91 in 2015 to 127 in 2016. In 2016, there were also 634 anti-Jewish crimes, 62 antiCatholic crimes, and 15 anti-Protestant crimes. These numbers demonstrate

to Islam that morning at the Islamic Society of Central New York.

Antoine is accustomed to being different. Raised by Methodist missionaries, she lived in Chile for 10 years of her childhood. When she was 12, her family moved to Long Island.

Out of all her classmates, most with lighter skin like hers, she gravitated to Latinos. In her early 20s, Antoine converted to Unitarian. She fell in love with a Haitian man, and the couple had two biracial children. But when Giselle converted to Islam, Antoine begged, “Please, not my daughter.”

Antoine didn’t understand why her feminist daughter would convert to a faith that she, at the time, believed to restrict women.

But Giselle was her daughter, and Antoine wanted to understand, so she turned to WTB for guidance. It took almost three years and a trip over 6,000 miles to Saudi Arabia for Antoine to fully accept her daughter’s path.

Today, however, Antoine has never felt more nervous for her daughter. In 2006, Giselle and her husband Maurice, who converted to Islam with her two years prior, moved to Saudi Arabia where they would live for 10 years.

Antoine never worried for her daughter when she lived in Saudi Arabia, but since she’s moved back to the U.S., she has fears. “She knew the rules and she followed the rules [in Saudi Arabia].

We were never afraid,” she says. “But when she came to the States, we were always afraid for her. And now it’s even worse with Trump as president.”

Like Antoine, Wellmon grew up Methodist, but in 1992,

“When you sit down and listen to another person’s story, it can break down those barriers.”

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a growing need for interfaith groups.

Cato Institute data shows that terrorism in the U.S. is on the rise and more than 60 percent of domestic terrorism relates to the Islamic State terrorist group, a fact that fuels Islamophobia.

Although WTB doesn’t focus solely on mending perceptions of Muslims, with the statistics and with today’s political climate, Islamophobia lends a strong example of what WTB seeks to reduce.

Judy Antoine joined the group of interfaith women in 2005, not to be more accepting of others but of her own blood. On a Friday in 2004, Antoine’s 20-year-old daughter Giselle walked into the kitchen and confessed to her mother that she had converted

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she, too, converted to Islam. Wellmon says her spiritual journey has softened her ties to any one religion and calls herself a “child of God.” It was Wellmon who really helped Antoine heal her relationship with her daughter. Wellmon would tell Antoine about her similar experiences and advised her to just to wait it out. “When I started going to WTB, I said to myself, ‘Either you’re going to lose your daughter trying to be right, or you’ve just got to stop and love her,’” Antoine says.

Women Transcending Boundaries aims to bring together women through their similarities rather than their differences. The group holds meetings to discuss divergent faiths’ traditions in birth, marriage, and death, for example. Through such

conversations, members realize that some of their traditions are not so dissimilar after all – like the Muslim and Jewish practices of wrapping a person in a shroud after death.

WTB not only finds commonalities via discussion, but through activities such as Turkish cooking classes and refugee sewing classes. Each month, the members read a book that someone has recommended and meet for discussion at book club gatherings. The books they’ve read cover topics including religion, politics, values, and current events. Once a month, they have a dinner that they call a “schmai,” which means an informal hangout in Yiddish.

With the group’s revived importance today, bringing in younger members is vital for the group to continue rather

than perish when current members are unable to run the show. Current social issues like LGBT+ rights and gun control have spurred youth activism.

“We’d like to get younger people involved, who maybe can come up with these creative ideas,” Wellmon says.

Wellmon recalls a meeting where a Palestinian woman and a Jewish Israeli woman stood in front of WTB members, each explaining their story.

They shook hands before speaking but were noticeably standoffish. By the end, the two left with a better understanding and were much warmer to each other, Wellmon says. “That just proves that when you sit down and listen to another person’s story, it can break down those barriers.” <<<

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ADVE NTU R E S I N S O U T H A F R I CA A writer navigates cultural differences while exploring Cape Town.

words & photos by Annie Kelly & map by Erica Petz

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fter two hours of bouncing down a bumpy dirt road, I begin to hear melodic voices singing in isiXhosa (isi-k-osa), the native language of this rural village tucked away in the mountains. As I exit the van, the beautiful mamas, wearing head wraps and clothing with colorful patterns, pause their singing and along with their children and friends, ambush me with greetings and hugs as if I was family or an old friend. This is how I’m welcomed home — well, one of my homes — in South Africa.

