Passport Fall 2013

MEMORIES OF

PèRE LACHAISE STORIES FROM

GHANA

TRUTHS ABOUT TURKISH DELIGHT SPONTANEITY IN

EDINBURGH

Volume 18 Fall 2013

EDITOR’S NOTE When I first read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I was simultaneously amused and confused by Mad-Eye Moody’s first outburst of, “CONSTANT VIGILANCE!” as the failsafe tactic to guard against Dark Wizards and Witches. Truthfully, I had no idea what the word “vigilance” meant—it seemed like a very big word to be shouting at a class of fourteen-year-olds.

Many years later, I find that even though I may understand the definition of “constant vigilance,” I still don’t fully understand its application. No matter how hard I try, I struggle with maintaining a constant state of awareness, not necessarily with what is directly occurring in my surroundings, but rather with what these events may imply in the grand scheme of things. Constant vigilance requires not just sheer observation but also understanding of these observations.

Throughout the eighteenth issue of Passport, constant vigilance is key; without it, the significance of each sight, sound, and taste in an unfamiliar surrounding is lost. From a spontaneous trip to Scotland to a walk through Père Lachaise, from tasting Turkish Delight to watching bullfights in Spain, each reflection of the writer’s time abroad is a commentary of the world beyond one singular experience. These writers look at the aftermath of the double-edged role Christianity has played in Ghana, the true meaning of service through teaching at an elementary school in Ireland. Just as seeing a Dark Wizard or Witch hiding in an alleyway is the first step to preventing imminent demise, recognition of a problem is the first step to addressing it. I hope that as you read these pages, you can see the various ways in which constant vigilance is present in each of these narratives. I hope you notice how they extend beyond a casual remark—these narratives offer rumination, thought for thought’s sake that paves a road to action. And I hope that throughout your Duke journey and beyond, you’ll be constantly vigilant for those surprises around every corner or right under your nose, and that you’ll forge a road to action of your own.

Jennifer Hong

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photo by Shelley & Dave @ Flickr

editor-in-chief Jennifer Hong chief graphics Lauren Jackson editor senior editors Becky Chao Daniel Luker Caitlin Tutterow graphics Ukyoung Chang editors Becky Chao Jennifer Hong Suhani Jalota Rhona Ke Wendy Lu Katie Ni Elaine Pak Roshni Prakash editor Tony Cao writers Ukyoung Chang Phyllis Duncan Brendan Huang Lauren Jackson Suhani Jalota Chris Lee Cara Peterson Gayle Powell Victoria Scott Caitlin Tutterow Cassie Yuan

cover photo by Fixeche @ Flickr back cover photo by stewartmorris @ Flickr

CONTENTS Descending from the Ivory Tower of Humanitarian Aid

by Cara Peterson

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City of the Dead

by Lauren Jackson

6

Time Capsule

by Brendan Huang

9 11 13 16 19

Never Ending Peace and Love

by Cassie Yuan We’ll Always Have Edinburgh

by Victoria Scott Narratives of Redemption

by Chris Lee A Toilet Perspective for Empowerment

by Suhani Jalota Truths about Turkish Delight

by Ukyoung Chang Ireland’s Educational Failings

by Gayle Powell The Allure of the Corrida de Toros

by Phyllis Duncan Unreal City

by Caitlin Tutterow Antarctica!

Senior Staff

photo by Kwan C. @ Flickr

21 23 25 27 29

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DESCENDING DESCENDING Dublin, Ireland

FROM THE IVORY TOWER OF HUMANITARIAN AID

by Cara Peterson

T

his summer, I participated in the DukeEngage Dublin program, which focuses on refugee and immigrant issues.

From my coursework at Duke, I was aware of the disconnect that can exist between aid workers and the populations they target, so I wanted to work directly with refugees. I was hoping for a summer learning experience that would be built upon personal connections and exchanges. I could not have been happier when my supervisor linked me with the Refugee Access Program (RAP). At RAP, I taught Math, English, and Life Skills classes for "Separated Children," adolescents under the age of eighteen seeking asylum in a country without a parental guardian. While working at RAP, I was challenged to consider the best ways to cater to the needs of the students. I constantly found myself linking small (or big, depending on your point of view) daily occurrences to one dominant issue: empowerment.

“Helping” often creates a hierarchical power structure that implies an individual has problems that must be solved for them by an outside source with greater power, which removes the individual’s sense of agency. “Working with” or “being with” places all involved on an equal plane and implies that the individual is the main player in solving his or her own problems with the support of periphery aid

“Empowerment stems from viewing oneself, not as a problem that must be fixed, but as the solution to one’s own problems.”

Empowerment is the topic around which I have centered my education. At Duke, I am double majoring in public policy and women’s dtudies with focuses on human rights advocacy, international development, and gender equity.

Throughout my courses, the general theme that has consistently arisen is the difference between “helping” individuals and “working with” or “being with” them.

partners. The “working with” or “being with” model allows the individual to retain a sense of agency and control over his or her future.1 Empowerment stems from viewing oneself not as a problem that must be fixed, but as the solution to one’s own problems. It is critical that the

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individual and the problem remain two separate entities, especially in the minds of social workers and other support, as the social workers almost always determine the power structure of this relationship.

Within my first couple of days at RAP, I noticed that all the teachers and faculty not only knew this concept but also embodied it and lived it every day.

This is not an easy task! Many of the RAP students had been separated from their families after extremely traumatic experiences in their home countries and were struggling to find their way in an entirely new country with an entirely new set of cultural norms.

Additionally, many students, especially the young women, began the RAP program having never received formal schooling and were in the process of “learning how to learn.” They were only just growing accustomed to raising their hands when they knew an answer or asking for extra assistance when they did not understand a concept.

As if the challenge of “learning to learn” were not overwhelming enough, roughly half of the RAP students had never spoken a word of English before coming to Ireland. Furthermore, many were not even literate in their first languages. One

photo by Laura Bittner @ Fotopedia

of my students was a new student from Mali. On one occasion, I was reading with her and realized that as I traced my finger along the line of words written on the page, she was able to read them out loud, but when I asked her what the words meant, she had no idea. I knew she spoke French, so I went to the shelf to retrieve an English-to-French dictionary to help translate. When I showed her the English word and then pointed my finger at the French word alongside it, she signaled that she still did not understand. Only then did I realize that, while her first language was French, she only knew how to speak it. English was the only language in which she could partially read, though she could hardly understand what almost any of the words meant. I was left with a sense of shock at the obstacles she was working to overcome and awe at the resilient and continuous effort she was putting forth.

and unique—more than a foreigner, more than a refugee, more than a student.

By having an uncanny awareness of their personal circumstances and their needs, likes, dislikes, and even hobbies, she sees them purely as fellow human beings. By doing so, she empowers them to see themselves in the same light. This empowerment has a huge impact on these students, especially in a new environment and culture far from their native home.

Watching the interactions of the RAP teachers with the students—especially their approaches to children misbehaving or having difficulty paying attention in class (as it tends to happen on sunny summer days)—provided me with wonderful examples of how to be an effective teacher. One teacher in particular, Bernie Boyle, is a role model who truly goes beyond the notion of “working with” the students to the highest form of empowerment: “being with” them. She recognizes each individual walking through her door as complex

which the victim becomes extremely withdrawn, Rama came across as emotionally unresponsive when I first met her and for almost the entirety of the time I spent with her. She spoke very little and, when she did, it was so soft that her voice was barely audible from three feet away. Because she spoke very little English and there was not very much to talk about, I initially found it difficult to have a conversation with her. I was always looking for an excuse to compliment her achievements in the classroom to help build her confidence in any way possible.

photo by James Sarmiento @ Flickr

I was blessed to witness one student’s “transformation” during my time with RAP. Suffering from Flat Effect, usually a response to a traumatic experience in

“She recognizes each individual walking through her door as complex and unique. More than a foreigner, more than a refugee, more than a student.”

Rama’s transformation through RAP was sudden and too beautiful for words. On the last day of RAP, she stood in front of a crowd of fifty attendees and read a poem, first the French version and then the English version. When she spoke, her voice flooded across the room all the way to the back row. After seven weeks of watching her quiet project presentations, usually given while seated at the table instead of standing, it was a sight to behold. After that, she continued to talk louder in her everyday interactions. This transformation was only possible once she felt more confident in herself and empowered within her new environment.