In fall 2017, I studied abroad in Cape Town, South Africa through the Vermont-based School of International Training, a world partner with Syracuse University Abroad. The theme of the

semester was Multiculturalism and Human Rights, an interesting topic for a country ruled by white supremacists until nearly the end of the 20th century.

In 1948, the Dutch (called Afrikaners) took over the previously-British colony and established apartheid, which directly translates from Afrikaans to “apartness.”

The apartheid system essentially segregated whites and blacks in every aspect of society. South Africa didn’t become a democracy until 1994 when Nelson Mandela won the nation’s first presidential election, just three years after his release from prison. Learning more about the country’s history helped me truly understand what each of my four homestay families had endured.

Annie's one-room house in Tshabo, which she shared with six other people

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Homestay #1: Langa On the outskirts of Cape Town lies Langa, one of several townships the government forced black people to live in during apartheid so they had less access to the city. My first host family’s modest two-story house stands in the middle of this neighborhood, with kids playing soccer in the streets, but the door is closed when I arrive.

My driver says, “Go ahead!” so I grab the door handle and let myself in.

My new host brother Khanyiso and his cousin Zenande greet me and lead me inside where another cousin Vuyo and her two friends from university are chatting on the couch. Then they all revert to speaking Xhosa while I sit there observing, feeling like a burden in their home. A wave of homesickness washes over me as I feel like I’ve made a huge mistake going abroad so far away. After all, my friend who did this program a year ago had told me that Langa would be the longest three weeks of my life. I start to believe her, but then my host sister Pumla finally emerges from the kitchen to welcome me with a huge hug and show me my room. It’s small with just a bed in the middle, but I have a view over Langa and can hear the church bells in the distance. At this point, I feel more accepted. Khanyiso and Zenande begin to warm up to me, and we start playing games and getting to know each other.

A couple weeks later, Khanyiso,

fa s p lrli nt gw o t wtoh ot uh soaunsda nadn da nsdi x et iege hnt e e n

Pumla, and I are watching TV in the living room when suddenly, a tiny lizard scuttles above the door. “Kill it!” my host sister screams before sprinting with Khanyiso out of the house and all the way down the street, leaving me to usher this poor creature outside safely. With the lizard gone, Pumla and Khanyiso return, and we all laugh uncontrollably.

By now I’ve grown much closer with my host family — washing the dishes with my siblings, watching my four-monthold baby brother, even participating in family birthday parties — but I already know that this hilarious moment with the lizard will be one of the first stories I tell to all of my friends back in America.

For my last night in Langa, and my family and I attend the farewell dinner for all the students and their host families at a restaurant located on a street so bustling that we can barely drive there. My friends and I sit together with our host families at the long, communal tables for a meal of chicken and beef. After dinner when everyone else had left, the restaurant staff kicks us

out for being too loud as we joke around with each other about nothing. Unfazed, we drive home and continue to goof off in the car, and I have never laughed so hard in South Africa until this moment.

We feel like a family, and when the morning comes, I don’t want to leave.

But I know I’ll return for a visit one day.

Homestay #2: Tshabo After a flight to the Eastern Cape and a drive through the mountains, my fellow students and I arrive at a small classroom in the center of Tshabo for our next homestay reception, where all of the host mamas are singing and the children dancing. For lunch, we eat a selection of sandwiches and soda from the village supermarket. I’m sharing my Tshabo host family with another student (Yawen), and together we meet our host mama. She doesn’t speak English, so we communicate with her using the little Xhosa we know and any conversational body language.

With Yawen’s heavy suitcase balanced on her head, she walks us

to our new home — a single room with three beds for seven people. The room also contains a kitchen area, a couch, and a coffee table, but we have to go outside to go to the bathroom in the outhouse and to get water from the tap. The family keeps the lights on from 5 or 6 a.m. to around 8 p.m. every day. Although I initially feel uneasy about this living situation, I eventually overcome my culture shock.

One night, some other students, our host siblings, and I decide to go watch the sunrise the next morning. Soon after the lights come on, I awaken, hastily slip on my shoes, and run down to the soccer field to meet my friends. The predawn weather is foggy and chilly, but the crisp, clean morning air makes up for it. Together we watch the morning sky turn pastel pinks and yellows and then play soccer at 6 a.m. A friend and I sit on a rock in the middle of the field until nearly 8, just talking and watching the cows and goats make their way out into the fields to start the day.

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S O U T H A F R I CA

Tshabo Bo-Kaap

Langa

Stellenbosch

CA P E TOW N Homestay #3: Stellenbosch One day about halfway through my time in Stellenbosch, a white area of Cape Town, my program friends and I learn of a beer festival going on, and we walk to downtown Stellenbosch to check it out. We pay only about seven dollars

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(roughly 100 rand) to enter, and then all the beer is so cheap. We sit on the grass drinking beer, enjoying the fall weather and the company of all the Stellenbosch University students around us.

However, I also catch glimpses of the town’s unsavory side. Coming

here from Tshabo has been my most difficult transition so far because of racism’s prevalence in Stellenbosch, the birthplace of apartheid. Under the policy, people fit into four categories: white, black, Indian, and colored — meaning you were neither white nor

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View of the Stellenbosch neighborhood black. Some people have denounced this label while others, like my Stellenbosch host family, have chosen to reclaim it.

Every night at dinner, Jennifer, my host mom, shares her experiences as a colored person during apartheid with my roommate (Maggie) and me. She explains how she and her husband could only take their kids to certain beaches, how they had to be careful about which routes they drove each day, and even how she faced discrimination as an established professor at the local university. Hearing Jennifer’s stories breaks my heart but continually reminds me that South Africa’s history is still so recent.

Homestay #4: Bo-Kaap One Sunday night during my time in Bo-Kaap — the predominantly Muslim community known for its large, brightly colored houses that are actually owned by wealthy foreigners — my host mom, Fatulkah, brings my roommate (April), our three-year-old host sister,

and me to a weekly town festival.

We watch three traditional bands perform, following them through the streets with the rest of the community, dancing and clapping along, while others observe from their rooftops.

Bo-Kaap maintains its fun atmosphere during the weekdays, too.

One evening, a few friends and I tag along with some of the host moms to a karaoke contest at the community center.

An hour into the party, people finally

start singing and dancing (I’ve learned a long time ago that the slower-paced “African time” is very real). Two of my friends sing “Just the Way You Are” by Bruno Mars, and the crowd goes wild.

Fatulkah buys us delicious beef-filled samosas, a popular dish among South African Muslims. Our host mom says she loves that we are enjoying ourselves because we are enjoying part of her culture and immersing ourselves in her everyday life. <<<

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FIG HTI NG I S FE MALE How self-defense classes build ready, confident women

words & photos by Hayley Greason

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wice a week, the dance studio in the Women’s Building at Syracuse University transforms into the following scenes. A dark, quiet street with trash cans and broken street lights. A park with trees, grass, and mud surrounded by fraternity houses, or totally isolated. The sidewalk outside your favorite bar, the air filled with cigarette smoke, muted music, and conversation, surrounded by people you think you know. And so on.

Whatever the scenario, Self-Defense for Women (PED 263) instructor Phil Benedict introduces the problem with, “Here comes some asshole who wants to put his hands where they don’t belong.”

And then the women get to work.

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In those vulnerable situations, a potential victim needs the right moves to properly combat attacks. To escape the straight-on wrist grab, for instance, simply twist your arm so your wrist can slip out of the grip and swivel your hips when you yank. Always remember, a man’s power is in his upper body, but a woman’s power is in her hips, as Benedict says. The women pair up and practice the moves on each other, playing the pretend “asshole perp” or the victim — correction, “The Badass Bitch That’s Gonna Fuck You Up,” as one student proudly calls herself. They tell each other to really grab on to see if it works, and when it does, their eyes go wide.

When the setting includes daylight,

offices, and people in positions of power, different tactics apply. For the first 10 minutes of class, the women sit on the floor while Benedict urges that if something ever feels wrong, “TELL SOMEONE.” He says over and over that sexual assault is never the victim’s fault, but if the first few young gymnasts had told their parents or coach about Dr. Larry Nassar, maybe they could have saved all the girls who came after them.

Benedict emphasizes that molestation and rape can happen anytime, anywhere. To address all possible situations, his class alternates between lessons on physical tactics for defense against strangers and lectures on assaults stemming from

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social power within certain systems. In light of feminist movement evolutions sparked by the presidential election, #MeToo, and the Nassar case, women’s self-defense classes like Benedict’s have recently spiked in popularity, according to Jocelyn Hollander, a sociology professor at the University of Oregon specializing in women’s self-defense training. But are the punches and kicks taught in these classes enough to help women fight institutionalized sexual assault?

“When somebody jumps out of the bushes or otherwise attacks you in a sudden and violent way, responding with kicks and strikes makes sense,” Hollander says. “But assaults by acquaintances are often not violent, and many women wouldn’t feel comfortable

students regularly practice saying straightforward phrases like “Do not touch me!” and “No!” with confidence and vigor, along with correct body language. This means holding yourself with confidence, keeping your distance, and putting your hands up to show that you absolutely don’t want to be touched.