Moments like this gave me much to think about and I could not help but reflect upon how they played out in my own life. I think back to my primary school education and distinctly remember the year I decided for myself that I was “smart”—not that I had the potential to be smart, but that it was innately a part of me. This change in my perception of my self-image occurred when a teacher told me I was smart and made me believe it. I worked hard in school not because I wanted to be smart, but because I had been led by this teacher to believe that it was my identity. It was who I was. After that, my work ethic made every following teacher I had believe I was smart and capable as well, which led me to have the educational opportunities that I have today. They believed in me, so I believed in me. And when I doubted myself, I thought back to the words they had said to me and was able to re-convince myself and keep pushing forward.

This is what children need in an education above all else. Yes, teachers to teach, but they also need to “be with” their students, see something in them, and convince them to see it in themselves.

This way, kids can develop a sense of identity that they respect and love. I descending from the ivory tower

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went into my volunteer position at RAP knowing that eight weeks was not enough time for me to dramatically increase the amount of substantive knowledge in the student’s brains. But after about two weeks in the RAP environment, I realized that I had the power to contribute to something greater because I possessed the world’s greatest, and simplest, superpower: the ability to take an interest in and encourage young adults who looked to me as a mentor. I felt a growing belief within me, inspired by the RAP teachers, that I could play a role in imparting the same sense of empowerment in the RAP students that my past teachers had instilled in me. Or, on a less complex scale, I could at least bring an extra smile or a boost of confidence to their days. Perhaps it is optimistic for me to believe that I could make a major difference simply as one person, just one volunteer in Dublin for eight weeks; but I really hope that my daily words of encouragement and efforts to celebrate their achievements, big or small, amounted to something in the big picture.

“... I realized that I had the power to contribute to something greater than that because I possessed the world’s greatest, and simplest, superpower: the ability to take an interest in and encourage young adults who looked to me as a mentor.”

1. Wells, Dr. Rev. Sam. “The Nazareth Manifesto.” Vaght Lecture. Peakland Baptist Church, Lynchburg. 27 Apr. 2008. Lecture.

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photos by William Murphy @ Fotopedia

memoir

Paris, France

City of the

Dead

by Lauren Jackson ucked away in a corner of the City of Light T is an entirely different metropolis. Sprawling across 119 acres of the 20 Arrondissement of ème

Paris, the Cimetière du Père Lachaise is a quiet attestation to memory sculpted, engraved, and erected into a landscape of still stone monuments.

The City of the Dead, it is often called—and indeed, although the inhabitants of Pere Lachaise lie quiet in their sepulchres, this corner of Paris is every bit as populous as its livelier, more touristy counterparts.

Broad cobbled boulevards lined with trees already tinged an autumnal gold stretch beyond the eye’s ability to see. Elaborate street signs announce the avenue de la Chapelle or chemin du Père éternel in gold lettering. The most posh street in Belgravia couldn’t give off more of a sense of gracious, timeless elegance than this corner of Paris.

Paris is the final leg of a two-month journey abroad. I’ve already spent a week jumping from archive to archive in London, followed by a month and a half at Oxford studying political philosophy. I am tired and more than a little homesick when I arrive in the capital of France late on a Sunday evening armed with letters of recommendation, a passable command of French, and a determination to get a carte de lecteur for the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF).

Paris is bewildering for a single traveler without fluent French. No one at the archives speaks English, and more than once, I am certain I am only managing to bumble my way into the BNF’s various reading rooms by judicious application of a deer-in-theheadlights Help me! look that transcends language. By Wednesday, I am exhausted, and I decide to spend my day outside. On a whim, I think that Père Lachaise might be a nice way to while away an hour.

It is a cool, sunny August afternoon. While Paris is notorious for the teeming hordes of

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tourists that lay siege to its sights, when I step out of the metro station onto the Boulevard de Ménilmontant, only the understated bustle of a small city street greets me. Relieved to escape the usual press of people, I slip through a small side entrance to the cemetery.

It is like stepping into another world: at first, I keep to the main thoroughfares, but there are many graves beyond these carefully planned lanes. They are packed so tightly together that sometimes only thin strips of earth six or seven inches wide separate one monument from another. I pick my way among them with the sense of an explorer encountering some long-forgotten city.

Weeping angels, stately soldiers, and ornate crosses loom overhead. I pause in front of particularly interesting monuments to read the inscriptions, including those of a twentythree year old aviator killed in the French air service and an abolitionist “liberateur des esclaves” who has since been transferred to the more prestigious Pantheon. Père Lachaise reads a bit like a Who’s Who of Parisian history. Everybody is somebody,

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even if some people are better known than others. For most, their epitaphs are the last word on their lives: posterity narrowed down to a couple brief lines accompanied by a birth and death date.

I finally find my way to the main entrance to the cemetery, where to my delight there is a map of the entire place with famous gravesites carefully marked out. I snap a photo of the map, whip out a notebook, and scribble down the locations of several people I’d like to track down. What follows bears striking resemblance to a prolonged, leisurely scavenger hunt. Some graves are easier to locate than others. Chopin’s grave is decked with Polish paraphernalia and surrounded by a steady stream of visitors.

At Oscar Wilde’s monolithic tomb, visitors have scribbled graffiti notes on the sides and left lipstick prints on the gray stone. One enterprising fan has even gone so far as to color the relief figure’s lips red. Héloïse and Abelard, the famous star-crossed lovers, have an entire pavilion to themselves carved entirely of stone. Other sites seem to have faded into the Parisian past. I am alone in photo on previous page by Katchoo @ Flickr

front of revolutionary painter Jacques Louis David’s impressive monument, as well as composer Rossini’s tall, narrow sepulchre.

And then there are the graves that I, try as I might, cannot locate: the painters Pissaro and Modigliani, and famed financier James de Rothschild.

It is an interesting paradox that some of the most famous people of their time might be lost amidst the masses here in Père Lachaise.

When every gravesite has an expensive, magnificent monument, it is entirely possible for some to be swallowed up in the tightly packed rows of names. Père Lachaise is one of the most celebrated cemeteries in the world, and yet even interment here cannot ensure one’s posterity.

between the cracks of the historical record.

Pleasure quickly turns to frustration when I comb the section where he is supposed to be interred without success. I retrace my steps and peer more closely at my map, to no avail.

I have just given up when a pair of French girls stops me, asking the way to a particular avenue. They hold out their official map for me to show the way, and as I point out where we are, I notice Barras’s grave marked with a dot. With a feeling of sudden discovery, I hurry back to my search, until finally, nestled amidst overgrown foliage, there it is: an undistinguished flat stone so old the lettering has all but been effaced by the elements, surrounded by a rusted iron fence. I am perhaps disproportionately pleased with my sleuthing skills as I take a quick photo of myself in front of Barras’s

grave. Some others may have eluded me today, but I’ve ended with success.

The Cimetière du Père Lachaise is the City of the Dead, but it is also the city of memory, much like any library full of desiccated manuscripts and neatly numbered government files. Pausing there for even one afternoon leaves me as invigorated as any session in an archive. The names, epitaphs, and monuments of Père Lachaise are their own type of historical record: a quiet, restful one. As I walk out the wide front gates and back into the real world, I feel peaceful, almost as if I have slipped out of time during my hours in Père Lachaise. Perhaps the next time I am in Paris, I will return. I suspect that just as it is now, the cemetery will be timeless and still.

The last site I hunt down is that of Paul Barras, one of the corrupt, louche leaders of Directoire France, that slim period of time separating the Reign of Terror from Napoleon’s empire. Most people nowadays probably have no idea who Barras is, and I take a certain pleasure in searching for the gravesite of someone who has slipped photos clockwise from top left: by author, Aleksandr Zykov @ Flickr, extranoise @ Flickr, dbaron @ Flickr, Philippe Mibault @ Flickr, mayanais @ Flickr, mayanais @ Flickr, mostly.unoriginal @ Flickr

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memoir

Darwin, Australia

Time Capsule

by Brendan Huang

A

n old saying goes, “There are 1000 ways to die in Australia.”

My parents shook their heads when I told them that I would be traveling with a Duke study abroad program and living in damp sleeping bags with blood-sucking mosquitoes for a month—something they had hoped that, as a New York City resident, I would never have to do. However, resigned to the fact that they couldn’t convince me otherwise, my parents spent the nights leading up to my trip lecturing me about everything they had read and heard about the Outback.

Of all the things that we talked about, the only talk that I remember in full detail was the one about Australia’s Asian community.