“Let the perp know you won’t be a victim in the first place,” says Dana Densmore, a seasoned martial arts instructor and former member of the 1960s feminist group Cell 16.

Through the institution of a Cell 16 martial arts school for women in 1968, Densmore helped found one of the first known women’s self-defense classes after years of martial arts training.

Densmore explains that despite the momentum of female liberation

order to protect yourself. “Are you going to go into freeze mode when you’re attacked? Are you unable, or unwilling, to hurt somebody?” she asks. These questions can only be fully addressed through extensive martial arts training.

Densmore has experienced the evolution of women’s self-defense over the years. Since the opening of the Cell 16 martial arts school five decades ago, she has tried almost all versions of martial arts and self-defense classes.

She finds that martial arts really work only if you fully commit to it for years because of the level of skill required and the psychological barriers that must be broken down. “Fighting is not instinctive for most women. I suspect it’s beaten out of us. If you try to pick up a kitten or shove it in

“This class taught me how to say no and to never second-guess my judgment.” using aggressive physical techniques against someone they know.”

In 2014, Hollander published research on the effectiveness of Empowerment-Based Self-Defense (ESD), a certain type of self-defense training focused on reducing the victimization of women by attackers they know. Her results conclusively show that women who take a 30hour class decrease their likelihood of sexual violation. Of all the women surveyed, about 30 percent of those who didn’t take an ESD class reported a sexual violation during the followup year, compared to only 12 percent of women who did take the class.

ESD trains women in nonviolent verbal and physical tactics to achieve the goal of “boundary setting.” For example,

movements like hers, women can’t fully live with pride and dignity when they feel powerless to fend off possible attackers lurking in every corner. “How can we go and make a feminist movement when we walk around with our heads hunched into ourselves out of fear?” she asks.

Although clearly undergoing a resurgence in the women’s rights movement, the way self-defense is practiced has changed. Today, women’s self-defense has become a technique in itself, completely separate from martial arts. Densmore explains how each focuses differently on the body and the mind. Self-defense classes train you to be confident, say no, and never see yourself as the victim while martial arts opens your mind to using violence in

a cage when it doesn’t want, you end up with a lot of scratches,” she says, explaining that women have to uncover the buried instinct to defend oneself.

Densmore says short-term women’s self-defense classes have the potential to create empowered and confident women who can avoid violent situations before they begin, including those in which men use their social or institutional power to take advantage of them.

Benedict’s one-credit class, offered every semester through the School of Education, focuses more on physical techniques like getting out of holds and grabs, learning strikes, and ground defense. The grading rubric assesses knowledge of physical defense tactics, execution of responses to attacks, and response time to attacks. For the final

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exam, each student faces Benedict in one-on-one combat. Even though the class is based more in martial arts than ESD, Benedict’s lessons may still empower women in other situations besides attacks in dark alleyways and parks. After all, he always discusses current events with his students and encourages them to speak up.

“Those poor girls that were trusting this doctor on the Olympic [gymnastics] team are scarred for life. All they had to do was say something, but they were so afraid because it was an authority figure that they trusted. That's where women’s self-defense has gone,” he says.

The women in Benedict’s class have taken his words to heart. For example, one of his former students — who asked to remain anonymous because of the emotional sensitivity of the situation — developed a new attitude after completing the class. “This class was more than just techniques and how to get out of choke holds. It taught me how to say no and to never second-guess my judgment,” she says.

About a year before deciding to take Benedict’s class, the student was walking home alone from a party through Walnut Park when two seemingly older guys started calling to her. She ignored them and picked up her pace, but they persisted. When the men caught up to her, one grabbed her wrist. She yanked her hand away and told them to leave her alone. As the other grabbed her wrist and called her a bitch, the first guy touched her underneath her skirt. She turned around, punched him in the mouth, and ran.

“I let them touch me THREE TIMES before I hit him. This class taught me that no person has any right to touch you without your permission. Looking back on it, I should have punched him when he grabbed my wrist, and I wouldn’t have had his hand on my ass,” she says.

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Densmore says these classes won’t magically guarantee lifelong safety from attackers, whether a stranger on the street or your boss, but the confidence gained from realizing you’re not powerless may do something even more.

She stresses that even if your situation doesn’t end up well, knowing that you handled it effectively and fought for your bodily integrity will make a huge difference in how you feel afterward.

“In class, they load a man up with protective gear, and he comes at the students using that aggressive, obscene talk. Then the women come in with their kicks and punches and

elbows and knees,” Densmore says.

“And they learn to be that kitten. They think to themselves, ‘He’s going to be really sorry he picked me up when I didn’t want to be picked up.’” <<<

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P U T T I N G T H E " DA R E " I N DA I RY A local farmworker fights unjust industry practices.

words & photos by Marita del Carmen Perez Diaz

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rispin Hernandez can’t pinpoint the final straw that spurred him to form a farmworkers’ committee. Perhaps when a cow kicked him and the farm owner refused to take him to a doctor to stop the bleeding, or maybe when watching his supervisor assault a co-worker who was later fired.

“The owners cannot continue treating cows better than us,” Hernandez says.

But in New York, like in most states, they can. Because he met with allies from the Workers’ Center of Central New York, the farm owners intimidated Hernandez for months and eventually fired him in September 2015, leaving the underage immigrant broke and homeless.

Hernandez, now 22, is currently fighting for New York farmworkers’ right to organize. In 2016, the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in his name and in the name of the Workers’ Center against the state and the governor. The goal is to refute an 80-year-old law that denies farmworkers the New York State constitutional right to “organize and advocate for improvements of workplace conditions without fear of termination.” The New York Supreme Court judge dismissed the lawsuit, but Hernandez and the Workers' Center have filed a notice of appeal. This is the first case of its kind to reach the Court of Appeals, the highest court in

New York State. If successful, it could set a legal precedent for the entire nation.

New York has a solid agricultural industry, yielding the third largest milk production of any state in 2017, but behind these fresh, local products is an ignored world of deprivation and abuse of farmworkers, most of them Latinos. Without the right to stand up for themselves, thousands of Hispanics work as sort of “modern slaves” — a term farmworkers like Hernandez often use to describe themselves — to grow the fruits, vegetables, and dairy products available for consumption in New York and beyond, according to research by the Workers’ Center and the Worker Justice Center of New York.

In the Workers’ Center, located in Syracuse, Hernandez spends much of his time pondering how to help others in the same situation as him.

In a small room with walls adorned with butterflies, a symbol for Hispanic migrants’ fights, Hernandez recalls how everything started for him.

“I was working 12 hours a day, six days a week, without receiving training and with minimal payment.

We had to buy our own gloves to protect ourselves from the strong chemical we used,” Hernandez says.

When hiring farmworkers, agricultural employees must find people participating in the H-2A or

H-2B guestworker programs. But the reality is that “over one-half of the approximately 2.5 million seasonal workers on U.S. farms and ranches lack authorized immigration status,” according to the nonprofit Farmworker Justice. The H-2A guestwork program requires farm owners to provide their workers with good and safe housing for free. However, in his accommodation, Hernandez struggled to adjust to the odor, the overcrowding, the bugs, and even the cold air that sometimes entered through broken windows. “I never could rest properly,” he says. “After taking a long bath, my hands smelled terrible. I couldn’t even get the flavor of any food.”

A few days before he was fired, the farm owners called the police on Hernandez and four others when they met with allies from the Workers' Center in their home. The intimidation worked with three of them, who feared losing their jobs, but Hernandez and one other persisted until the day they were fired.

Rebecca Fuentes, lead organizer of the Workers’ Center, says that in order to improve working conditions in the agriculture industry, farmworkers must be allowed three basic labor rights currently denied to them: “the right to organize, the right to a day off, and the right to overtime pay.” The Farm Bureau, a powerful lobby industrial group, entered the case in defense of

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the farmworker exclusion from these rights, says Erin Beth Harrist, Senior Staff Attorney for the New York Civil Liberties Union. “They said there is no constitutional violation here, that there is no problem here,” she says.

The State Employment Relations Act (SERA), codified within New York State Labor Law, protects employees’

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ask for reinstatement after being unfairly fired, for example,” she says.

The New York Farm Bureau argues that extending collective bargaining rights to farm workers “would impose an unreasonable hardship on agriculture, an industry that faces unique challenges due in large part to the prevalence of family farms and

don’t need the right to organize because they can solve their problems using other legal alternatives. However, Harrist believes that there are many other ways to protect agricultural products instead of excluding farm workers from what she says is a really important right.

Fuentes and Hernandez stress that they are committed to fight, no matter

Hernandez (left) chats with other migrant workers in one of the dilapidated trailers on the dairy farm right to organize, but it explicitly excludes farm workers. This violates the Equal Protection Clause of the New York State Constitution, which prohibits “any discrimination against people, in his or her civil rights by any other person or by any firm, corporation, or institution.” SERA states that farm workers do not classify as employees with a protected right to organize, Harrist explains. “Farm workers cannot go to the administration agency and

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seasonal workflow,” according to the Bureau's memo of law in the motion to dismiss the case, signed by Brian J. Butler, attorney of the Farm Bureau.