“Take note of the population,” said my father. “Their lifestyle resembles the way that your mother and I lived when we came to America from Taiwan thirty years ago.”

It was a cryptic statement that occupied my thoughts on the long plane ride.

Our class stayed in Darwin, the capital of Northern Territory, for most of the trip. Because of its proximity to the Asian continent, Darwin is a major destination for Asian migrants—an opportunity for a better life and possibly some extra money to send

home. On our second night there, we went on an excursion to Darwin’s Mindil night

market. As we strolled down the boardwalk, eyeing the eclectic foods that were offered by the dozens of food stands, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of yearning—not for New York, but for Taiwan, my motherland.

Like Mindil, Taiwan’s night markets are special because of their authentic, regional treats and loud, rambunctious music. Merchants line the streets begging for someone to buy their wares. Both night markets have vendors who slyly inch up their prices in hopes of making a larger profit when they see a tourist group pass by—it is a little game that both buyer and seller play and usually results in the vendors begrudgingly selling their wares at lower prices. In contrast to the stinginess of souvenir shops, food vendors at both night

markets gladly serve you cheap food so unhealthy that you will have a stomachache until the next morning. These vendors also play their own game: they offer samples, small enough that you remain hungry, but so tasty that you will buy the whole meal— trickiness indeed. Nonetheless, one can only imagine the amount of nostalgia Darwin’s Asian immigrants feel as they buy and eat dishes that originate from their homelands.

I walked through the night market in Mindil, looking for signs of Taiwanese delicacies when I heard a cook yell at me, “What would you like to eat?” The man, who introduced himself as Mark, owned one of the two ramen booths. I will never know how he discerned my Taiwanese heritage through the combination of his thick glasses and the smoke that emanated from the pot of noodles. Mark and I struck a conversation that lasted until he closed shop late at eleven. He was a computer programmer during the week and had opened up a noodle stand several months ago to earn some money. His parents in Taiwan had recommended that he earn tips waiting tables like his other 25-35-year-old Asian friends do in Darwin. However, he decided to take the risk and open his own

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bottom left banner by Lauren Marchese Digital Design @ Flickr

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“Going to Australia was

analogous to opening up a time capsule into my parents’ lives.”

business selling noodles to tourists. When I met him, Mark made double his salary as a computer programmer and seemed as happy as he could be.

The talk with Mark opened my eyes to opportunities outside of the prehealth track that I was so used to. Both of my parents did not have very many opportunities to find their dream jobs in Taiwan. Their only hope was to travel out of their country into a new world. Upon arriving in the United States, my parents found that the rules had changed and that they had to start from the bottom of the social ladder again. Though my parents did not end up with their original dream jobs, in the end, they believe they were happier going through their experiences and following their instincts. They encouraged me to pursue the medicine because it is a stable field, but though I am largely set on a pre-health track, sometimes, I can not help but think, “What if?”

Later in the week, I encountered a young Asian male on his bike. He wore a

white button down shirt and black pants, like other workers at many Chinese takeout locations. In his haste, he forgot to completely close his backpack, and the contents fell to the ground. “Hey, mate!

You dropped your stuff!” I yelled at the speeding bike. Thankfully, he heard me and returned to the intersection to gather his belongings. Interestingly enough, the decal on the bicycle had the Domino’s

in gas stations like Shell and Mobile were the only jobs that would take foreign immigrants because our English was so terrible.” Mark, the busboy, and my parents spent their first few years in a new country needing several jobs to get by. Because of the eventual successes of my parents, I never needed even one. My only job was to study for classes and leave the money problems to my parents.

In the end, I left Australia alive and well. However, the experience definitely changed the way that I interact with my parents.

Until my Australia study abroad experience, I had never truly appreciated what my parents had done for me.

I did not know the sacrifices they had to make, leaving family and close friends in order to achieve a better life. Australia was truly a time capsule, as I was able to see so many things that reminded me of my family’s past struggles. Australia taught me to make the absolute best of every opportunity. If all else fails, blaze your own path and make your own ending.

“There were people who came to Australia and were not prosperous. It made me feel like I was the lucky one.”

top photo by pelican @ Flickr all other photos by author

pizza icon. Forget about waiting tables— this person was a driver for an American company, a tale of East meets West similar to the one my parents experienced many years ago.

“Mark and that busboy were us twenty years ago,” exclaimed my parents when I told them about my encounter in Darwin.

“We had to leave home because our parents could only support us so much. Working

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memoir

Nepal

NEVER ENDING PEACE&& LOVE

by Cassie Yuan

I

t started to rain as our van wound down the southern branch of Annapurna.

The storm came every afternoon around two when we were trekking in the mountains.

This meant muddy rainforest, leeches, and wet clothes that wouldn’t dry for a week.

But now it was over. With every piece of my clothing wet nearly the entire time, we had climbed up to 12000 feet and come back down again. Our plan was to stay in Pokhara for one night and then take a shuttle flight to spend another two days in Kathmandu.

Sunset in Pokhara was as light as a leaf on Lake Fewa. On our way the guide compared it to Lake Baikal and Lake Victoria, but Fewa is Fewa—it can be as wide as one’s imagination, as peaceful as the clouds, and as alert as the Buddha’s eyes. All the boats had come back from a day’s business and were docked by the shore. The Annapurna range of the Himalayas sat calmly at the far back as the yellow, red, blue, and orange boats scattered themselves along the water. Had it been a day in spring or fall, we might have been able to see Machapuchare, the “Fish Tail” mountain, reflected onto the edge of the water; however, clouds of the monsoon season covered the crown of the peak and only allowed us to see below its waist.

The night we spent in Pokhara turned out to be a “thanks-giving night.” To thank our porters, who had each climbed with forty pounds of our gear and belongings, and our guide, who had taken care of more than a hundred leeches on our bodies, we picked a restaurant by the Lake with live music and dancing. Nepali people like to dance, and

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Overlooking the Kathmandu Valley from Swayabhunath.

Nepali dances all have stories behind them.

One of the dances we watched depicted a fisherman and his wife going out on sunny day and bringing back a full load of fish. The night went by slowly as our glasses emptied.

At midnight it started to drizzle again, but the rainfall was light and graceful, echoed by the lulling beats of drums.

The next morning we waved our farewell to the mountains as we embarked on our 25-minute f light back to the capital.

Trekking and paragliding had brought us face to face with the mountains, and now, we headed for one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

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Though it rains often in the monsoon season, the dust and smoke in Kathmandu never dissipates. Whenever we rode in the van, we were trapped between rolling down the window for some fresh air and keeping it up so that we could breathe without inhaling dust. Motorcycles, pedestrians, vehicles, and monkeys competed for roads that fit less than half the traffic they already had. Except for the main street that went along the royal palace, we could be stuck in the middle of the traffic even though the destination was only blocks away.

Once we got out of the car, the weight of Kathmandu city fell on us as soon as the dust did. The pressure to get through the

all photos by author

“Unzipping all the memory and beauty of Nepal after I left brought the most painful nostalgia.” crowd certainly added to the heaviness, but it was mainly the history and religion that made Kathmandu thick. Our first stop was Swayambhunath. Unsurprisingly, it is also called the Monkey Temple since there are often almost as many monkeys as there are worshippers at the site. We were told not to look straight into a monkey’s eyes, as eye contact with a monkey could stimulate anger or interest that could make it aggressive. Strands of prayer flags hung from the top of the stupa (a domelike structure containing Buddhist relics, usually a place of meditation for Buddhist monks) to the very low ground.1 Only then did we realize that we were on top of the Kathmandu Valley. Houses piled over each other before a ring of mountains. The dust was all gone at this height, and we could almost breathe mountain air again.

After Swayabhunath, we visited two other religious sites: one in the city of Patan about thirty minutes south of Kathmandu, in the Durbar Square complex. It was a festival day for followers of a Hindu deity; they filled the entire square from temple to temple, wall to wall. Holding our breaths before the exquisite carvings on each temple, we had to shoulder through the crowd in order to stay with one another. After circling the square and taking pictures of some of the temples, we headed for our next stop, the largest spherical stupa in Nepal: Boudhanath.

Inside, the mantras were written from right to left, and worshippers spun the prayer wheels clockwise as they said the prayer to the Buddha. All stupas have prayer wheels at the bottom, and this one rumbled smoothly when we stroked it as we circled around the stupa clockwise. Again and again, we heard the mantra “om mani padme hum.”