For instance, the Farm Bureau is concerned that if farm workers can organize, they can strike and all the produce will go bad, Harrist says. The Bureau states in the memo that all of the workers’ concerns “are addressed by other federal or New York State statutory schemes,” suggesting that farm workers

what. That's why on Dec. 1, 2017, they traveled to dairy farms across Central New York. This outreach is a normal practice for the Workers' Center to get in touch with farm workers, give them advice, and provide support. Since many workers are undocumented, the Workers’ Center has to do the reaching out most of the time.

Arriving at a farm located in Marietta, a hamlet in southern Onondaga County, a welcome sign reads that this is a dairy farm operated only by

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Migrant workers participate in a orkshop at the Rural and Migrant Ministry's “Liberation Retreat” family members. “That is the first lie; they have seven Latinos working for them and living here,” Fuentes says.

Behind the owner’s main house and only a few feet away from the dairy farm sit two trailers adapted to be the Latino workers’ home. Inside one of the trailers, a young, Mexican, undocumented farm worker awaits this meeting. They never open the door the first time you knock.

Once in, Hernandez and Fuentes sit with him in a small room which also functions as the kitchen. The conditions are deplorable, with cockroaches scuttling about and the audible squeaks of mice looking for food on the dirty floor. Fuentes hands the farm worker a paper with updated information about workers’ rights. In big letters,

the paper says that the minimum wage would change from $9.70 to $10.40 starting on Dec. 31, 2017. The worker says he was hardly receiving $8 per hour while working over 12 hours every day, without a day off, since he illegally crossed the Mexican border in October. When he arrived looking for work, the farm owner didn’t ask for his documentation; he just joined six other people in the small trailers. He worked without complaining to pay off the debt he incurred on his journey here. He was afraid to complain because of his irregular migratory situation.

In the other small room, an 18-yearold girl from Guatemala studies English with a professor who visits her 45 minutes per week. She concentrates as best as she can while caring for her twoyear-old brother, oneyear-old sister, and her own one-yearold son. She shares the child rearing with her mother, so

“ The owners cannot continue treating cows better than us.”

they take turns working on the farm.

The English as a Second Language tutor teaches her the different parts of a cow. “Udder is ubre, hooves is cascos, horns is cuernos…,” she repeats aloud.

Class that Friday afternoon will end early because Marty Fefer, a volunteer at Freeclothing.com, is giving the women a ride to buy some supplies for their kids. He spends most of his weekends giving clothes and driving farm workers who need transportation, but when the situation involves families with children, it’s particularly difficult and overwhelming for him, Fefer says.

“From my experience meeting farm workers, I know for sure that the owners prefer a young man rather than a woman with children,” he adds. Fefer emphasizes that these people work hard to feed others and should be treated with respect. “This situation is happening right here in our backyard, and everybody is blind to this fiasco,” he says.

Not only does he drive the migrant workers around and bring them clothes, but Fefer and his wife also celebrate

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their birthdays with some of them. “They are not just people that we help, they are my truly friends,” he says.

Allies and migrant farm workers often participate in workshops and training to learn different ways to improve their working and living conditions.

In November, the Rural and Migrant Ministry held a Liberation Retreat”in Lyons, New York to create dialogue about “strategies to move forward in a political climate that is dehumanizing,” an invitation card read. Hernandez attended to share his experiences.

Almost two dozen people gathered in the small church that sponsored the meeting.

Throughout the weekend, the organizers provided several conferences about migration, laws, and campaigns about their rights. They also spent time on group activities to help the attendees aimed at developing psychological strength and sharing their emotions.

For one exercise, the workers had to draw a door. The majority drew a closed, dark, windowless door.

Most were in tears explaining later why that was their kind of door.

One of the speakers, Fabiola Ortiz Valdez, coordinator of the New York

“ We just want to live and work with dignity.”

Immigration Coalition, said at the retreat that education is one of the most important actions to help farm workers. “Our role as allies, organizers, or academics is not to make decisions but to provide resources for workers to use their power and change their situation,” she said. Even if Hernandez and Fuentes win their historic lawsuit in New York, that doesn’t mean problems will disappear, Ortiz said, pointing out examples of other states like California, Arizona, Kansas, and Idaho, that have unions for farm workers, but still have important problems without solutions.

“We are fighting for making it mandatory, by law, for the farm owners to sit at the negotiating table with workers," she said.

For the final exercise, attendees had to climb a chair, say something from the bottom of their heart, and do a trust fall into the rest of the group.

Hernandez was last to stand up. "We just want to live and work with dignity," he declared before falling back into the hands of his peers, who raised him up with cheers like the hero he has the potential to become for them. <<<

Hernandez does a trust fall at he Rural and Migrant Ministry's Liberation Retreat

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S H E S H O OT S , S H E SCOR E S A glimpse of life on the Syracuse women’s basketball team

words by Gabriela Knutson & photos by Codie Yan

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n Jan. 21, 2018, the Syracuse University Women’s Basketball Team drew its largest crowd of the season, over 8,000 people, as it faced University of Pittsburgh. After an afternoon of making contested shots under the basket, no. 22 freshman Amaya Finklea-Guity, the team’s center, received a pass from teammate Tiana Mangakahia. With Pitt’s no.

23 all over her, Finklea-Guity whirled around and shot the ball. The whistle blew, and no. 23 threw her arms up in the air, defending her alleged foul. The crowd watched intently as the basketball swished through the hoop and roared as Finklea-Guity headed to the foul line to complete the three-point play.

SU won that game 70-52, its tenth consecutive home win. Leading with 14 points tied with Mangakahia, FinkleaGuity drove her team to victory. That performance, along with a career-high three blocks against the University of Miami, earned her the title of ACC’s rookie of the week. “I was really proud of myself just because I didn't think I could do it,” says Finklea-Guity. “It made me feel like I have a chance to be really good here at SU.”

Despite her current success, Amaya Finklea-Guity didn’t start playing basketball until fifth grade.

She struggled to keep up with her teammates who had been playing basketball for years. That summer, her road to collegiate basketball began.

“I started working really hard. I was going to basketball camps, doing drills with guys, going to the park to shoot,” Finklea-Guity says. “I came back for sixth grade, and I was just good. I knew I could continue playing after that.”

The 6-foot-4 Massachusetts native focuses on having confidence, ambition, and discipline, three values exhibited in her number 22. “When choosing my number, I want to make sure I get a good vibe from it,” Finklea-Guity says. She says the number 22 means “able to turn dreams into realities.”

Currently enrolled in the Falk College, Finklea-Guity wishes to transfer into computer science and engineering.

She chose SU over Boston College because of the engineering program and the instant connection she felt with the women’s basketball team.

At the Carmelo K. Anthony Basketball Center after practice, you’ll see the team fooling around, dancing

to their favorite hip-hop and R&B songs, and laughing after a long day’s work. With a huge grin on her face, she describes the different personalities on her team as the “crazy ones, the not-socrazy ones, and the inbetweens that are sometimes crazy and sometimes not.

But everyone is fun in their own way,” she says. “They’re all sweet, kind people, and it’s just great playing with them.”

Nearing the end of her freshman year, Finklea-Guity reflects on the radical transformation she made from high school to college basketball. Her high school team worked for two hours every day, about one-third of what Finklea-Guity says she does at SU. “You just feel the atmosphere change to competitive and business-like,” says Finklea-Guity. “You don’t think it’ll be different, but the pace and the aggression is so much harder. You just have to be tough. You have to really want it.” <<<

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“Able to turn dreams into realities”

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“You just have to be tough. You have to really want it.”

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GAM E ON Serious Syracuse gamers aim to bring e-sports to SU.

words by Emma Fahey & photos by Qian Zhu

A

lone neon Batman symbol hanging in the window hints at the presence of Cloud City Comics and Toys, located on the top floor of a vintage-looking brick building in downtown Syracuse’s Armory Square. But this shop holds special significance for a handful of local video gamers who meet every other Sunday for Super Smash Bros. tournaments. Among the tight space riddled with chairs, controllers, and TVs are friends and enthusiasts sharing laughs and advanced skills totally foreign to those unfamiliar with the “culture.”

Frequent attendee Hunter “Draxsel” Gallagher has been a staple of the local Smash scene since 2014. When he’s not holding down his high position on the Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (colloquially known as Smash 4) Upstate New York Power Rankings, the Syracuse native can be found playing friendly matches and giving advice. Like many professional players, Gallagher’s road to competitive Smash began by playing for fun. Each game in the series has been marketed as a party game, frequently enjoyed in casual or family settings by people of all ages. Gallagher started playing Melee around 2005 with his siblings and dabbled in Brawl when it came out. His competitive relationship with the game commenced

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a few months after the release of Smash 4 in 2014 when he was attending Finger Lakes Community College.

Since then, Gallagher’s video gaming hobby has given way to a multitude of new, exciting opportunities. “Without Smash, I wouldn't have been flown out to [or] driven to places like Detroit, Virginia, and Las Vegas,” he says.