The Buddha’s Eye and Swayabhunath, the first stupa we visited.

As the sun was about to duck under the horizon, we reentered downtown Kathmandu. The night ended with the most exhausting, yet adventurous, souvenir shopping and some more Nepali food. We were able to find way more singing bowls, bracelets, and other local merchandises than what our backpacks could carry. When I arrived back home in the States and unzipped up my bag, bulging with all my purchases, I was hit with a painful nostalgia of all the memory and beauty of Nepal. Nepal has stamped my soul with its powerful contrast between the thin air in the mountains and dense wind in the city, material poverty and spiritual wealth, tumult and peace. Bye for now and see you later.

1. ”Stupa.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Nov. 2013. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.

Our trekking trip was inspired by the book, Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer. In the book, he documents one of the most tragic summit attempts on the Everest.

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Edinburgh, United Kingdom

we’ll alw ays have

Edinburgh

by Victoria Scott

A

n Edinburgh sunset is magical. After climbing to the very top of Arthur’s Seat, I watched as the fading light hit the famous Edinburgh Castle, the southern shores of the Firth of Forth, and the urban areas of Scotland’s capital city. The combination of breathtaking colors and the warm summer evening was so peaceful that I could’ve lingered for hours. The most rewarding part, though, wasn’t the view. It wasn’t the workout I got from climbing up a hill that seemed more like a mountain with its steep paths.

It wasn’t even the company of my four friends from Duke’s summer program in Oxford. It was the fact that for the first time in my life, I was somewhere because I’d spontaneously chosen to go there. It was that simple.

I don’t like traveling. I hate the hurried atmosphere of airports, the way they make me feel rushed even if I have a sevenhour layover. I hate how dirty airplanes seem, and the fact that, regardless of what statistics promise, I never feel truly safe so far off the ground. I hate the confusion of being in a foreign country, so removed from the familiar routine and comforts of life back home. So, if someone told me when I was eighteen that I would eventually study abroad, I would have laughed at them. Unlike almost every other doe-eyed freshman, so easily sold on the idea that foreign travels would round out the “college experience,” I avoided it like the plague. Having traveled a great deal with my family when I was younger, the stress of running through airports 13

and dealing with language barriers lost their appeal long ago in my eyes, but it was more than that. I loved Duke, and I didn’t want to sacrifice a semester (12.5% of my Duke experience!) for the sake of spending an extended period of time in a foreign country. In fact, if I hadn’t added a second major halfway into my junior year, I probably would have been able to avoid studying abroad altogether.

Fast-forward to the summer before my senior year, when I found myself on a bumpy, overwhelmingly hot bus to Oxford, wondering whether my newfound psychology major was really worth it. It didn’t help when I discovered that I was one of only three seniors out of almost fifty students. I felt completely out of place, trying

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and failing to contribute to conversations that largely revolved around future study abroad plans and goals for the next three years at Duke. Luckily, on my second day there, our group spent the morning walking around the quintessential college town of Oxford (home to thirty-eight different colleges), and I was drawn into the historical and academic atmosphere of the town. The highlight of my day, though, was attempting to punt down a river—in other words, propelling a boat with a giant stick, a British take on the gondola—while snacking on strawberries and whipped cream. I was placed in a boat with three people I knew only from our first-day introductions, but we quickly hit it off after we discovered our shared tastes in music and books. Over the course of

the following week, I began exploring the town’s numerous afternoon tea offerings, wandering through the immaculate gardens of New College and even stocking up on groceries (which largely consisted of popcorn and Pimm’s liqueur). I started to embrace Oxford as a temporary home.

More importantly, I soon learned a vital key to my study abroad experience: be spontaneous.

I’m not spontaneous. Like many Duke students, my whole life is planned on my iCal, down to fifteen-minute increments.

Unlike most Duke students, this obsessive bottom photo by Miss Mass @ Flickr all other photos by author

habit of scheduling every second of every day means that I handle change very poorly. It also means that I never do things on a whim, never go on adventures without planning ahead and outlining everything, and especially never travel to foreign countries, sleep in dirty apartments, and wander around cities at night without a single care in the world. Yet I found myself doing just that halfway through my time in Oxford, during my trip to Edinburgh.

I started small though. Pub culture is big at Oxford, so if someone randomly suggested going to a pub like The King’s Arms or

Four Candles for a pint, I joined them.

Then, I expanded my adventures to halfday explorations of Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath. The more spontaneous I was, the more I stumbled upon experiences that I would have otherwise passed by. It was my first time traveling without family, and I soon realized that nobody was planning my day for me. If I wanted to wander around the Stratford Butterfly Farm, rather than explore Shakespeare’s birthplace like everyone else, nobody was stopping me.

That realization was both liberating and intimidating, and it was long overdue.

we’ll always have edinburgh

14

...every opportunity deserves at least one chance...

As a senior spending most of my time with sophomores and juniors, I developed friendships with people I would likely never have met on Duke’s campus, and it was one of my new friends who suggested a trip to Edinburgh. Before coming to Oxford, my answer would have been a resounding, “No.” The conversation began innocently enough.

“Do you think a weekend in Scotland would be worth it?” “Sure, it’s in the UK and flights aren’t that expensive. They use pounds, so you wouldn’t have to worry about exchanging money.” “Would you want to go?” It never even crossed my mind that somebody would think to invite me on a random trip to another country. Suddenly, my head was buzzing with any and every potentially problematic scenario. Where would we stay?

Is it safe? Should I spend so much money on just one weekend? What if I lose my passport?

Who cares about Scotland anyway? I took a breath, using that pause to reflect on the first half of the program. I remembered the overwhelming sense of freedom I felt every time I’d opened myself to new experiences.

And I agreed to go.

I won’t lie—I spent the whole flight to Edinburgh wondering if I made a mistake.

Thinking about all of the supplementary

reading I could be doing, imagining the contained, familiar “adventures” the other Oxford students were having back in town. But when I got my first glimpse of Edinburgh’s famous castle, perched on a hilltop overlooking a city that seamlessly blended old and new architecture, I realized that I made the right choice. I decided then and there to be open to everything in my short time in Scotland’s capital.

I climbed to the top of a hill to see the entire city and toured Edinburgh’s landmark castle, the home of Scottish royals since the 1300s. I went on a whisky tour, where I gained valuable knowledge about the differences between scotch and its American counterpart, bourbon. I even sprinted through the Scottish National Gallery to see famous religious paintings like Botticelli’s “The Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child,” ignoring a grumpy security guard’s warnings that the building was about to close. In a small French bistro in the middle of the city, I discovered London Fog, an overwhelmingly delicious combination of Earl Grey tea, vanilla syrup and hot milk. I toured the Camera, a museum that blended optical illusions with 360º views of Edinburgh. Best of all,

as soon as I got back to Oxford, I took one of the most rewarding showers of my life, scrubbing off almost two days’ (and one long hike’s) worth of grime. All of this happened because I allowed myself to be open to experiences without having to obsessively plan for them.

I don’t mean to suggest that when I settled back into my life at Duke, I became an adrenaline junkie or jumped at every opportunity that presented itself, simply on principle. My iCal is still just as colorful, and my Saturdays are still just as quiet (just the way I like them). However, I have noticed my newfound willingness to try new things, however small or seemingly unimportant they may be. Whether it’s a new restaurant or an off-campus adventure, I’ve realized that every opportunity deserves at least one chance. While my study abroad experience was born out of necessity more than a desire to welcome new experiences, it still broadened my idea of the “right” way to live. Even more than valuable than my photographs and stories from my time at Oxford was the newfound outlook on life that it afforded me.

memoir

Accra, Ghana

Narratives of Redemption

by Chris Lee

T

hey say that you can hear whispers upon the shores of Elmina. Amid the crashing sounds of the waves, the sea cries its laments for a shackled people, long ago taken captive to foreign lands. Looming over the waters, a massive slave castle stands as a lonely testament to the tragedy, its hollow chambers still preserving the faded echoes of a screaming past.

I try listening as we step inside the walls of the fortress, but these whispers do not reach me. The shouts of bustling markets and busy streets from the city outside are still ringing through my ears. I try to shut them out, to no avail. Our tour guide helps me out by recounting a story, a memory, buried deep within his conscience.

He digs it out, softly and slowly.

In 1471, the first European missionaries landed their ships upon the friendly sands of present-day Ghana—one evangelist wrote earnestly of his intent to spread the Word of all photos by author

God, to “save the peoples’ souls.” Just thirty years later, slave ships departed from these same hallowed shores. One merchant then justified his enslavement of West Africans by remarking, “These people have no souls.”

His voice quivering, our tour guide breathes out quietly, “The Lord granted us with souls, and thirty years later, He stripped them away.”

Walking out of the slave castle, I immerse myself back into the crowded chaos of the city, feeling indignant and guilty. Yet surrounding me everywhere in the streets are countless signs that seem to proclaim a different narrative: “Our Lord Is Good,” declares one banner above a street shop.

Another reads: “He Will Never Fail, Bakery.”

Still another: “Jesus Is My Redeemer, Cold Store.” I find myself bewildered by the dichotomy I see: How could a country so oppressed by the hypocrisy of Christianity in the past still embrace such a widespread belief in the goodness of God?

Over the six weeks that I stayed in the capital city of Accra through Duke’s study abroad program at the University of Ghana, I struggled with that question, and soon it became the subject of my own independent field research project. During the weekdays, I visited local street shops that displayed Christian language, rode in taxis and trotro buses covered with Bible verses, sat in on classrooms at local missionary-founded schools, attended nightly prayer meetings and Sunday worship services at a local church, and simply talked with my host family and friends over meals and chores.

Through participant-observation, I wanted to find out more about the discourse of Christianity, about how people in Accra talked about God in their daily lives and what religion meant to them as they constructed their personal narratives.

Among my most precious memories in Ghana were the times I spent with my host brother Samson. For the first few days, there seemed to be some distance in our narratives of redemption

16

relationship; since both of us had reserved personalities, I found it hard to keep up a conversation with him for an extended amount of time. But eventually, longer talks came more naturally as we spent afternoons doing chores, with him teaching me how to hand-wash clothes and how to cook banku and jollof rice, two of my favorite meals. About two weeks into my stay, Samson told me about his love for playing the drum, and from that day on, time seemed to fly past us as we jammed together, with him showing off his rhythmic dexterity and me struggling to keep a simple beat.

Two of my most helpful informants, the pastor of my church and my homestay uncle who happened to be a missionary, both mentioned an inherent “Godconsciousness” in Ghanaian culture: “We all believe some deity to be out there, even

mandated a Western-style dress code. Even today, he feels pressure in church to identify himself with his Western name, rather than the name his parents gave him. “Ghanaians still want to be accepted by the West,” he told me, and Christianity is one way they can accomplish this. From this stems a dissonance that has long plagued the Ghanaian consciousness, between the Christianity that sought to “save souls” and the Christianity that endorsed slavery and Western dominance.

How could a country so oppressed by the hypocrisy of Christianity in the past still embrace such a widespread belief in the goodness of God?

Samson and I often talked at night on the porch of our house, and occasionally we shared our dreams in life. “If God is willing,” he once admitted, “I would like to start a business. But only God knows.” After hearing him speak in this manner, I was surprised to find later that Samson did not in fact attend church.

Indeed, such discourse was common in Accra—a person did not necessarily have to consider him or herself “Christian” to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of God. 17

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though some may not know exactly which god they are talking about.” When the Europeans arrived with Christianity, West Africans embraced the Gospel because it coincided with the picture of a powerful and loving God that they already had.

It came at a cost, however. Christianity and the West were inseparable at the time, and to adopt one was to adopt the other. One Ghanaian schoolteacher shared with me how this tension continued for decades after the country’s independence from Britain in 1957. As a child, his church prohibited the use of traditional Ghanaian drums during worship, sang hymns only in English, and fall 2013

However, even within the short time that I stayed in Accra, I could see emerging in the stories of my informants a new counternarrative, seeking to separate the genuine Christian faith from mere Western envy.

Their hopeful words conveyed the message that Ghana no longer needs to depend on the West in narrating the tale of its own redemption, for it has now fully adopted the empowering story of the Gospel uniquely for itself. At my church, I saw the congregation taking pride in its own style of worship, filled with dancing and movement, with songs sung in Twi and Ewe and other native Ghanaian languages, with drums played to African beats, with clothing unique to local regions of the country. As my pastor

noted: “When we sing the English hymns, we go slow, but whenever we sing in our local languages, that’s when you can tell we are African, when there is life.” Indeed, just as the Christian Gospel declares salvation from one’s old life of guilt and sin, so too does Ghana’s own expression of worship proclaim a long-awaited vindication from the shackles of Western influence through the power of a God who reconciles and transcends the wounds of racial disparity.

When the movement to end the slave trade emerged in Ghana, the churches were the ones behind it. While there were several hypocritical Christians at the time, there were also many Christians who genuinely shared the love of God. “Instead of all the negatives, why don’t we focus on the positives?” my host uncle once asked. Today, as Christianity has started to decline in Europe, more and more Ghanaian missionaries are being sent to bring redemption to the souls of the very nations who once declared Africans to “have no souls.” The past contradictory influence of Christianity as a vehicle for both salvation and enslavement is now no

more, for just as the Gospel in the Bible promises a new life with an identity in Christ, so, too, does the Gospel narrative in Ghana reflect the nation’s redeemed identity as a born-again and empowered people.

In hearing the Ghanaians around me construct their personal narratives, I could see that the Gospel is more than just a good story to them. Its message grants validation to those who were once deemed outcasts. It casts off the old grave clothes, erases the dissonance long imposed by the hypocrisy of slavery, and instead crowns the individual with a

new identity, a counter-narrative, which blesses the nation with a rewritten story.

Maybe the whispers of sorrow at the slave castle remained whispers for a reason. After all, had I not just come from the streets of today that declared loud and clear, “The Lord is Good”? I came to Ghana digging for a buried past and instead found a living, flourishing present. There are always stories being told; imagine, then, if we only stopped and listened to them.

narratives of redemption

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memoir

A Toilet Perspective

Raigad District, India

for

empowerment

by Suhani Jalota

“T

oilets? Why would we use them when we have so much free space to do it outside?!”

“We can’t eat, cook, and defecate in the same house!”

“We [women] are not scared of defecating outside, nor are our children.”

These were some of the responses I received on my first day in Shedashi village, located in the Raigad district of India. At first, my DukeEngage independent project on sanitation didn’t appeal to the village, so the first question I had to ask was, “Why?” Why were there were no toilets in this village? How was it that even with education and money (all the children went to school and their parents were well off from selling produce), the entire village practiced open defecation?

As an Indian resident and citizen, I thought I was well prepared culturally with a comprehensive understanding of all the barriers to sanitation, but this experience in a tribal village made me less confident of the claim. There were so many queries on my mind, all questioning my knowledge about my own country. How could sanitation 19

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norms be so different in a village only three hours from Mumbai?

The Thakurs, the indigenous community of Shedashi village, has lived in the forests for centuries and are not even used to living in concrete houses or eating food from the market. I realized that it would be a challenge to convince people who saw houses as a novel concept to construct and use toilets. My role in this project was to convince those who had for centuries lived without toilets to acknowledge the

groups to the nearby forest area or the riverside to defecate. They would either use the river water to cleanse themselves or carry water from home. No one mentioned anything about soap, though before and after meals they do wash their hands with detergent. But if the women were unwilling to change, how could I work with them to introduce toilets into their homes?

As the days progressed, I began to work with the women in the village, who the true decision makers at home. They woke up early in the morning and walked in

During my time there, I spoke to people in different age groups. Sometimes I would go near the school where I would find children who could only speak a little Hindi (my mother tongue) and from whom I learned a lot of Marathi (the local language). I would attempt to talk to them about their work and studies, which they would conveniently avoid, changing the topic to what I was doing there and where I came from. All the children in the village go to school and most of the teenage group live in ashrams (spiritual hermitages) or boarding schools outside the village. Yet, even when the children come back for vacation or after finishing school, they don’t pester their parents to build toilets.

In fact, the village has two nurses who work in cities and are well off, yet when they come home, they do not mind openly

fall 2013

all photos by author

How was it that even with education and money, the entire village practiced open defecation? idea of toilets and spur them into actually constructing toilets.

defecating. Sometimes I would drop in on some houses to talk to the old ladies and try to understand the kind of lives they led in their youth, where they got their water from, and if they had difficulty in defecating. I held village meetings, sometimes divided by sex and sometimes all together, to talk about sanitation, but the attendance was generally never very high.

It was a monumental task to gather the villagers together, as they worked every day of the week and were busy all the time.

They even worked on Sundays and only took leave from work for major festivals and marriage celebrations. Calling the people for a short meeting normally took many reminders. With the help of a few others I would go around the village twice on the day of the meeting to call people.

Even then, only a few would come. The villagers told me stories about people who had tried to work in the village earlier but ended up crying in front of them, as they couldn’t get the people together to hold a meeting. They laughed about it as I silently remembered the times and the struggles I faced to get the people to sit in a room together. The one exception was the time they came to Mumbai as an exposure visit to see toilets there —then, they were ready half an hour early.

The Mumbai trip was designed so that the people from the village could see how even slum residents, living in much worse hygienic conditions than they were, had toilets. The Thakurs began thinking that it was a disgrace that even though they

were better off than these people in terms of income and house cleanliness, they openly defecated. Most of the women from Shedashi were excited when the slum women shared their personal stories related to toilets, telling them how it was a relief to have a toilet in their house. On their return to the village, these women attended every meeting I held and were very enthusiastic about the project. Now, they all wanted a toilet in their home.

of how the government functions at the ground level, the basic problems at the grassroots level in rural India, and ways to approach new communities by empowering the people. Hopefully, the community will sustain their efforts and will be one hundred percent opendefecation-free by the end of next year.

The next step was forming a sanitation committee and making trips to the local government office, the supplier of the funds, and technical help needed to build toilets. The sanitation committee, consisting of people from the village, demanded toilets and voiced their opinions to the government officials. They are still doing follow-ups with the government even after my direct involvement was over. Before the project, the government failed to meet the demands of the Thakurs, who did not think they needed to ask for their rights. With just a little push, both the government and the Thakurs responded well (even if it took some time) and they are now again working independently, without any external help.

The true goal of my project was empowerment and sustainability, and it is exciting that the people of the village will continue to progress.

This experience has helped me to understand some of the nuances perspective for empowerment

20

d

memoir

Turkey

truths about

Turkish Delight

by Ukyoung Chang

“What would you like best to eat?”

“Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty,” said Edmund. The Queen let another drop fall from her bottle on to the snow, and instantly there appeared a round box, tied with green silk ribbon, which, when opened, turned out to contain several pounds of the best Turkish Delight. Each piece was sweet and light to the very centre and Edmund had never tasted anything more delicious...1

A

ny reader of C. S. Lewis’ book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, would wonder what exactly Turkish Delight is and if it actually tastes as Edmund describes. With this description in my mind on my trip to Turkey, one of the things I was looking forward to the most was eating Turkish Delight.

I will be honest with you, dear reader: it was not what I expected.

It was just a cube of sugar jelly. No enchantment, no “Oh, my God, I’m going to

Where exactly do those expectations come from? My expectations of Turkish Delight came from C.S. Lewis’s famous book. My other expectations about Turkey were from fleeting mentions of Turkey in popular culture, sometimes clumped into the category of “the Middle East.”

What we expect to see when visiting a foreign country is built upon how our media and other narratives have portrayed it.

It was just a cube of sugar jelly. No enchantment, no “Oh, my God, I’m going to betray my siblings over this” heavenliness.

The Spice Market or any dessert stores in Turkey that I meandered into often had pyramids of varying heights made out of Turkish Delight. Turkish Delight displays vibrant colors depending on its f lavor, ranging from pistachio green to rose red. The ones sprinkled with coconut powder reminded me of the never-ending snow from the White Witch’s curse; those made out of pomegranate made me want to check if they were indeed pomegranate, not fiery rubies. Surely Turkish Delight seduces people first with its mesmerizing view and then with its taste, I thought in anticipation. As soon as I got the chance, I bought a box of assorted Turkish Delight and eagerly plunged them into my mouth, expecting paradise to unroll on my taste buds.

21

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betray my siblings over this” heavenliness.

As I experimented with more desserts over the course of my stay, I found so many others worthier of being named Turkish Delight—no, Turkish Paradise, or even Turkish Orgasm in Your Palate—things like baklava, milk pudding, angel’s hair desserts, sütlaç (rice pudding). Exactly why this specific jelly, of all things, had to be named Turkish Delight, I don’t know.

One of the two courses in the Duke Turkey program was “Gender, Space,

But my complaint over how unspectacular I found Turkish Delight to be is not my main point. My central purpose is to talk about reality versus expectations and tracing the expectations to their origins. When we travel, there is at least an inkling of what we expect to see and do in the countries we are visiting. fall 2013

top photo by Titine @ Flickr photos by author unless otherwise cited

and Islam,” which taught us about the concept of Orientalism, which is defined

by Edward Said as “prejudiced Western interpretation of the East both in academic and artistic ways.”2 Coincidentally, there was an exhibition titled 1001 Faces of Orientalism held in a nearby museum that included architecture, texts and stories, portraits, paintings, videos, showing how Orientalism has percolated so many aspects of narratives and media regarding Turkey since as early as three centuries ago. The Occident, or the East, served as a venue for the West to explore Western taboos, fantasies, and fetishes. A prime example would be the harem: the word “harem” literally means sanctuary and consists of the private quarters of a family and the women of the family. The Imperial harem was a place of education ranging from literature to etiquette and family politics.3 However, its meaning is distorted in Western notions of Turkey. Inaccessible to the Western male audience, which further fueled fantasies, the harem became a hypersexual place of orgiastic sex. The Western rendition of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire was much more grandiose and colorful than reality. European artists and scholars often depicted exaggerated and inaccurate settings in Turkey: harem women sensually dressed in see-through,

almost fantastical garments, adorned with colorful ornaments with come-hither eyes.

Despite the fact that Sultanate was abolished and with it the imperial harem, tourists nevertheless still expect to see some fragments of the past—or rather, their perception of it. The tourist industry sells these expectations with belly-dancing

mentioned in history textbooks about World War I and II. In a way, I was starting out as a blank slate. Now that I look back at both experiences, as a blank slate for the Balkans and as a somewhat filled in canvas for Turkey, they were both similar in a way: I ended up learning. In both the Balkans and Turkey, I absorbed the reality before my eyes and filled in the blank slate and corrected the canvas of the countries: different architectural styles, gestures, cuisine, people, and the narratives that the countries themselves have woven.

When we travel, there is at least an inkling of what we expect to see and do in the countries we are visiting. Where exactly do these expectations come from? performances (the tourism industry actually introduced belly dancing to Turkish culture) and Sultan and courtesan outfits. At the Grand Bazaar, souvenirs embody such expectations as goods that seem “Turkish.” I noticed the stark difference between the tourist shops and local ones while I was seeking out my natural habitat: sweet shops. The sweet shops in the Grand Bazaar display Turkish Delight extensively with packages that have “exotic” images of Turkey, like silhouettes of inaccurate architectural styles of mosques and other curvy and floral decoration to emphasize the exotic ambience. The local sweet shops only have a small section of Turkish Delight, or none at all, and have more variety of desserts that are certainly not contained in illustratively exotic packaging.

Then what difference does it make if you don’t have expectations? Before going to Turkey, I traveled through the Balkan Peninsula for sixteen days, visiting Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro. Due to my ignorance, I have not had much exposure to the narratives and history surrounding the Balkan region other than the ones

top middle photo by avlxyz @ Flickr top right photo by stu_spivack @ Flickr

We all have expectations to some degree. Not all expectations are necessarily bad—half of the fun of traveling is getting to see what you expected. However, the other half is realizing that your expectations were misled, and you are then enlightened by how things actually are. The harm of expectations comes when they are are based on fabricated fantasies that generalize and stereotype cultures. Filling the to-do list with such expectations not only restricts your opportunities to break your own bubble and learn, but also marginalizes the country’s culture. All in all, what I want to convey is this: the next time you travel to other countries, before you eat the “signature dish” of that culture, before you engage in that “Must Do This When You’re in This Country” activity, pause and think, “Why do I feel like I have to do this?” Who knows—maybe you’ll find something entirely different in that expectation, and your traveling experience will be all the better because of it.

1. Lewis, C. S., and Pauline Baynes. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Print.

2. Said, Edward W. “Orientalism reconsidered.”

Cultural Critique 1 (1985): 89-107.

3. Pierce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

truths about turkish delight

22

op-ed

Dublin, Ireland

R

by Gayle Powell

Ireland ’s Educational Failings

olling green hills dotted with grazing cattle, dark blue waters crashing against coastal cliffs, friendly faces conversing over pints of perfectly brewed beer: these are images typically linked with Ireland. Behind these peaceful images though, this nation is facing immense institutional challenges, especially with regards to its education system. This summer, I participated in DukeEngage in Dublin, a program focused on refugee and migrant rights and worked with an organization called Educate Together. Educate Together is an NGO that guarantees equality of access to education for all children regardless of their social, culture, or religious background.

While working with this incredible and progressive group, I learned that while many positive aspects of Ireland do hold true, there are also great problems plaguing the country’s educational establishments that are not so widely advertised.

Ireland is a country where virtually no private schools exist. Each school is a public school, funded largely by the state, but controlled by a patron body. In 1831, the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Lord Stanley, established the Irish Board of National Education under the Irish Education Act with the goal to unite children from many different denominations, as religious organizations are also heavily invested

in these schools. Stanley envisioned multi-denominational institutions where religious instruction occurred outside of the classroom.1 Initially, officials were instructed to look favorably on patronage applications from mixed religious backgrounds. However, over time, Catholic

and Protestant Churches challenged this approach. Religious institutions preferred to manage schools under their respective orders. The influence of the Catholic Church continued to expand into all realms of Irish life (including the education system), as the Church invested enormously in the creation and management of schools. Resultant policy changes placed increasing weight on the role of religion in formal education.

The Rules for National Schools issued

in 1965 gave explicit recognition to the denominational aspects of these schools.2 The 1971 Primary School Curriculum stated that separating religious and secular instruction would “only to throw the whole educational function out of focus,” and that “religious instruction is by far the most important” of the curriculum.3 Predictably, non-Catholic students faced increasing alienation within the state-funded public education system as the Church’s influence grew.

Ireland has recently experienced a period of exceptional population growth resulting from a combination of consistently high birth rates and unprecedented levels of immigration. Despite the changing demographic and an increasing number of non-Catholic students, the Catholic Church still acts as patron for more than 91% of primary schools in Ireland.

Conversely, multi-denominational schools account for fewer than 3% of the total.4 Today, roughly 10% of the school-going population does not have access to a patron body associated primarily with their religion or faith belief.5 Under the curriculum, the patron body takes responsibility for the development and implementation of any religious or ethical curriculum. However, thirty minutes of each school day are reserved for

required ethical or religious instruction.

Within denominational schools, parents have the right to withdraw children from these periods of religious instruction, but in most circumstances, no alternative exists. Children choosing to opt out of the patron’s religious curriculum can theoretically leave the classroom, but this rarely happens due to lack of supervision.6 The bottom line is that for non-Catholics, the educational playing field is most likely uneven.

Luckily, Ireland’s Constitution grants parents the right to choose any primary school for their children, allowing them to send their children to any school in the country regardless of geographic district. However, many regions only have one primary school, most often under the patronage of the Catholic Church. Schools also have enrollment policies and in areas of over-subscription, access to any school is not guaranteed. Today, developing metropolitan areas feature a wider range of schooling options; yet, multi-denominational schools only exist in nineteen counties out of twenty-six, and most of these schools are not accessible to the rural population. Compounding the issue, schools backed by religious patrons enjoy the constitutional right to grant enrollment priority to children of their particular faith under the Equal Status Act of 2000.7 This policy, colloquially known as the "Catholicfirst policy," often makes it nearly impossible for non-Catholic students to secure places in Catholic schools in rapidly growing areas where oversubscription activates enrollment policies. Inevitably, cities with oversubscription problems are where minority populations experiencing the most difficulty in securing enrollment live; ultimately, this can result in unintentional de facto religious and ethnic segregation. all photos by author

The native Irish are quick to defend the integrity of their school system. Many believe that the Catholic Church does not play too dominant a role and also have problems with the influx of immigrants into their country. Unfortunately, the reality is that the way education is provided in Ireland needs to change if the government wants to claim that education

is equally accessible for all and encouraging of diversity. More multi-denominational options must exist to meet the needs of Ireland’s rapidly changing demographic.

On the bright side, the Irish education system has undergone a drastic transformation in recent years. Albeit slowly, positive and necessary reform is occurring and so the ways in which the educational system is run are being reshaped. The government has agreed on the necessity for more multidenominational schooling options and the Catholic Church is also in support of this proposal. Dr. Diarmuid Martin, the current Archbishop of Dublin, has affirmed his belief in the necessity of reduction of Church influence in the school system publically on many occasions.8 Educate Together has been the leading advocate for these changes, propelling the argument for

equality of access to education forward on the government and the public’s agenda.

Now, Educate Together schools are the fastest growing network of schools in Ireland. Currently, there are sixty-eight Educate Together schools nationwide, and the demand for this type of educational model far exceeds the number of school places available. Fortunately though, the organization is working closely with the Irish government to expand so that hopefully one day soon all Irish parents will have legitimate school choice and non-Catholic students will have access to schools that celebrate the religious diversity of Ireland.

1. Stanley, E. G. “On the Formation of a Board of Commissioners for Education in Ireland.” Letter to His Grace the Duke of Leinster. Oct. 1831. MS. N.p.

2. “Preface.” Rules for National Schools under the Department of Education. Dublin, Stationery Office: n.p., 1965. N. pag.

3. “Part I.” Primary School Curriculum, Teachers Handbook. Dublin: Roinn Oideachais, 1971. 19.

4. Darmody, Merike, Emer Smyth, and Selina McCoy. School Sector Variation Among Primary Schools in Ireland. Rep. N.p.: Department of Children and Youth Affairs, 2012. Print.

5. “Department of Education and Skills.”

N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.education.ie/ en/>.

6. Hyland, Áine. “Challenges for the Irish Education System for the Next Generation and Beyond: The Issue of School Patronage.”

SEARCH (2006): n. pag. Print.

7. “Equal Status Act, 2000.” Irish Statue Book. Office of the Attorney General, Government of Ireland, n.d. Web. 8. Boland, Rosita. “Faith before fairness.”

Irish Times Weekend Review [Dublin, Ireland] 8 Sept. 2007: 1. Print.

ireland’s education

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article genre memoir

Spain

THE ALLURE OF THE CORRIDA DE TOROS

by Phyllis Duncan

I

can’t say why I developed this obsession to attend corridas de toros (bullfights) which led me to travel for twenty-four hours, to have a weekend of adventures and misadventures in Spain, and to love every minute of it.

The book Or I’ll Dress You in Mourning introduced me to the subject of toreros and the danger of bullfighting. The title came from the Spanish torero El Cordobés telling his sister, “Don’t cry, Angelita. Tonight I’ll buy you a house, or I’ll dress you in mourning.” After fifty years, I still remember the quote as well as the image of the illiterate boy dressed in rags slipping into the bull breeder’s pasture during the full moon, shaking a blanket at a bull and calling out, “Hey, toro!” Upon arriving in Spain, I learned that El Cordobés is still alive—not having been gored to death in the ring—and is now in his early 70’s.

While he was adored by the masses, due to his unorthodox and non-classical style, he wasn’t amongst the greatest toreros. Some even speculated that he was crazy when he was in the ring.

Upon arriving in Valencia disoriented and exhausted at 8:30 PM on a Friday, and walking outside the train station to face a dark, rainy, and cold night, it didn’t seem like a good idea to try to find my way to the hotel on foot. After a long wait at the wrong taxi stand and then a 45-minute wait in line at the right one in the cold and wet, mine was the next available taxi. As we twisted and turned through stopped traffic, and by closedoff streets, I became convinced that the taxi driver was quite literally taking me for a ride. Then he stopped at a street open only to pedestrians, pointed, and told me my hotel was that way. After apprehensively walking a couple of blocks, to my relief the small marquee of my hotel finally came into view.

The expression “bullfight” is a misnomer because neither the bull nor the torero actually fights.

bull. Finally, the torero stands facing the bull and places the sword between the withers as he charges. A good torero kills the bull with one thrust. However in the six bullfights I saw that weekend, the toreros were not that successful.

There is a national debate in Spain over whether killing the bull in this manner is animal cruelty. People say that the bulls used in bullfighting are better off than those raised simply for beef: they live more years, eat well, and roam in beautiful pastures. However, most of the younger generation with whom I talked to about bullfighting weren’t fans and thought it was cruel. On my way to the arena on Saturday, I had to walk through a group of about 100 demonstrators.

One region of Spain, Catalonia, has now banned bullfighting. There are some who say this has less to do with animal cruelty than politics.

I learned that bullfighting continues to be a popular sport in Spain with TV and magazine coverage, so I developed a strong desire to attend a corrida de toros before leaving the country. The closest opportunity to attend one was in Valencia. Valencia is 488 kilometers (303 miles) northeast of El Ejido, where I lived; however, the trip there involved going west by bus, then north by train, and finally east by train for a total of twelve hours traveling.

The expression “bullfight” is a misnomer because neither the bull nor the torero actually fights. The Spanish term “corrida de toros” translates into “running of the bulls.” A corrida de toros is conducted in three stages. First, the torero uses his cape to confront the bull in order to see how he reacts.

Then, lancers on horses lure the bull to charge the horses while they jab him in the neck. In the second stage, the torero places sharp barbed sticks in the bull’s shoulders. In the third stage, the torero uses his cape to perform a series of passes with the purpose of wearing down the

Nonetheless, there are valid arguments that bullfighting in Spain is an art form that is a part of the country’s history, traditions, and identity. Bullfighting today is similar to the way it was in 1729: the bull passes within inches of the body. It’s as if the torero is performing a ballet amazingly graceful and light on his feet. A torero’s braveness can’t be ignored. Some of the most famous toreros in history died from being gored, and it still happens in the ring today. As Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, “Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death…”

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top photo by Kevin Poh @ Flickr

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With three hundred years of history, pageantry, and tradition associated with bullfighting in Spain, the corrida has rituals and rules for what the bull has to do and what the torero is supposed to do. Watching the torero bring the bull in a close pass around his body is a beautiful thing to see. I admit that I was absolutely mesmerized. As Hemingway states, “The matador must dominate the bulls by knowledge and science. In the measure in which this domination is accomplished with grace will it be beautiful to watch.” In contrast to his view, though, I found watching the bull die not “beautiful to watch” but heart wrenching. I covered my eyes and usually shed a tear.

The corrida brought the most amusing incident of the weekend, when I met my cigar-smoking, wine-guzzling, calamarieating new friend. We were seatmates and bonded over the bullfight. He appeared as this large older man, who shuffled in smoking a cigar, taking half my seat, and blowing smoke my way every time he took

A torero (El Cordobés).

a puff. Fortunately, the couple sitting next to me left, giving me a little extra space.

Apparently, he took it as a gesture of friendliness when I asked him about which torero was performing first. He unwrapped a calamari sandwich and offered me half, which I declined. He and his two friends passed a wineskin back and forth, squirting wine into their mouths. He tried to get me to take some and after refusing vehemently several times, I finally gave in to letting him put “un poquito” in a paper cup. Next, he pulled out one calamari from his sandwich and practically forced it into my mouth before being convinced that I couldn’t eat seafood. Conversing was next to impossible between my Southern accented Spanish and his Valencian dialect, so we settled into sharing the

wine while he laughingly kept pouring “un poquito más’’ into my cup. He was fascinated that a lone American woman would attend a bullfight in his city.

The next morning, I left the train station just as I had arrived—in the dark, rain, and cold—to retrace my twelve-hour journey. I had seen six well-known toreros in Spain and had become an aficionada. The trip to Valencia wasn’t the end of my chasing the corrida de toros, however. There remained a mission to complete relating to El Cordobés, and the book that had stayed in my memory for so many years. There is a torero in Spain using the name El Cordobés who claims to be the (illegitimate) son of the original. To make the circle complete, I had to see him in the bullring. He appeared in a corrida close by, which I was lucky enough to attend. Never could I have imagined fifty-plus years ago that I would live in Spain, see a bullfighter with that name, and hear him shout, “Hey, toro,” in a bullring.

At this corrida, I sat in the second row where I could sense the pounding hooves of the charging bull, hear the call of the toreros, and see the blood running down the animal’s back. The beauty of the pageantry, the danger to the participants, and the artistic performance of the toreros make it an exciting spectacle to see. It makes my heart beat faster and stirs emotions when I think it. The allure of the corrida de toros is like the sirens’ song calling me back to Spain.

above photo by Alf Igel @ Flickr top photo by author

corrida de toros

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photo essay

Japan

UNREAL CITY

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by Caitlin Tutterow

A

t times, I felt like I entered the â&#x20AC;&#x153;unreal cityâ&#x20AC;? that T.S. Eliot mentions in The Waste Land. Lights, bullet trains, neon signs, cars driving on the left side of the road, and endless, endless blocks of office buildings, shops, restaurants, and people. Tokyo is an interesting mix of the height of technology with a deep acknowledgement of the past. Everyday, I walked past women dressed in kimonos carrying a parasol in one hand and talking on an iPhone in the other. Tokyo never ceased to amaze me in terms of the breadth of its eccentricities. As I traveled across Japan, I was met by a number of sights that I could only truly classify as Japanese.

all photos by author and Jamie Bando

unreal city

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ANTARC staff corner

E

very semester, Passport attempts to include articles about as many parts of the world as we can. We tell ourselves, “We need to have one from every continent— well, except for Antarctica…”

the 1950’s with Chile and Argentina.2 Most tourists travel to Antarctica by ship, but some choose to sightsee by air. In the face of rising tourism, however, environmentalists are quick to voice their concerns: Antarctica

But why neglect Antarctica? Even though there isn’t a residential population in Antarctica, there are still plenty of fascinating and oftentimes adorable organisms living there. Join us on a brief overview of this continent, which, after seventeen issues, has finally made it into Passport.

TO U R ISM Though Antarctica is the coldest, driest, and windiest continent, it has become a popular tourist destination for those who can afford it—a package for a 12-day adventure cruise with Abercrombie & Kent starts from $12,495, not including the amounts they would have to spend on the warmest coldand wind-proof clothing.1 For an annual estimated twenty-something thousand visitors, these conditions and costs are no deterrent. Antarctic tourism dates back to

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remains relatively pristine as the largest area of wilderness on Earth, and the introduction of the smallest foreign substance may change the landscape irreparably. Some cruises are so careful as to require tourists to rinse their

fall 2013

boots every time they step foot back on the ship, so as to not introduce matter from one part of Antarctica to another.

PEN GUI NS Who can mention Antarctica without thinking of penguins? Antarctica is home to six of the seventeen species of penguins.

Interestingly enough, penguins were originally indigenous to warmer climates near the equator and adapted as they evolved and moved southward. These birds range in size, with the smallest being the rockhopper penguin, which is measured at less than two feet, to the emperor penguin, which can reach up to four feet tall. Though the species exhibit different mating rituals, penguins share similar feather features that allow them to remain warm—an outer layer of waterproof feathers that cover soft down feathers, all of which envelop layers of fat. Penguins actually can retain heat so well that they fluff their feathers to cool themselves.4 However, the emperor penguin is the only warm-blooded animal that stays on top of the ice sheets during the winter.5

background by mmreesescott @ Flickr

RCTICA! TH E A NTA RCTIC ICE SH EET

melted, sea levels would rise by nearly two hundred feet.7

The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest contiguous mass of ice in the world, accounting for 98% of the continent.

Snow can compact into glacier ice and can add to the size of the ice sheet.

Contrary to popular belief, the amount of sea ice in the Antarctic region has actually increased in the past several years, though its polar sibling, the Arctic sea ice, has indeed been melting. 6 However, if all the ice in Antarctica

PO LA R BEA RS

left photo by sandwichgirl @ Flickr right photo by mmreesescott @ Flickr

Polar bears don’t live in Antarctica. They live in the Arctic.

1. Abercrombie & Kent. “Classic Antarctica (2014-15).” 21 November 2013. http://www. abercrombiekent.com/travel/?tid=5830.

2. International Association Antarctica Tour Operators. “Tourism Overview.” 21 November

senior staff piece

2013. http://iaato.org/tourism-overview 3. International Association Antarctica Tour Operators. “Visitor Guidelines.” 21 November 2013. http://iaato.org/visitor-guidelines.

4. “Penguins.” About Antarctica:. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

5. “Cool Facts About Antarctica.” Cool Facts About Antarctica. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

6. “Fun Antarctica Facts for Kids.” Fun Antarctica Facts for Kids - Interesting Information about Antarctica. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.

7. “Antarctic Ice Sheet.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 17 Nov. 2013. Web. 23 Nov. 2013.

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WHO SAYS EXPLORATION IS A THING OF THE PAST?

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