Competitive video gaming, or e-sports, is becoming an increasingly popular trend among college students and young adults worldwide. These players desire more than what casual gaming provides — a chance to hone their technical skills, opportunities to travel to national and international competitions, or even a path to a professional video gaming career. In response to this growing interest, several multi-college organizations have cropped up to encourage student involvement in nationwide gaming tournaments and events. One of the largest, Collegiate Star League, boasts a membership of over 900 universities and 30,000 college students across the globe. CSL hosts tournaments for ten different games including Counterstrike: Global Offensive, League of Legends,

Dota 2, Rocket League, and Smash.

The organization’s success demonstrates the eagerness with which college students everywhere are teaming up and showcasing their gaming skills, yet the e-sports community at Syracuse University is almost non-existent.

For the past four years, SU’s competitive video gamers have been restricted to dorm matches or small meetups among friends. Attempts to create e-sports clubs, even as an offshoot of the university-sanctioned Gaming Club, have notoriously failed.

This past January, Gallagher and other well-known members of the Smash community brought a large tournament of multiple Smash games to the university. Players from all over the state commandeered a Life Sciences lecture hall to spend the day competing and having fun. Gallagher even paid the venue fee for SU students, hoping to encourage attendance and establish a regular tournament series. Unfortunately, the relative success of the tournament known as SUS 2 didn’t push Syracuse University to join the e-sports trend.

Gallagher is passionate about the potential of e-sports, both for the

NACG members play together. Photos courtesy of Alvin Chow.

university and the local gaming scene.

He notes that students often consider social clubs when deciding where to go to college, and since a significant number of people share video gaming as a hobby, a campus club dedicated to them would be paramount. “Past this,” he says, “if [an e-sports] club gains enough following and recognition, then it gives back to the students as a way to help them de-stress, as most clubs often do.” Furthermore, Gallagher believes such a club could facilitate community building. He says, “Colleges have the potential to really boost their local scenes and build a community and, in truth, a family of people who enjoy the game, each other's company, and simply having fun.”

One SU student looking to bring e-sports to campus is freshman Alvin Chow. He’s lived in Shanghai, Southern California, and Maryland, but one constant has remained: video games.

When asked for his gamer tag, which he reveals is “Disaster,” he fondly recalls his early e-sports success as a middle school student in China. With a friend, Chow created “RaM,” a competitive team for the online team shooter game Counterstrike 1.6. Although the team

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could only play on weekends because of their parents’ strict rules, “RaM” rose through the ranks of Chinese Counterstrike, reaching no. 2 in Shanghai and no. 32 in China overall.

Now, as a college student who has delved even further into the e-sports world, Alvin “Disaster” Chow still glows with pride for this accomplishment.

In 2017, Chow was approached by a group known as North America Cyber Games. As the e-sports branch of the North American Student Network, NACG supports Asian students studying abroad in the United States and Canada. Because of Chow’s prior gaming experience, NACG representatives selected him to lead the Syracuse University chapter.

Members of the chapter, established in February 2018, play a variety of popular e-sports games including League of Legends, Overwatch,

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PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and NBA2K. Chow says the club has two ultimate goals: to promote Syracuse University's gaming teams and tournaments within the NACG and “to gather people that are interested in e-sports and build a community where students can play with each other.” “ Colleges have the potential to really build a community and, in truth, a family of people who enjoy the game, each other's company, and simply having fun.”

The university’s NACG chapter currently consists of 12 staff members who meet regularly in Bird Library to play, chat, and take a break from the stresses of academic life. The club is on track to become an officially recognized student organization this fall,

and new members are encouraged to apply. According to Chow, prospective members will need to submit a gaming resume with their application — but membership isn’t strictly limited to pro players with a national record. Perhaps Syracuse University gamers have finally found their lucky break. <<<

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M O M E N T S A B R OA D International photos from Syracuse University students 1. Kristine Klein 2. Annie Kelly 3. Lindsey McClafferty 4. Cynthia Wang

5. Tess Berger 6. Tess Berger 7. Erica Petz 8. Lindsey McClafferty

1. La Serena / Chile

3. Jerusalem / Israel

2. Okavango Delta / Botswana

4. Lviv / Ukraine

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5. Budapest / Hungary

6. Portofino / Italy

8. Bethlehem / Palestine

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7. Otago / New Zealand

“ YOU ONLY FAIL WHEN YOU STOP TRYING.”

Friends of Dorothy co-founder Michael DeSalvo, photo by Codie Yan Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist