SPECIAL ISSUE: LIFE IN THE PANDEMIC
SUMMER 2020
RICE MAGAZINE Summer 2020 PUBLISHER
Office of Public Affairs Linda Thrane, vice president EDITOR
Lynn Gosnell ART DIRECTOR
Alese Pickering CREATIVE SERVICES
Jeff Cox, senior director EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Tracey Rhoades ASSISTANT EDITOR
Kyndall Krist PHOTOGRAPHERS
Tommy LaVergne Jeff Fitlow PROOFREADER
Jenny West Rozelle ’00 SPECIAL CONTRIBUTORS
Jenny Blair, Michael Hardy ’06, David Levin INTERNS
Savannah Kuchar ’22 Mariana Nájera ’21 Rice Magazine is published four times a year and is sent to university alumni, faculty, staff, parents of undergraduates and friends of the university. © July 2020, Rice University
THE RICE UNIVERSITY BOARD OF TRUSTEES
Robert T. Ladd, chairman; Edward B. “Teddy” Adams Jr.; J.D. Bucky Allshouse; Donald Bowers; Bart Broadman; Nancy Packer Carlson; Albert Chao; Mark D. Dankberg; Ann Doerr; Douglas Lee Foshee; Wanda Gass; Terrence Gee; James T. Hackett; Tommy Huie; Patti Lipoma Kraft; Holli Ladhani; L. Charles Landgraf; Brian Patterson; David Rhodes; Jeffery A. Smisek; Guillermo Treviño; James Whitehurst; Scott Wise; Huda Y. Zoghbi. ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICERS
David W. Leebron, president; Reginald DesRoches, provost; Kathy Collins, vice president for Finance; Kathi Dantley Warren, vice president for Development and Alumni Relations; Klara Jelinkova, vice president for International Operations and IT and chief information officer; Kevin Kirby, vice president for Administration; Caroline Levander, vice president for Global and Digital Strategy; Yvonne Romero Da Silva, vice president for Enrollment; Allison Kendrick Thacker, vice president for Investments and treasurer; Linda Thrane, vice president for Public Affairs; Richard A. Zansitis, vice president and general counsel.
For the Spring 2020 issue, we used emails from readers and Google Analytics to gauge what our readers are paying attention to in print and online at magazine.rice.edu. High Resolution “I’ve greatly enjoyed Rice Magazine, especially the depth, breadth and variety of the articles. … A couple of years ago, I was blessed to find the notes and photographs — always thought lost by the family — of my mother’s 1921 European tour. The photos were in less-than-pristine shape, so I took great care to optimize the reproduction, running tests with various grades and styles of paper. The [finished] photo reproductions had a crispness about them I’d never seen before — not until I compared it with Rice Magazine’s photos. The resolution of the photos is better than I would ever believe possible.”
— ED MILLIS ’50
Millis is a class recorder for Owlmanac, Rice’s biannual magazine, featuring Classnotes and alumni events. Childhood Memories
POSTMASTER
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FEEDBACK
“Wrestling’s Big Night” Geoff Winningham’s ’65 documentary photography project, “Friday Night in the Coliseum,” gets a digital revival to honor Rice Media Center’s 50th anniversary. “As a kid in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I used to
watch the wrestling broadcasts from the Sam Houston Coliseum on my crummy little black-and-white television. … By the age of about 13, I stopped watching. Still, I enjoy those memories of staying up late to watch wrestling
broadcasts, and I appreciate the article and setting the context of how regionally distinct and quirky wrestling shows were part of the special character that we’ve lost over the years.” — RICHARD R. JOHNSON ’92 Johnson is the director of the Administrative Center for Sustainability and Energy Management at Rice.
Most Read on magazine.rice.edu May 1–June 15, 2020 “A Changed World” by President David W. Leebron
ILLUSTRATION BY PADDY MILLS
“A Prescription for Healthy Meals” by David D. Medina ’83 (part of the online-only “Tiny Acts of Kindness” series) “Scene: Campus Then and Now” (titled “Last Look” in the print magazine)
If you missed any of these stories, go to magazine.rice.edu to catch up.
events have called forth an unprecedented examination of the ways we encounter and respond to systemic and everyday racism. As President David W. Leebron wrote to the Rice community and Rice Magazine readers, “There is anger and pain and fear across America, not because these are new things to deal with, but because they aren’t.”
Summer Stories LET’S START WITH GRATITUDE. On the back cover of our Spring 2020 issue, we promised another addition to our series of themed summer issues — just not the one we’d planned. The original theme of adventure will have to wait a while. Instead, we produced a special issue that highlights voices from our community — students, faculty, staff and alumni — as they navigate the demands of COVID-19’s emergence and ensuing havoc. We’re grateful to all who responded to our invitation to share personal perspectives of living and working during a global pandemic. This issue includes first-person essays accompanied by beautiful, thoughtful illustrations; visual art projects created in response to unfolding history and practical realities of life in quarantine; and interviews recorded with just a few of the many Rice alumni on the front lines of a health care crisis. Let’s continue with acknowledgments. Rice has launched a comprehensive response to the ongoing pandemic, as COVID-19 is still very much with us in Houston, throughout the state and across the country and world. We’ll cover these initiatives affecting campus life, teaching and research in our Fall 2020 issue. More significantly, we have not yet turned our attention to the initial responses from the Rice community to the killing of George Floyd and other recent acts of violence against Black individuals. These tragic
C OV ER P H O T O O F Z AC H A R Y DR E Y F U S S ’07 B Y J O N AT H A N Z I Z Z O
We are fortunate to be part of a university that values open-hearted conversations, reflection and learning — and to have leadership that is taking meaningful actions on behalf of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. Let’s end with hope. Many voices ringing out from our campus now — voices like that of Yvette Pearson, an associate dean at the George R. Brown School of Engineering, who recounted both her and her brother’s harrowing experiences of being stopped by police — are telling hard truths. Pearson also organized meetings — on Zoom, of course — for engineering students, faculty and staff to share their thoughts and to discuss ways to make their school a more just and equitable community. We are fortunate to be part a of university that values openhearted conversations, reflection and learning — and to have leadership that is taking meaningful actions on behalf of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. To read about these initial actions, go to news.rice.edu.
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PRESIDENT LEEBRON
A Painful and Necessary Reckoning The Rice community has both an urgent responsibility and a strong desire to listen, learn and take necessary actions to address racism and its ugly consequences.
“I
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CAN’T BREATHE.” These painful words have rocketed across America, and indeed the world, in response to the brutal killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It isn’t the first time we have heard these words in this very context. Three and a half years earlier, Eric Garner uttered the same words before he died in New York City. In between, there were many other Black Americans killed in encounters with the police or armed civilians, several of whom I mentioned in my recent letter to the Rice community: Atatiana
PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW
Jefferson, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. This issue of Rice Magazine had been largely finished and submitted for publication when the protests spread across the nation and around the globe. In future issues of the magazine, we’ll hear more from voices on our campus and among our alumni and share university plans in response. We are now in the midst of three national crises: a global pandemic, a financial and employment crisis that is the worst since the Great Depression, and a protest and reckoning over racial relations and justice in America. Universities have a core responsibility in each of these arenas and most especially in the last. In fact, all three of these crises raise issues of inequality and disparate consequences based on race. We have a responsibility both to understand the ways that our own institutions have contributed to racial inequality and how we can do better. We have a responsibility to educate ourselves and others about these painful experiences and questions. We have a responsibility to research the underlying systemic causes of these issues. We have a responsibility to help formulate the actions that will address them. These responsibilities are fundamental to our university mission. We, and this nation, must begin to do this by speaking out against injustice, listening to our communities (and most immediately the Black members of our communities), reflecting on what we have heard, learning from that process and taking the actions needed. Speaking out in support, listening, reflecting, learning and acting — that is the path we must follow as a university and indeed as a nation. We will not always agree with each other as we undertake this process. The conversations will be difficult. But if we do not engage wholeheartedly and commit to increasing our shared understanding and then improving our community and our institution, we will not make progress. Last year, we took some actions that will help in this process. We launched the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation and Racial Injustice, chaired by professors Alex Byrd and Caleb McDaniel. The Center for African and African American Studies was established under the leadership of Professor Tony Pinn and a new minor was created. And Professor Jenifer Bratter launched BRIDGE — an initiative for Building Research on Inequality and Diversity to Grow
Equity. Some 30 professors across the university in a wide range of disciplines identify themselves in some significant way as working on issues relating to race. We will be identifying ways to leverage that faculty engagement, along with our alumni, staff and students who are eager to contribute to the ongoing process of building a better university. But there is more listening, learning and action that must be done. Action plans will emerge out of the conversations occurring even as you read this. As I wrote in my letter to the campus: “There is anger and pain and fear across America, not because these are new things to deal with, but because they aren’t. …
We will not always agree with each other as we undertake this process. The conversations will be difficult. But if we do not engage wholeheartedly and commit to increasing our shared understanding and then improving our community and our institution, we will not make progress. “We must therefore join with our own expressions of concern and sympathy and outrage. We must work to build an inclusive environment, one that respects and values people from different backgrounds. We must take part in efforts to reduce the deadly discrimination and racism that is an unstaunched wound in our national fabric. “And so I write today to convey on behalf of the Rice community, to all of our community, and most especially to the Black members of our community, that we acknowledge the sorrow and the fear and the pain. And that we know as a university and as individuals we must contribute to healing that wound.”
Left: A mural honoring George Floyd in Houston’s Third Ward.
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RICE MAGAZINE SUMMER 2020
CONTENTS
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UNREAL REALLY! The villain in Christopher Sperandio’s pandemic cartoon is an all too familiar one. Sperandio is an associate professor in the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts.
SURVIVAL PEDAGOGY Author Lacy M. Johnson finds new connections between parenting and teaching her students during traumatic times. Johnson is an assistant professor of creative writing.
MISSION CRITICAL Zachary Dreyfuss ’07 works in five Dallas-area hospitals as a pulmonary care physician. He was interviewed for this story by Michael Hardy ’06.
NOTES FROM INSIDE Journalist Brad Tyer ’90 dreams of outdoor adventures both at home in Montana and back in Texas with friends.
THIS IS FINE Elena Lacey ’13 shares her illustrated self-isolation diary. Lacey is a San Francisco-based art director and designer at Wired.
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HOME AND AWAY Grace Ishimwe ’23 is an international student from Rwanda who just completed her freshman year. She is a proud member of Wiess College.
PIVOTING IN A PANDEMIC Freddy Nguyen ’02 is a pathology resident and research scientist evaluating a treatment option for COVID-19 patients.
THE DAYS GO BY Journalist Lisa Gray ’88 recalls a Talking Heads anthem of her undergraduate days and longs for the “same as it ever was.”
BASQUIAT À LA SOCIAL ISOLATION Laura Semro ’21 is double majoring in art history and studio art. Her art installation recreates a Basquiat painting using her own clothes in her parents’ living room.
FROM RICE EMS TO CHICAGO MED Hashim Q. Zaidi ’11 is good in an emergency — whether as captain of Rice EMS, as an ER doctor in a hospital or on call with a police SWAT team.
RICE MAGAZINE SUMMER 2020
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PARADISE OF THE LOST Terrence Liu ’20 is a Seattle-based software engineer at Facebook. Liu’s photos evoke the loneliness of an abandoned Galveston Island.
APOCALYPTIC TIMES Author and teacher Nishta J. Mehra ’05 draws from her undergraduate studies in religious history to find meaning in this modern pandemic.
DISTANCE LEARNING IN THE DELTA The academic gains that teachers like Bonnie Miller ’19 and Abi McDougal ’18 are helping their young students achieve are in danger of being eroded by COVID-19.
STOP THE PRESSES Before students left campus in March, Rice Thresher editor Christina Tan ’20 organized an impromptu commencement ceremony, complete with a walk through the Sallyport.
A SILVER LINING IN STEP WITH TIME A digital collage by student-artist Lorelei Dearing ’22 manipulates a natural space influenced by human interaction.
VIRUS BODY Zheng “Moham” Wang ’20 is currently working on his MFA at CalArts in Los Angeles. His installation visualizes his dreams during the pandemic.
FACE TIME Former O-Week coordinators and study partners Simone Elder ’12 and Chethan Ramprasad ’12, now doctors in New York City, are helping each other through demanding residencies.
TAKEN LEAVES Eduardo Martinez’s painted magnolia leaves express thoughts he had while on walks in his neighborhood. Martinez is an artist and graphic designer at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business.
TAKING ROOT Now that his eventbased professional life is on pause, David D. Medina ’83 has found pleasure in the company of nature.
MEDITATION FOR THIS MOMENT Alejandro Chaoul ’06, founder of the Mind Body Spirit Institute at the Jung Center in Houston, gives tips to help calm nerves during these uncertain times.
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Survival Pedagogy In these traumatic times, what’s required when teaching my brilliant students from afar and parenting my kids at home is much the same: patience, love and empathy.
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By Lacy M. Johnson
ACH DAY BEGINS when I rise from the bed, dress in the darkness of my bathroom, pull on my running shoes and try to compel my teenager into some form of exercise without waking my husband and 9-year-old son, who choose to sleep in. We run in slow loops around the neighborhood or ride our bikes along the trail by the bayou; we do jumping jacks in the backyard or lift jugs of water in the garage. When we return to the kitchen, we find that coffee has been made. After breakfast, I remind both children to make their beds, to dress in actual clothes, and then some combination of adults and children walk the dogs around the block. This is all outlined in THE SCHEDULE, our only raft in what feels like an increasingly viscous soup of time: every day soaked with the same boredom, terror, grief and moments of absurd humor as the day before.
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THE SCHEDULE tells us that today is a Monday and that the teenager will spend the entire day at the computer for virtual middle school and that the 9 year old will spend the day with me. He and I have decided that Mondays are for botany, so we work in the backyard garden watering plants and picking weeds, and then move to the front to collect blackberries from the bramble, where we pause to observe how different parts of the vine are in different stages of the cycle from flower to fruit. These blackberries happen to be self-fruitful, meaning they can bear fruit from their own pollen, though even this variety still requires the assistance of pollinators like bees and butterflies. The nearby magnolia tree is also in bloom, though its flowers are pollinated not by bees, but rather by beetles, since both the magnolia tree and the beetles that pollinate it evolved before bees. This part of the lesson, about the beetles and the magnolia, is new information to my son, though the rest is old news. He already knows all about pollination from school, he tells me as we watch a delivery truck arrive and the driver place a box on the sidewalk near the
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What my children learn in the way of formal schooling in this time will be negligible, marginal — and this is less important to me as their mother than providing comfort and care and minimizing the trauma and horror and grief of this moment as much as possible. I am teaching them how it is possible to live while trying to survive.
gate. As we collect the package and walk inside, he teaches all the names for the parts of a flower to me. “Home schooling” is a generous and inaccurate word for what we are doing. Proper home schooling — real home schooling — is a distinct and genuine pedagogy, and people who home-school their children spend years honing their lessons, syncing their children’s learning to the rhythms of the home and the cycle of the land and the seasons. This is not that. What we are doing is crisis schooling, traumamitigation schooling. Beyond the blackberry bramble in our front yard, a disaster is unfolding that may fundamentally alter our world in the years to come in ways we can’t yet fathom. Millions are sick in this country alone, more than 100,000 have died and tens of millions have become unemployed. What my children learn in the way of formal schooling in this time will be negligible, marginal — and this is less important to me as their mother than providing comfort and care and minimizing the trauma and horror and grief of this moment as much as possible. I am teaching them how it is possible to live while trying to survive. In the kitchen, the 9 year old and I make lunch for ourselves and the teenager. While we are eating, now in a bit of a hurry, we open the package that has just arrived — a hummingbird feeder I ordered weeks ago, which I immediately disinfect before taking the cardboard package to the recycling bin in the garage and scrubbing my hands in the sink.
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THE SCHEDULE dictates that I teach on Monday and Tuesday afternoons. Now that class time is approaching, I set the 9 year old up in his bedroom with his tablet, onto which I have loaded educational websites and downloaded educational apps to keep him enriched and occupied — Duolingo, Khan Academy, PBS Kids — though he forgoes these options and begins playing Roblox instead. I collect my notes and attendance records, open my laptop, and prepare the documents and windows I will share in the Zoom call with my students. It is a strange coincidence, maybe, that one of the courses I am teaching this semester is called Documenting Disaster, a creative writing course that combines instruction in the craft of long-form nonfiction with questions about the ethics of representation. “What obligations do we have to other people’s suffering?” I have been asking my students all semester. Before they arrive in the Zoom meeting, I spend a few minutes reading the news: Right there on the news app’s homepage is a story about the death toll in New York City. In one image first responders load body bags into the back of an ambulance, in another pine coffins are stacked in mass graves on Hart Island. The familiar chime announces students as they arrive in the Zoom meeting. We spend the first halfhour of class checking in: How has the last week been? I ask. Did you go outside at all? How is it where you are? Is your family healthy and well? Are you able to get work done? Are you eating enough? Have you gotten any sleep? When Rice made the decision to move classes online for the remainder of the semester, one student returned home to the Philippines, where, because of the time difference, she now can’t participate in our class meetings because they occur in our afternoon and the middle of her night. (On Thursday mornings, I meet with her separately.) Another student returned to her parents’ home — a house her parents had recently sold and were planning to vacate, having already sold most of the furniture — and lives there still, mostly without furniture. Other students, returning to their parents’ homes, have reverted to old relational habits: In one case, the parents have demanded that their adult child not take her phone to her room, though she admits sneaking to the kitchen to retrieve it after they have gone to bed. The seniors in particular are grieving lost jobs, lost internships, the loss of a future for which they had planned.
The 9 year old decides to make an appearance and comes to my side to say hello. I introduce him as my new teaching assistant, and he smiles and blushes; my students wave, and he waves back. In another time, not even very long ago, I would not have felt inclined to bring my children to my class. I have learned in my 20-year career as a teacher — through messaging that has sometimes been implicit and others explicit — that my role as a teacher and my role as a mother should not mix or meet, but in truth, they’ve never really been separate. Teaching my son and parenting him are not such different activities, especially in such a sad and terrifying time as this, and the best way I can think to teach my brilliant, brave young students right now is not so unlike my approach to parenting: suffused with love and generosity, patience and understanding. After we finish the check-in, my class talks about the reading for the day. We discuss the projects they’ve been working on all semester — one writes about the looming threat of tectonic disaster in the Pacific Northwest, another about the pandemic itself — and whether it is useful as writers to pretend we can stand apart from the chaos of a disastrous time in order to chronicle it, to create narrative order through logic and reason. Some disasters defy logic, order and reason. My students go on talking about their projects but suddenly I am thinking of a detail from that news article I read. So many of those who succumb to COVID-19 die completely alone, mourned by family who cannot even come to the hospital to hold the beloved’s hands. Meanwhile, protesters gather in crowds at statehouses to demand a return to “normal” life, to go back to the way things were before — when people could go grocery shopping, or go to a baseball game, or get a meal with friends without worrying about their own or others’ mortality all the time. The responsibility we have to protect and preserve one another isn’t new, but this disaster has made it newly explicit, and perhaps whatever it was about the past that allowed us to ignore that responsibility for so long isn’t something we should want to return to. As writers, we can do more than document and bear witness to the scale of our own or others’ suffering, I tell my students. We can write stories that show a way through. Before we end the call, I ask my students to assure me they have enough money to pay their rent, that
they are eating vegetables and doing at least three things that bring them joy every week — it’s an assignment and therefore mandatory. After class, I take a few moments to reorient my role to the one I play at home. I read an article about how to grow more food from my yard and look for a recipe for hummingbird food. A news alert tells me that a new model predicts that, at its peak, this new virus will claim the lives of 3,000 people in this country every day.
The responsibility we have to protect and preserve one another isn’t new, but this disaster has made it newly explicit, and perhaps whatever it was about the past that allowed us to ignore that responsibility for so long isn’t something we should want to return to.
I find my 9 year old sprawled on the living room couch playing Minecraft and my teenager watching anime in one window and “reading” in another, but THE SCHEDULE does not dictate that now is the time for Minecraft or anime. I compel them both to log off, to take a break and to join me in the kitchen to make hummingbird food for the feeder that arrived in the mail. Hummingbirds are also pollinators, I tell my son, who assures me he knows this already. We mix together the water and sugar in a saucepan. It takes time for the sugar to dissolve. It takes time for the mixture to cool before pouring it carefully into the glass vial that screws into the colorful base. We carry it out to the backyard, where we hang it on a hook on the fence. It will take time for the hummingbird to arrive, if indeed it ever does. And so we wait. Lacy M. Johnson is an assistant professor of creative writing at Rice. In April, she won the prestigious 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of general nonfiction.
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Mission Critical As a critical pulmonary care physician with a graduate degree in public health, I’m used to having evidence-based answers; COVID-19’s questions are entirely new. By Zachary Dreyfuss ’07
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AM A CRITICAL PULMONARY care physician, which means that I manage the most critically ill patients in the hospital — generally, patients who have multiple organ failure. Because they are so sick, many of them end up on a ventilator. With pneumonia and other respiratory diseases, patients might be on the ventilator for four or five days. The problem with the new coronavirus is that patients are spending 14, 15, 16 days on the ventilator. Because they haven’t been moving around, their muscles atrophy, including the muscles that help them breathe. I have one COVID-19 patient who has been on a ventilator for four weeks. Fortunately, we have enough ventilators at the moment. I work in five Dallas-area hospitals, and each of them has a designated hot zone for COVID-19 patients. Before going into that area, we put on our personal protective equipment (PPE) in an anteroom. There’s a nursing tech who monitors and coaches us to make sure we’re donning and doffing the equipment in the right order. It takes about 15 minutes. The equipment is meant to be single use, but because of shortages we’re wearing it for extended shifts. That means you have to make sure it’s comfortable to wear for a long period of time. It’s even more dangerous taking off the PPE because you don’t want to contaminate yourself. After every piece of equipment you take off, you have to wash your hands and put on a new pair of gloves. The car I drive to work is now the “corona” car — I don’t use it for anything else. I take off my shoes before I get home. We have an outdoor shower, and that’s where I clean up every night. I put my scrubs in a laundry hamper, shower outside and put on new clothes before going inside. The temperature was in the 50s last week, so it was definitely a chilly shower. My schedule is seven days on, a weekend off, seven more days on and then a week off. When I’m working, I complete 11-hour shifts and I’m on call for 24 hours. Off weeks still feel the same, except that a day before I go back to work I get a little more nervous than usual. I’m still living at home with my wife and daughter, but I know doctors who are sleeping in guest rooms or even a different house from the rest of their family. My wife is pregnant — that’s scary. Not only am I going out there and risking my life, but possibly also my family’s lives. It’s heavy at some points.
I don’t think anyone’s ever prepared for this kind of crisis. I’ve dealt with one mass casualty event before, but that only lasted a day or two. I have a Master of Public Health degree in tropical medicine, so I’ve studied infectious diseases, and I regularly deal with HIV, hepatitis C and tuberculosis. But those aren’t nearly as contagious as the coronavirus. One of the challenges in treating COVID-19 is that I was trained in evidence-based medicine; every therapy I give has been proven to work. We don’t have established data on the best way to fight COVID-19. That’s what’s scary. Am I doing the right treatment? Let’s say my friend is using some other treatment — is that something I should consider? I’m not used to being both a doctor and a scientist at the same time.
The car I drive to work is now the “corona” car — I don’t use it for anything else. I take off my shoes before I get home. We have an outdoor shower, and that’s where I clean up every night. I put my scrubs in a laundry hamper, shower outside and put on new clothes before going inside. As a critical care doctor, you know some of your patients won’t survive, but at least you can be there with the family — that’s a big part of the job. Right now, though, no visitors are being allowed into hospitals. Only at the end of life, or if we’re withdrawing life support, do we allow a family member in. I spend a lot of time having phone conversations with patients’ families, which is really difficult. Some of the patients have chronic illnesses and their families have seen it coming. But in one case I was talking to the sister of a healthy 36-year-old patient who was on a ventilator, and I couldn’t say whether they were going to make it or not. I’m 35 myself. Before COVID-19, I could usually tell families what my patient’s chances of survival were. Now I just don’t know. — AS TOLD TO MICHAEL HARDY ’06
Left: Zachary Dreyfuss outside his home in Dallas.
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Notes From Inside Hunkered down and busier than ever covering the pandemic, I’m missing my annual West Texas river adventure with friends.
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By Brad Tyer ’90
S I WRITE this in Montana with April tipping into May, I should be packing. O ne awk w a rd ly large cardboard box is usually sufficient to mail the gear I’d rather not have to borrow after I deplane in Austin, where most years I meet a rabble of friends and drive to West Texas for a week of canoeing down a desert river. One year, we hit especially low water and essentially walked, dragging overly loaded boats, down the Devils River. Twice we’ve run the lower canyons of the Rio Grande. And twice we’ve paddled the Pecos River. The Pecos, especially, has always been an adventure, which is to say I’ve never been very far from afraid on that river. We go in the springtime because that’s when there’s the best chance of enough water in the skinny river to avoid repeating our Devils debacle. But that’s also the time of year when it’s most likely that thunderstorms passing over the expansive hardpack watershed of the Pecos will generate the flash floods that regularly scour those canyons, leaving unlucky paddlers to hike out through miles of remote desert, waving goodbye to anything — boats, tents, ice chests full of food and beer — they couldn’t drag out of the channel in time. Three years ago on the Pecos, I was as scared as
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I’ve ever been on a river. We camped in heavy rain most nights. While the lightning displays on the panoramic evening horizon were gorgeous, they suggested downpours in every direction, and we did not want more water in the river. There are few places to camp along the Pecos that aren’t side canyons, and even aside from the acutely electrical night we spent crouched in lightning position inside our wind-blasted tents, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one whose sleep was disturbed by dreams of being flushed out of one of those narrow limestone slots by a wall of dirty water. Last year, I was scared before I even got there. The televisions in the Missoula airport were tuned to Weather Channel reports of storm systems squatting over West Texas. My flight to Austin was diverted to San Antonio by thunderstorms. Austin was flooding when I finally got there. Our week on the river, it turned out, was dry — not counting my frequently flipped canoe and a good portion of the tortillas therein — and uneventful. But the awareness of danger was ever present. In Montana, it’s frequently noted that just knowing you share a landscape with grizzly bears puts the senses on high alert. That’s how I feel on the Pecos, even under sunny skies. But not this year. In mid-March, when my far-flung canoe crew is usually busy sharing Google Docs of camp-cook ingredients for a giant pre-paddle grocery run, Montana announced its first four confirmed cases of COVID-19. Since last year’s Pecos trip, I had
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moved from Missoula to Helena, the state capital, and started work as editor of Montana Free Press, a nonprofit news startup. I was their third employee, alongside the founder/director and one reporter. We were busy from the start trying to build an organization from next to nothing, coordinating a 16-paper statewide reporting collaboration and publishing three to four stories and a podcast every week, even as I learned the new ropes. Then COVID-19 hit us like a wall of dirty water. During the seven days after the announcement of Montana’s first cases, we published 17 stories and we have been averaging about 12 a week since then, a 300% overnight increase in editorial output. We weren’t doing that with one reporter, of course. Suddenly I was marshaling freelance journalists
I got a federal stimulus check last week, and I’ve already spent half of it — about what it would normally cost to fly and mail a big cardboard box from Montana to Texas and back — on Hail Mary ergonomic aids for my suddenly full-time home office and creaking lower back. in Missoula, Kalispell, Bozeman, Lewistown, Billings, Butte and Great Falls to cover the pandemic’s impacts on hospitals, health departments, national parks, Airbnbs and agriculture. Our little downtown office had been closed since early March after our reporter returned from a conference in New Orleans where a presenter had subsequently tested positive, and it was only a few days after we’d started working from home that a new staffer, a development director, joined our remote ranks. In February, we’d hired a second reporter who’d been working in New York City, and we nervously tracked her cross-country car-camping escape from that COVID-19 hot spot into a statemandated 14-day self-quarantine in Helena. That hire had been planned, but an unanticipated third reporter fell into our lap in early April when a Report for America corps member who’d been furloughed
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from his paper in Wyoming was reassigned to us. Suddenly we have a real newsroom, even if we only see each other every morning on Zoom. I sit at home all day on the receiving end of a fire hose of copy and our governor’s stay-at-home order, which began a phased expiration April 27. The outdoor adventures that I originally moved to Montana for in 2002 in a pickup with two canoes and a kayak strapped on top seem as distant as our Pecos put-in near Pandale, Texas, 1,500 miles from here. I can hardly remember the last time I was outside — bimonthly grocery runs don’t count — other than walking my dog six blocks every day to poop on the only recently snow-free Capitol lawn. (And yes, I pick up after him. Mine is a civilized hermitage.) I got a federal stimulus check last week, and I’ve already spent half of it — about what it would normally cost to fly and mail a big cardboard box from Montana to Texas and back — on Hail Mary ergonomic aids for my suddenly full-time home office and creaking lower back. Sitting in a canoe for seven days, never mind the associated gear hauling and boat dragging and ground sleeping, can do its own number on a person’s spinal infrastructure. But those days end with a constellation of equally tired friends, communal meals, campfires under lightning storms and shared stories of engagement with the elements. Helping build a startup publication during the public health story of — let us hope — a lifetime is its own adventure with its own adrenaline, and I fall into bed these days as worn out as I’ve ever been after a long day’s push downstream. But on the Pecos, we always know where the river — or at least our time on it — will end. And when it does, there’s a grimy group photo, a mad multihour dash to the nearest purveyor of Mexican food and, eventually, back in Austin, a hot, cleansing, restorative shower. It’s hard to know when or how this present assault on normalcy might end. I can only hope there’s a scalding plate of enchiladas on the other side. A pandemic, like a grizzly, can set the senses buzzing. But I can’t wait for my next chance to fear a flash flood with friends instead. Brad Tyer is the editor of Montana Free Press (montanafreepress.org) and has worked as a reporter and editor at the Houston Press, the Missoula Independent and the Texas Observer. He’s the author of “Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape” (Beacon Press, 2013). He was born in Bryan and raised in Houston.
ART IN ISOLATION
This Is Fine A self-isolation diary By Elena Lacey ’13
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Home and Away As an international student from Rwanda, going home during the pandemic was not an option for me. But staying connected was. By Grace Ishimwe ’23
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Y FRESHMAN YEAR COULDN’T have been more eventful. In general, the year started out a little rough due to culture shock and transitioning to college life. However, there were plenty of highlights, including O-Week group hangouts, working on volunteer projects, experiencing Africayé, driving to Surfside Beach with friends and having a host family.
PHOTO BY JEFF FITLOW
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. At first, I didn’t quite understand how serious and deadly it was. As more cases were detected in the U.S., Rice took precautions as most other schools did, which led to evacuating the campus and moving classes online. Most Rice students went back to their homes, but many international students, myself included, petitioned to stay on campus. I wanted to stay for a number of reasons, but primarily to keep up with my studies. Rwanda, my home country, is seven hours ahead of Houston’s time zone. The time difference would disrupt my class schedule a lot, and the internet connection is not always strong. Also, I didn’t want to risk exposing myself to COVID-19 on a 20-hourslong flight with layovers. It was very risky to travel, and by March 20 the airports had closed. Staying on campus during the pandemic has been a very different experience. Although I’m introverted, I love chatting with people around campus, so not seeing my fellow Wiessmen and other students has been quite an adjustment. However, I am super grateful. This is uncharted territory for all of us, so I appreciate how everyone has managed the situation. Specifically, Housing and Dining staff have been hardworking, kind and brave. Honestly, one of the best parts of each day is when I go grab food and talk to the chefs at South Servery. When Rwanda confirmed its first case March 14, I was very concerned — but when people started recovering, it put my heart at ease. The future is uncertain, but I know that Rwandans are brave and will get through this together, no matter the cost. Of course, I worry about my family and friends and the country at large. Meanwhile, we cannot give in to this pandemic and let it take away the lifelong bonds and memories we’ve built. To stay connected to my family and friends who are thousands of miles away, I text them (a lot) and call them (occasionally). We keep each other company and remind each other to take good care of ourselves. I make sure that they don’t worry about me too much and that I don’t worry too much about them. The last thing we want is to let the quarantine prevent us from being grateful for joyful things — like singing a few lines of “Find Me in the River” and “Beautiful in White,” two of my favorite songs, with my siblings and friends on a call. Although these calls usually cheer me up, sometimes they break my heart, too. Recently, I called my
cousin to wish him a happy birthday. I then talked to my 3-year-old cousin who asked me where I am and when I’m visiting him — the questions he always asks when we talk. This time, the questions hit differently. This time, I didn’t have words. I just cried because I didn’t know how to explain that, apart from school and being far away, there is also a pandemic. And that even if I were in Rwanda, it would probably be a long time before I would see him. I know this crazy time is making some of us feel alone, but we shouldn’t allow that. It is everyone’s responsibility to check on family, friends, neighbors and so on. We probably need to rename the term “social distancing” to “physical distancing”
The last thing we want is to let the quarantine prevent us from being grateful for joyful things — like singing a few lines of “Find Me in the River” and “Beautiful in White,” two of my favorite songs, with my siblings and friends on a call. because, at this time, we need all the social support we can get. I understand this because April is such a heavy month for Rwandans as we commemorate the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. I am pretty sure this April is even heavier because of the pandemic. This is just my perspective, but I’m sure there are many people out there who need support — such as those who are quarantined with abusive people and those with mental health issues like depression who desperately need social support more than ever. We have been spending an enormous amount of time on our phones, so it is time that we make use of that habit even more by checking on our friends and family and letting them know that we love them, care for their well-being and that we’ll get through this together. I wish and hope that in these times, we are kinder, more gracious, empathetic, mindful and compassionate toward others.
Left: Grace Ishimwe was photographed at the home of her host family in Katy, Texas, where she relocated in April.
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Pivoting in a Pandemic As a pathology resident and research scientist, I’m refocusing my work to help evaluate convalescent plasma as a treatment option for COVID-19 patients. By Freddy Nguyen ’02
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EW YORK is supposed to be the city that never sleeps. Things are supposed to happen around the clock every day of the year — but right now, the entire city is on lockdown. You walk down the street and don’t see a soul. In this town, it feels apocalyptic.
IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y DA NIEL F I SHEL
I came to New York in July 2019 as an M.D. and a Ph.D. I had just finished a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in Boston and was starting a pathology residency at Mount Sinai Hospital, one of the largest hospitals in Manhattan. Before the pandemic set in, I was developing new nanotechnology and imaging techniques to help fight against cancer. But since the beginning of March, I’ve been working nonstop with the rest of my colleagues to fight against COVID-19. No matter which department we’re in, there’s a sense of being united against a common enemy. Everyone here wants to do something meaningful to solve this problem. We’re all being retasked from our usual jobs to other areas where we can have an impact depending on our skill sets. For some of us, that means taking shifts in the emergency department or taking on other posts where we wouldn’t normally work. In my case, instead of my normal research, I’m using my lab skills as part of Mount Sinai’s convalescent plasma program. It’s a relatively new treatment strategy: We take donated blood from people who have recovered from the virus and extract antibodies from it that may help newly infected patients recover. In order to be effective, though, the donors’ blood has to have a high level of the COVID-19 antibody, so we’re testing those donations to find people who meet the right criteria. Mount Sinai was one of the first hospitals in the country to use this treatment, but getting there wasn’t easy. It takes a huge number of steps to create and validate new tests and treatments. By necessity, the pandemic has really changed the way we work as scientists — instead of doing things the traditional way, slowly and methodically, we’ve been trying to accelerate research as quickly as possible. We’re still following the scientific method and having all the right controls and so on, but we’re trying to balance that with the ability to release new information and discoveries to the rest of the community as soon as possible. The paradigm has compressed something that would normally take months and years to develop and execute into something that happens in just a few days. For us as academics, the change has been difficult and a little disorienting, but it’s ultimately positive. The challenge in science has always been that research happens in the silos of our labs or departments or schools. Even when work is done, it may not be published for a year or two, so there’s always a lag. There’s never been a good model for having that process happen more quickly.
Right now, a lot of physicians are sharing best practices in Facebook groups and Google Docs. There’s no centralization. I think every hospital has some internal group that’s trying to vet all this information, but we’re all still doing it with limited context in our respective silos. The silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic may be that it forces us to find new ways of not only doing science, but also sharing it with the rest of the world. It’s already making us think about how to balance releasing new findings in a timely manner while still properly vetting new material.
During this time, I’ve really been struck by how quickly scientists and clinicians have been able to come together as a community toward a common goal, whether we’re working on the academic side, the clinical side or in private industry. I wish it didn’t take having a pandemic to bind us all together in that respect. During this time, I’ve really been struck by how quickly scientists and clinicians have been able to come together as a community toward a common goal, whether we’re working on the academic side, the clinical side or in private industry. I wish it didn’t take having a pandemic to bind us all together in that respect. I want to be able to build upon our collective knowledge for the betterment of human society as opposed to just focusing on the next paper or grant or promotion. I don’t know if that will continue to stick after the pandemic subsides, but I hope people realize that none of us can do what we do by ourselves. It really does take our whole community to come together to tackle some of these larger challenges. — AS TOLD TO DAVID LEVIN Freddy Nguyen was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and is a pathology resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.
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The Days Go By An anthem of my student days — the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” — has blasted back into my consciousness, making me long for “same as it ever was.”
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By Lisa Gray ’88
’M A REPORTER at the Houston Chronicle. On March 3 — a lifetime ago — I published my first COVID-19 story: A Q&A with Peter Hotez, a Houstonbased vaccine researcher with a gift for explaining science in plain English. “The bow tie guy,” my editors call him. Hotez warned that the situation was fluid, that everything he said could seem out of touch in five or 10 days. Judging from what he’d seen thus far in Seattle and Wuhan, China, he said we should think about precautions to protect health care workers and elderly people in skilled nursing facilities. But with no evidence that the virus was in the Houston area, he recommended that Houstonians continue going about their daily activities — maybe stock up their pantries as they would for a hurricane. His wife, Ann, had put a couple of extra Trader Joe’s tikka masalas in their freezer, he said, but otherwise, his own life was normal. He and Ann were still going out for sushi. After that story came out, a co-worker told me he thought Hotez was an alarmist. It was a more innocent time. Forever ago.
IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y A L E X EB EN ME Y ER
Now, I write a COVID-19 column for the Chronicle. It’s a temporary gig with no end in sight. In these weird, weightless days, my brain keeps playing the Talking Heads. Searching my notebook for a pandemic expert’s quote: “And you may ask yourself: Well, how did I get here?” Waiting for the next Zoom meeting to start: “Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down.” Setting up my “podcast studio” — the bedroom closet — to interview a Rice professor about voting in the age of COVID-19: “Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground.” I imprinted on “Once in a Lifetime” in the mid1980s when I was an undergrad and the Talking Heads seemed to be the unofficial band of Rice. In my memory, “Once in a Lifetime” was always blasting from some balcony at Sid Rich, echoing off Will Rice: dance music that questioned the nature of reality. We quoted the song constantly — more than Shakespeare, more than Monty Python. “This is not my beautiful house! … This is not my beautiful wife!” summed up our feelings about entering the responsible adult world. As soon as those “Once in
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a Lifetime” college years were over, we knew the underground flow of life would hold us down, carry us away. Sure enough, the days went by. Alumni Classnotes indicate that we turned out fine, mostly: jobs and families, houses and vacations. I’m married, with grown kids and a ranch house. Until March, it all seemed real enough. But now, on my mental auto play, “Once in a Lifetime” is as inescapable as it was at Rice. Wondering what I’d do if I lost my job: “Into the blue again after the money’s gone.” As my son and I discuss the potential danger of
Wondering what I’d do if I lost my job: “Into the blue again after the money’s gone.” As my son and I discuss the potential danger of entering a grocery store: “Am I right? Am I wrong?” As I wonder whether it’s Saturday or Tuesday: “Time isn’t holding up. Time isn’t after us.” entering a grocery store: “Am I right? Am I wrong?” As I wonder whether it’s Saturday or Tuesday: “Time isn’t holding up. Time isn’t after us.” At Rice, I dreaded letting the days go by, entering that underground flow. Now it’s that day-today normalcy that I miss. I want the world to be the “same as it ever was, same as it ever was.” The Tuesday after publishing the Hotez interview, I went into the office at 7:30 a.m. That early, I wasn’t surprised that nobody was there. I walked past a reporter’s desk wrapped in yellow police tape. A prank, I figured. Maybe it was her birthday; maybe one of the cop reporters had scavenged a roll. I rubbed on hand sanitizer, then booted up my laptop. An all-staff email from the Chronicle’s editorin-chief bore a subject line in nothing-to-see-here lowercase letters: “coronavirus update: work at home.” The week before, he wrote, four of our reporters had attended a New Orleans conference. Another attendee had just been diagnosed. None of our reporters remembered having been near that person — but it was possible that they had, so they’d been asked to self-quarantine. For safety’s sake, he was closing the office to all but a handful of people.
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Hardly anyone else in Houston had sent workers home at that time. I considered what I needed to take home for the duration, folded up my laptop and headed back to my car. I work mostly at my dining room table now, alone but not alone. I’m on the phone, Facebook, Slack, Zoom, email, Twitter. It’s intense. I’ve talked to people who’ve lost their jobs. To people who’ve been furloughed. To a primary care doctor collecting masks for other doctors. To the guy who had to scold a food delivery volunteer for allowing a grateful, lonely old woman to hug him. A hyperorganized single mother of three told me how she’s home schooling while continuing to work. Her 3 year old keeps asking whether the “bad germs” are gone yet. An Alcoholics Anonymous member, separated and maybe headed for divorce, told me how depressed he is. A man told me about a conversation with his dad, an avid Houston Chronicle reader. They were idly discussing the news of the day, wondering whether this “coronavirus thing” would blow over. Two weeks later, his dad died alone in an isolation unit dedicated to COVID-19. Recently, I asked an infectious disease expert how we should prepare to go back into the world now that Texas is beginning to reopen. She said the things we’ve heard a hundred times before, the things that now seem like eternal truths: Stay home if you can. If you must go out, wear a mask. Wash your hands for at least 20 seconds. I stay home. I wash my hands. The song in my head is not “Happy Birthday” — “Water dissolving and water removing,” David Byrne yelps — but 20 seconds pass anyway. Then 20 minutes. Then 20 days. Texas’ reopening hasn’t changed my family’s housebound lives. As much as I miss restaurants and the beach, the experts have made me leery. But occasionally, in fits and starts, time seems to be moving again. We’re establishing a household rhythm, my back-to-the-nest adult kids, my husband and I. My son has online classes. My daughter has set herself a strict schedule: a certain time for exercise, a certain time for job hunting. I take weekends off now. Every two weeks, there’s an Instacart grocery delivery. And every day there’s happy hour, dinner and watering the garden. It’s a long way from the “same as it ever was, same as it ever was.” But I’ve stopped waiting for the old daily routines to carry me away. The new world is establishing itself. The days go by.
ART IN ISOLATION
Basquiat à la Social Isolation By Laura Semro ’21
This was for a re-creation assignment, and I was drawn to a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting because it was as chaotic as everything else I was feeling at the time. My family let me take over our living room for a couple weeks to let me create art with the unconventional materials that ended up being almost my entire wardrobe. While it was a re-creation, using my clothes and that feeling of chaos turned it into a self-portrait, in a way.
“Basquiat à la Social Isolation.” Clothing and living room. Approximately 7' x 6'. Class: Beginning Painting with lecturer Josh Bernstein.
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From Rice EMS to Chicago Med As an emergency room doctor, my days are filled with crisis, trauma and very few breaks. At home, my dining room looks like a hazmat zone. By Hashim Q. Zaidi ’11
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HE U NIV ER SIT Y OF Chicago Medical Center is located on the city’s South Side, where there have been a lot of COVID-19 cases — in early May, we were ranked third in terms of cases by U.S. county — and a disproportionate number of deaths. The new virus accentuates health care disparities. It doesn’t necessarily create them, but it brings them into the light. For
IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y K IM R O SEN
the coronavirus, a lot of that has to do with patients with preexisting conditions or poorly controlled conditions. As we’re seeing from the statistics, a lot of those patients are from underserved populations. The vast majority of deaths from COVID-19 in Chicago — more than 70% — are African Americans, and a lot of those deaths are concentrated in just five neighborhoods on the South Side. We’re looking at that data very closely. Across the country, there’s a much higher mortality rate among African Americans than other groups because of disparities in access to health care. My lens is through the emergency department, so I’m seeing the COVID-19 patients who have to come to the ER for difficulty breathing or low oxygen levels. They’re very short of breath and can be very ill. It starts with a 911 call. Emergency medical service (EMS) will respond. If the patient has coronaviruslike symptoms, the paramedics will take the needed precautions to safely transport them to a hospital. The hospital will triage the patient based on their symptoms. If they look like they might have the coronavirus, they will be taken to a part of the hospital reserved for COVID-19 patients. These are isolation rooms, where negative air pressure is maintained. There’s an anteroom where we don and doff personal protective equipment (PPE). As part of my fellowship, I do a certain number of shifts in the emergency department, then a certain amount of time doing EMS activities. I’m also a flight physician with the University of Chicago Aeromedical Network. Sometimes I’m with the Chicago Fire Department on the ground. I’m on call for the SWAT team, so I go to those calls if there is a SWAT callout. Every week looks a little different. The scrubs I wear at the hospital can get covered in viral particles. If we do an aerosolizing procedure, the particles can spread like a fine spray or even stay suspended in the air for hours. An example would be intubation, which involves placing a breathing tube into someone’s trachea. It gets everywhere — your hair, your glasses, your shoes, even your eyelashes. In China, the doctors wear full-body suits. We don’t have those available, so we use hairnets, eye protection, respirators and gowns. I get pressure ulcers on my nose from wearing the respirator all day. Some days, there aren’t any breaks because patients keep coming for eight hours, 12 hours, however long the shift is. Taking breaks is hard anyway because safely taking off and putting on equipment is time-consuming.
My fiancée, Maria Maldonado ’12, is a third-year trauma internal medicine resident at the University of Chicago. She was one of the first people to volunteer to work in the COVID-19 intensive care unit here, so she’s also around the sickest of patients. She stays in full protective gear all day. But we trust that we have the right PPE and processes in place, and we try to relax at home when we have a chance. Going out to buy groceries and then cooking dinner is our main pastime now. It’s a great way to destress and talk about our day, our challenges and all the things we want to do after things settle down. We have an extensive decontamination process at home. Some might find it comical. We wear one set of scrubs at the hospital and one set of transit scrubs for the drive home. When we get home, we throw our equipment in a basket and our scrubs in a laundry hamper to be washed. We leave our shoes outside of the house. All our equipment gets wiped down. We jump in the shower and scrub, scrub, scrub. Our dining room certainly looks a lot different these days — it’s more of a hazmat decontamination zone now. We’ve adapted. There are cold zones and hot zones. Outside is a hot zone, the decontamination area is a warm zone and the cold zone is the rest of the house — hopefully. Rice EMS is really what led me to emergency medicine. I took the basic class my sophomore year, and some of the people in that class are still my best friends today. It’s one of the most unique things about the university — it’s like there’s an extra college called Rice EMS. A lot of us end up in health care, whether that’s emergency response, disaster preparedness, public health or emergency medicine. Those skills translate very well into the professional world. When I interviewed for residencies, all anybody wanted to know about was Rice EMS. The community support in Chicago has been extraordinary. Lots of people are donating food and drinks to the ER. Some people are donating homemade cloth masks; we use those masks going to and from work. Lately, though, we’ve been seeing more protests. Some people are clamoring to end the lockdown. I think the most important thing is to listen to public health authorities. They’ll be the best guides for when and how to reopen.
— AS TOLD TO MICHAEL HARDY ’06
Hashim Q. Zaidi is a fellow in EMS at the University of Chicago Medical Center and a former captain of Rice EMS.
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ART IN ISOLATION
Paradise of the Lost By Terrence Liu ’20
My photographs of anonymous sites around Galveston Island depict a sense of loneliness and abandonment. I’m intrigued by the remnant of the temporal inhabitant — the nearly collapsed fence, the oil stain on the road, the halfopened curtains of the motel room by the sea. These fragments create a sense of simultaneous presence and absence that shrouds the space with mystery and invites the possibility of alternative narratives.
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“Paradise of the Lost.” Digital photographs. Dimensions variable. Class: Visual and Dramatic Arts 2020 Senior Studio.
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ALUMNI
Apocalyptic Times What I learned in my religious studies courses at Rice helps me understand what the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing about the brokenness in contemporary society. By Nishta J. Mehra ’05
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N SEPT. 11, 2001, I WAS ONE MONTH INTO my freshman year at Rice. That Tuesday morning, my suitemates and I woke to the sound of the (landline!) phone ringing. It was my suitemate Rebecca’s dad, calling to tell us to turn on the news. We did, watching in disbelief as the second plane hit the World Trade Center tower. The rest of that day unfolded in a daze. I walked to the Humanities Building only to discover that classes had been canceled. I sent frantic emails to check up on friends and family members living in D.C. and New York. Finally, I headed to Fondren Library, where I spent the day in an oversized chair, devouring Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood” in
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IL LU S T R AT IO N B Y C HLO E NIC L A S
one sitting until the light outside grew dark. That night in the Baker Commons at dinner, we all wondered: Would a war break out? Would the draft be reinstated? Would we be sent home? Over the coming weeks, daily life for most of us returned to normal, the aftereffects of 9/11 having primarily to do with cumbersome airport protocols and increased attention to the news and international politics. I had matriculated at Rice with the intention of studying religion, much to the chagrin of many adults in my life. “What are you going to do with that?” became a question I regularly fielded. But in the wake of 9/11, my area of study ceased to puzzle; as interest in Islam grew and misinformation spread like wildfire, what had previously struck people as an esoteric, impractical area of study suddenly seemed intensely important and real. My decision to major in religious studies was cemented. Engaging in the academic study of religion felt akin to walking into the Library of Congress for the first time; I spent a lot of time walking around in wonder. I read voraciously, fascinated by the way that my major encouraged me to dig ideas up by their root, to seek the full picture rather than assume what was visible aboveground told the whole story. Early on in my studies, I discovered that many words I assumed I knew the meaning of had different uses in an academic context. For example, among scholars, “cult” is a neutral term that refers to a new religious movement whose practices or ideas are considered reprehensible by their contemporaries. By this definition, Jesus and his followers are considered a cult movement; it is only after Jesus’ death and the work of Paul that Christianity becomes an organized religion. “Apocalypse” is another word whose meaning varies greatly depending on its context. Though most of us think of action heroes and fiery landscapes when we hear it, the word’s etymology is quite different. Apocalypse comes from the Greek “apokalyptein,” which is itself a joining of the prefix apo-, meaning “off, away from,” and the root kalup ein, meaning “to cover or conceal.” Therefore, apocalypse literally means “to uncover or reveal.” Even the term “revelation,” which we associate with the end of the world, is much more about the end of a current age, a reckoning that brings about desperately needed change. So for me to say that we are living in an apocalyptic age is not to invoke futuristic, dystopian imagery, but rather to argue that the current global pandemic is showing us a great deal about the brokenness of contemporary America: the inequality of our
systems (particularly health care), the gaps in our infrastructure, the frailty of our social safety nets, our cultural discomfort with uncertainty and grief. Populations that were already marginalized and vulnerable — indigenous and African American communities, the elderly who live in nursing homes, incarcerated Americans — are the ones who face the highest rates of COVID-19 infection. Unemployment
I may have first unpacked the term “apocalyptic” while studying the messianic beliefs of the first century of the common era, but what I learned about human dynamics and the beliefs that we live and die by are as applicable as ever. is at a record high and food banks are struggling to provide assistance to citizens of one of the richest nations in the world. Our mythology of exceptionalism and insistence on rugged individualism have blinded us to our interdependence on the natural world and on each other; the cost of this blindness is high, with climate catastrophe lurking on the other side of this pandemic. I may have first unpacked the term “apocalyptic” while studying the messianic beliefs of the first century of the common era, but what I learned about human dynamics and the beliefs that we live and die by are as applicable as ever. This fall marks my 15th reunion year; the nervous speculation that my classmates and I felt during the fall of our freshman year has been overtaken by a pervasive and indefinite uncertainty that forced this year’s graduating class off campus in March instead of May into a world turned upside down. The religious studies major in me can’t help but wonder what will be revealed to them. Nishta J. Mehra is the proud first-generation daughter of Indian immigrants, a high school English teacher and the author of two essay collections: “The Pomegranate King” and “Brown White Black: An American Family at the Intersection of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Religion.” Mehra lives with her wife, Jill Carroll, and their children, Jesse and Shiv, in Phoenix.
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Distance Learning in the Delta As teachers in rural Mississippi, we watch the COVID-19 school closures with a nagging awareness that inequities in education are nothing new — and a clear understanding of how schools weather crises through the strength of their communities. By Bonnie Miller ’19 and Abi McDougal ’18
Bonnie: “We’re in the country-country, Ms. Miller, we really have nothing to worry about,” the lead teacher on my hall reassured me. Characteristically, she sought to allay any fears about the spreading coronavirus, even as she delivered the administration’s warning to prepare paper packets in case of school closures. Our first grade classroom’s reward for completing benchmark exams was to watch “The Cat in the Hat,” and they were loving it. Even when the warning about closures interrupted our movie for a moment, I decided not to worry. Instead, I leaned into the delight of dance parties on the way to the buses and children hugging me so tightly I wasn’t sure they would ever let go. Now, sitting here in my home and knowing schools are closed for the rest of the school year, I wish they never had. Abi: With a festive dismissal on Friday, I sent my restless fourth graders off to break. I tried to shrug off Mrs. Jackson’s jaded words: “I’m just saying, Ms. McDougal, this quarter’s been good, but it’s too good. It ain’t gonna last. You watch — when we get back from spring break, there’s change coming. I can feel it.” On the chalk-decorated sidewalk, the principal stopped me and two other teachers. “When — not
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if — a coronavirus wave hits us, we may have to close school for a couple weeks. We’ll be too close to state testing to afford losing that time,” he added, “so can you pull some resources to send packets home with kids?” We nodded. Easy. Bonnie: My first thoughts on this whole “distance learning” idea included a string of questions: How can children learn from a distance without internet access? What about the kids whose parents are still working? And for those already behind, how will they ever catch up after this? Educators have always faced systemic challenges in providing all students with high-quality learning. As schools began contemplating distance learning plans, the radical differences from student to student — and community to community — became jarringly magnified. The inequities that have always been present have now been shoved into the limelight by COVID-19. Abi: With the end of spring break came the email announcing school closures. Within a few days, the school addressed the first priority in a district that qualifies for 100% free and reduced-price meals: setting up sites for families to pick up food. Several
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days later, we received confirmation that state testing had been canceled and would not factor into district accountability ratings. Our school’s funding for the upcoming school year would continue to be determined by last year’s accountability rating. After a year’s hard work toward boosting student learning, that was disappointing, especially given that recent data had shown headway toward increasing our score. Nevertheless, we tasted newfound freedom to think about helping students actually learn for their own benefit.
nities, the common ground every family depends on for daily structure. I repeatedly told families, “Some parents beg me to send work to keep their child busy, but others say, ‘Please, don’t give us one more thing to worry about right now’” — at that point I’d often hear a genuine chuckle. I continued, “So I’m just saying, look, here are some great resources that can help your child stay on top of reading at home, but please don’t stress on it.” Over and over, I could hear their responses relax at the other end of the line.
Bonnie: During the first week without school, I received many phone calls and messages from parents asking about policies not yet developed,
Bonnie: Two weeks after spring break, we received a distance learning plan from our school, which included assigning weekly virtual activities and holding online office hours. I knew immediately that would not be enough, but I also did not want to overwhelm parents with complicated instructional methods. As I began brainstorming, I realized the plan did not mention families without internet access. How could I just accept that some of my kids would receive an education and others would not receive any? In an attempt to address some of these disparities, my teaching assistant and I decided to put together and drop off care packages for our students. Parents had been asking for materials to help support their children’s learning, so this action plan seemed like the best fit. We quickly crammed bags with activity worksheets, books, school supplies, and even snacks and candy to keep their spirits up. These packages would at least hold them over for a few weeks. While COVID-19 hadn’t made its way through our part of Mississippi quite yet, we knew there would still be risk involved no matter the safety precautions we took. Ultimately, we decided this was something many of our kids needed at the time, and if parents felt safe about it, we were willing to move forward.
Of my 27 students, 12 had access to a laptop or tablet, eight could access the internet only through a parent’s cell phone and seven had no chance at getting online. This information influenced all my decisions moving forward. requesting resources I was still working to research and even asking if they could drop their children off with me for one-on-one teaching. While teachers across the country constantly posted about their creative makeshift Zoom classes and assignments, we were still trying to assess our district’s needs and determine who had a computer at home, or even reliable access to the internet, especially in the most rural areas. I felt inadequate. To overcome the feeling of helplessness, I started calling parents, making sure I had reached everyone and tracking who had remote access. Of my 27 students, 12 had access to a laptop or tablet, eight could access the internet only through a parent’s cell phone and seven had no chance at getting online. This information influenced all my decisions moving forward. Abi: As parents adapted to the shutdown, my phone calls to 62 families of students revealed how widely reactions to the new virus varied. That is the nature of schools: They serve as a cross section of commu-
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Abi: On April 1, like a nasty April Fools’ joke, the district suspended meal pickup for students in our school. “It wasn’t an easy decision,” my principal commented on the phone. He never had an easy job; he’s the fourth principal in four years. With the pandemic, impossible expectations for school leaders only increased. He explained that a neighboring district had an employee and a volunteer working the food line both test positive for COVID-19, and surrounding districts took notice. “Pick your poison, I guess,” he concluded. We’ve traded one health crisis for another.
As parents and students kept asking when school would be back in session, the return date kept getting delayed. Some days, my phone buzzed indifferently with messages I didn’t know how to answer. A mother told me that to juggle her work schedule, she needed to send her children out of state. She wanted to make sure her son’s grade wouldn’t suffer if he left. “I’m so sorry you’re having to face that choice right now,” I texted back. “Tell me if I can do anything to help make the schoolwork easier.” My response felt lame. It was. Since our virtual class is optional and we’re free from standardized testing, I explore new virtual content to engage students — livestream performances, science articles on insects, historical fiction audiobooks. Amid a wave of online support for education, a wealth of digital resources have suddenly become free for the remainder of the school year. One day, at the end of my office hour, several fourth graders remained on Zoom analyzing a graph modeling the benefits of social distancing. “It’s time to go,” I told them, “but I’ll stay on another 10 minutes if you want to dig into the advanced reasons why experts say we need to keep schools closed.” For the next 15 minutes, my five students stayed online helping each other understand the graph, fully engaged. Bonnie: A few weeks later, after adjusting the district learning plan and delivering paper packets to all students, we learned that Mississippi has shut down schools for the rest of the school year. As always, teachers and administrators are expected to make massive changes as seamlessly as possible, completely reinventing our entire learning system. Suddenly “summer slide” has expanded into an additional “virus slide,” and student regression seems imminent. Forget new learning — all of our work is now focused on preventing students from falling further behind. As a teacher, my job is to assess the struggles and strengths that kids come in with and harness those to their advantage. The loss and hardship children are experiencing as a result of this crisis will certainly add to their lists of struggles, but it is my hope that students gain some resilience while living and fighting through this outrageous situation. These kids are strong. They are brave. They are capable of one day leading our nation in restructuring inequitable systems.
The loss and hardship children are experiencing as a result of this crisis will certainly add to their lists of struggles, but it is my hope that students gain some resilience while living and fighting through this outrageous situation. These kids are strong. They are brave. They are capable of one day leading our nation in restructuring inequitable systems. Abi: As of early May, there are 77 confirmed cases and three deaths in our county due to COVID-19. Like in many regions, the lack of available testing suggests these numbers grossly underestimate the spread. We wait to see whether delayed graduation ceremonies will happen in the fall, but for now the semester ends without closure. Distance learning packets are due May 15, but the state will require districts to plan extended learning for the summer. In the Delta, strong community remains the fundamental support line. I stay in touch with families and fellow teachers, and I hear the endless ways they help each other. So much stays the same and so much changes. Virus or not, perhaps never-ceasing waves of change are the most consistent part of all. Perhaps the strength of communities in this tide of shared new change will swell with enough force to restructure our systems to better support the communities they are meant to serve. As much as any pandemic, these schools will shape our future.
Abi McDougal earned a B.A. in linguistics and cognitive sciences at Rice. As she wraps up her twoyear commitment with Teach For America, she is preparing for her third year of teaching at Sanders Elementary School in Hollandale, Mississippi. Bonnie Miller is a first grade teacher at Sanders Elementary School in Hollandale, Mississippi. This is her first year with Teach For America. She earned a B.A. in psychology at Rice. Both are proud alumnae of Jones College.
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Stop the Presses Even as the Thresher staff reported on the pandemic, we kept wishing we wouldn’t become part of the story.
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By Christina Tan ’20
HE LAST TIME I was in a crowd, it was in the Academic Quad. We all looked ridiculous, a bunch of seniors wearing half-baked graduation outfits; some wore stoles thrown over the only dress they hadn’t yet packed, while others showed up in sweatpants and T-shirts. It was two months before we were supposed to graduate, but the day before, we received a gut-wrenching email informing us that classes would move online for the rest of the semester and that most students had to vacate campus as soon as possible. As we scrambled to pack our belongings — college flags,
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half-filled notebooks, useless items tinged with memories that suddenly felt precious — a thought struck me. We might never have an in-person graduation ceremony, might never get to finally walk out of the Sallyport, might never make use of the stoles crammed haphazardly into suitcases. That thought, once unfathomable, now felt like a real possibility. So I opened Facebook and made an impromptu graduation event for the next day. Whether or not we were ready, we would walk. Two days before that fateful email, I was sitting in the Thresher’s office, poring over the final versions of that week’s paper. As editor-in-chief for the year, I had led a particularly sobering production meeting in an empty student center. I outlined the Thresher’s plans “on the off chance we have to leave.” These included online coverage, maybe an email newsletter, reducing expectations, paying staffers through the semester and reallocating roles. When Kelley Lash, our staff adviser, asked me if I wanted to make a note about this possibly being the last print issue of the year — and thus the last print issue I’d be able to oversee as editor — I laughed, knocked on wood and said that wouldn’t happen. Despite all of my contingency plans, I wasn’t ready to let go of the paper and the people I had spent my last four years with. In reality, the Thresher staff had been readying the campus months in advance. Our COVID-19 coverage started in late February and escalated after a Rice research staffer fell ill. Still, we carried on with our lives, even while the impending crisis was gathering in the background, preparing to crescendo. We read the news and tracked the daily rise in cases but held on to our plane tickets and our plans for spring break, Senior Week and summer. We kept knocking on wood, but the notes of disaster grew louder. When I created an impromptu Facebook event for seniors to walk through the Sallyport, I wasn’t ready for the messages warning me against it because it didn’t abide by social distancing rules limiting gatherings, at the time, to 25 people. I wasn’t ready for more than 100 people to show up for our intense feelings of loss and pride. When the time came for us to walk, our small group of seniors — about a tenth of the graduating class — milled around the quad, waiting for guidance. Questions flew. Should we go in founding order? How long can we be here before we get in
trouble? Should I walk now, or when we have our real graduation? What if we never get to have a real graduation? Can I hug you? Can I be near you? A friend, one of the few remaining students on campus, said he sees the last issue of the Thresher everywhere. “It’s ghostly,” he said, the way that the headlines are trapped in the past. “Rice suspends classes,” the front page reads, blissfully unaware of the headlines that will soon follow: “Faculty prepares for transition to online classes”; “Students remaining on campus adjust to regulations”; “On-campus commencement postponed”; “Faculty Senate discuss fall
The Thresher staff had been readying the campus months in advance. Our COVID-19 coverage started in late February and escalated after a Rice research staffer fell ill. Still, we carried on with our lives, even while the impending crisis was gathering in the background, preparing to crescendo.
semester concerns”; “US coronavirus cases surpass 1 million with more than 56,000 deaths.” It feels as if picking up one of these ghostly papers could reverse time to allow the Thresher staff to write our goodbye columns and cry in the office together one more time. Instead, the paper remains as a memory of being on the cusp of understanding but staying in denial. Its serene confidence in the future reflects the sobering realization its staffers — and by extension, its editor — have come to: Despite being the people with all the answers, drilling deep to investigate and inquire, there are some things we aren’t prepared to answer. Instead, we knock on wood and keep our fingers crossed, not ready for what comes next but facing it all the same, anyway.
Left: The Thresher team’s last Zoom meeting of the year.
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ART IN ISOLATION
A Silver Lining in Step With Time By Lorelei Dearing ’22 I have always enjoyed manipulating a natural space influenced by human interaction; the Houston Arboretum is one of those spaces where one can be immersed in nature so close to the city. Nature is always changing and time is always moving forward; and in a time when everything is inside and stagnant, I found it significant to reflect on the motions that occur outside. No matter the difficulties we face, one thing is certain: The sun will always rise and always set. Walking on this path is reminiscent of someone experiencing time; the sky above them is the present and below is the sky that they perceive. “A Silver Lining in Step With Time.” Digital collage with watercolor and pencil. Class: Beginning Painting with Associate Professor Natasha Bowdoin.
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ART IN ISOLATION
Virus Body
By Zheng “Moham” Wang ’20 THIS WORK IS A visualization of my dreams during the pandemic period. The installation demonstrates the nature of chaotic dreams while maintaining a sense of balance and connection amidst all the fractures. As a whole, the work is a human body whose “skin,” the canvas paper, is penetrated and connected simultaneously by electronic wires resembling blood vessels. The balloons arranged in different ways are various human organs and infesting viruses occupying the body. The outermost parts are gestural drawings inspired by the overview of the neighborhood where my parents are living through the pandemic in Wuhan, China. It is also one of the locations that has suffered the greatest casualties and longest quarantine during the tragedy. By piecing together broken imageries that have deeply impacted me both in dreams and reality, I make a personal statement about the pandemic that has now connected every individual of our global village. “Virus Body.” Installation on wall. Various materials. 72" x 100". Class: Visual and Dramatic Arts 2020 Senior Studio.
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Face Time The friendship we formed as Rice students sustains us from a distance as doctors in New York City. By Simone Elder ’12 and Chethan Ramprasad ’12
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IMONE ELDER IS A SECOND-YEAR OB-GYN RESIDENT at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. She is originally from Snellville, Georgia. She was a member of Sid Rich College. Chethan Ramprasad is a third-year internal medicine resident at the New York University Langone Medical Center, which includes Bellevue Hospital and the Veterans Affairs Hospital. He is originally from Cincinnati and lived in Hanszen College at Rice.
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Chethan: I applied early decision to Rice. I wanted to go to a place that was warm and friendly and very diverse. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of being in a frat. I loved the idea of the residential college system. And when I visited when I was a junior in high school, I fell in love with it. I was really happy when I got in. I studied psychology and global health technologies, and we both did premed classes on the side. I was pretty set on doing medicine as a career. Simone: I applied to Rice and Emory. I remember going to [visit] Rice in February when the weather was perfect. I remember students of every color talking and partying together, the classes were small and I really felt it was an amazing environment. Probably the No. 1 reason why I picked Rice was because of this diversity. I came from a very Southern town, and it was very segregated. I remember being so amazed about how everyone at Rice got along — we went to each other’s homes on the holidays and all hung out. Even today, when we’re in New York City going through everything that’s going on right now, we are still hanging out with each other via social media. Chethan: Simone and I took organic chemistry together, and I think we were in the same general chemistry class, too. So we would study together. I remember sitting next to her in organic chemistry and being intimidated. She had been doing research and had all this biochemistry interest. Simone: We both were O-Week coordinators. He was at Hanszen and I was at Sid Rich. We spent the whole summer together, planning and coordinating the welcome week for new students. And when Chethan was thinking of coming to New York City for his residency, I said, “Let me show you the city.” Chethan: Rice has a holiday party every year and it’s very swanky. Everyone’s dressed up really nice, and there are hundreds of alumni ranging from recent grads all the way to people who graduated 50 years ago. I happened to be in New York City to interview for my residency at the time of the holiday party. That’s my memory of coming to New York — Simone introducing me to the city. The Rice Owls in New York are a very outgoing and interesting group — even if you didn’t know them at Rice. After you meet them a couple times here, you kind of feel like you had a Rice experience
with them. It’s definitely having the alumni network here that has made it so amazing and so much fun. Simone: I always invite other people who didn’t go to Rice out to Rice events because there are so many here, which I love. And my friends comment, “Wow, your alma mater is the best” and “I feel so welcome at all these events.” If I did not have my Rice community, it would have been hard for me to truly enjoy New York.
We’re able to vent, and we’re just a phone call away. I’m relying on social media and a lot of phone calls to keep my spirits up. We used to hang out a lot, but now we FaceTime when our schedules permit. As a resident — a doctor in training — you work a ton of hours. The way I like to de-stress and get my mind off the rigors of residency is by hanging out with people. I’m infamous among my friends because I’m always saying, “Let’s go out! We have to see each other!” Ever since the quarantine began, I would come home and it would be me, in my apartment, by myself. By the end of March, it really hit me that … I miss how things used to be. Chethan: I also had a big social change, just like Simone. [COVID-19] kind of hit all of a sudden in early March. It seemed like every day, there was something else that was more serious and more concerning. We like to go out together and hang out as much as we can with the rest of our friends, many who went to Rice. That was a big change for me — also not having the gym, restaurants and the things we’re used to doing in New York City. Simone: Even though we have completely different specialties, Chethan knows exactly what I’m going through. We’re able to vent, and we’re just a phone call away. I’m relying on social media and a lot of phone calls to keep my spirits up. We used to hang out a lot, but now we FaceTime when our schedules permit.
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Chethan: I’ve been at Bellevue Hospital on the wards. As a senior resident, I am in charge of at least 20 patients. These are too sick to go home but are not sick enough to be in the intensive care unit (ICU). So I have a lot of patients with COVID-19, at least half of them. And a few of them were sick enough to get intubated while I was taking care of them. I had many more who were safe enough to go home, and we discharged them being COVID-19 positive. I’ve seen very mild cases of COVID-19 where people have a few fevers and maybe a cough and
The first time I experienced [the cheering] was here in my apartment. I opened my window and it was awesome. One day, the policemen came and drove around outside the emergency room — they were blasting “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra. I had just gotten off work and some random stranger said, “Good job, young lady!” shortness of breath. And then I have other cases where people are very short of breath, very feverish and have very high oxygen requirements. I’ve had patients who decompensated, who needed to be intubated and moved to the ICU. And I’ve had multiple situations in between, too — so I’ve seen how serious [COVID-19] is. A lot of the care really has to do with just being supportive and making sure someone’s hydrated and getting the kind of monitoring they need. We don’t really know exactly what’s curing or helping people. Simone: In my current rotation, I’m seeing highrisk pregnancies. There are a good number of pregnant women who are sick with COVID-19. They may look very sick one minute and then be fine the next. We just don’t have enough data, but as far as we’ve noticed, there’s no major difference in outcomes between nonpregnant and pregnant women.
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Chethan: I definitely feel the city of New York has really supported us. We have a ton of free food every shift. Simone: The meals are great. We don’t have to figure out when we’re going to get our next meals. We have time to decompress. They have areas in the hospital for us to meditate. There’s a psych intern who came to our floor and asked, “Do you guys want to talk to someone?” And we said, “Yes!” And a hospital priest came to give us a prayer and a blessing. It was really nice. I’m not even Catholic, but I am all for it. Chethan: The 7 p.m. cheer that happens every night is awesome. It’s definitely a morale boost. [For a few weeks,] I could only really watch people’s videos of it. I recently got to experience it, and it was really cool. Simone: The first time I experienced [the cheering] was here in my apartment. I opened my window and it was awesome. One day, the policemen came and drove around outside the emergency room — they were blasting “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra. I had just gotten off work and some random stranger said, “Good job, young lady!” Chethan: I was remembering how we would study for our premed courses, and now we’re in the same city doing our residency. Although our experiences are different because we’re in different specialties, different medical institutions, different parts of New York City, it’s still something we go through together because we both have this residency work during a crisis. Salman Khan was our commencement speaker and he said something like, “The experience you have now, the friendships you build, the people you know in this community, you should never let go. You should always remember where you came from and connect later on in life. These are your people who are going to be supportive of you.” And I think that really is true. The friendships that I built in college have remained very important to my happiness and my success in a lot of things. Simone: I think it’s the same for me, too. This conversation is edited for length and clarity and is based on two interviews conducted by Jenny Blair, a science writer and medical doctor living in Brooklyn.
ART IN ISOLATION
Taken Leaves
Walking through my Houston neighborhood, I feel comforted and inspired by nature’s enduring cycle. By Eduardo Martinez
Eduardo Martinez is an artist and graphic designer at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. M AG A ZINE . RICE . EDU 4 5
Taking Root When the pandemic put a pause on my professional life, I turned my energies toward home and discovered a new pleasure in gardening. By David D. Medina ’83
Above: A begonia blooms in David D. Medina’s home garden.
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PHOTO BY TOMM Y L AV ERGNE
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HEN THE COVID-19 pandemic invaded our city and sent us to our houses to practice social distancing, it was a shock to our humanity. Never in my life had I been forced to keep away from others and limit my movements outside the home. I found my salvation in gardening, an earthy art that had only been on the margins of my existence. In the past, gardening meant trimming branches, pruning flowers, watering the lawn and planting colorful annuals in the spring — the bare minimum to beautify the house. It was as if nature, knowing that I had free time to spare, beckoned me to return to my roots. I bought a book, “Beginner’s Illustrated Guide to Gardening: Techniques to Help You Get Started,” and set out to learn how to turn my pale hands into a darker shade of green. My primary target was the backyard. Weeds had overtaken it, moving imperceptibly from the fence to my back door until they had choked all the grass to death. The roses and azaleas on the border had withered away from lack of watering. Branches from overgrown trees hung over the fence and shrubs grew wild. It was a pathetic sight. With shovel in hand, I started to scrape off all the weeds — a painstaking job, especially under a beaming sun. After a couple of days, the yard was clean of unwelcome intruders. A patch of dusty, gray soil laid exposed like a large bald spot. I covered the patch with black soil mixed with manure. With the help of a yardman, I put down sod, sprinkled pellets of fertilizer and watered the grass twice a day until the blades turned a dark green, indicating the grass had started to take root. Even though the job was hard on my back and hands, my satisfaction was immense; I had improved a tiny piece of earth. Next, in between the garage and yard — a space 16 feet long and 2 feet wide — I planted a row of lavender in honor of the trip to France that my wife and I took a few years ago. I remember it vividly. As we approached a village in the southern part of the country, we stopped along the roadside to see the rows upon rows of lavender covering the rolling hills, turning the landscape into a purple haze of beauty. The five lavender shrubs in my backyard will always remind me of that special time. Van Gogh will also be remembered. When we were in France, we visited Arles, where he created many of his famous paintings. I decided to plant
sunflowers to honor this painter who was fascinated by the tall, lanky flower that seeks the sun. I put the seeds in empty egg cartons filled with potting soil, fearing that if I planted them directly in the garden, the squirrels would dig them out and eat them. After the seeds sprouted, I transferred 50 of them to the garden, making little holes in the soil and gingerly placing the delicate sunflower stems in each one — all the while suffering pangs of pain in my back and knees. Knockout roses, Mexican heathers, begonias, wildflowers, marigolds, geraniums, petunias, periwinkles and larkspurs now decorate the back and front of my house. Each planting gave me a certain pleasure. I felt the soil between my fingers as a source of energy that was giving plants and flowers a boost to reach their full potential. I felt I was giving flowers a chance to grow in their mission to add color and scent to the world. “You don’t discover your own gardening potential until you have gardenable space of your own, if only a humble window box,” writes Penelope Lively in her book, “Life in the Garden.” I have found my space and am discovering my potential as a gardener thanks to the deadly virus. To be a successful gardener, I’ve learned that you have to pay close attention to the garden and become attuned to its needs. Maybe, through the pandemic, the universe is telling us to slow down and pay attention to the planet. Gardening has taken root in me. Whenever I go outside to tend my young garden, I feel an attachment and fondness to the flowers and trees. I take care of them, and they in turn add color to my life. I’ve developed a sensitivity toward this wildlife to the point that if a flower withers under my care, a sense of failure tugs at me. As I become more successful, though, I want to make my garden lush. Plans are in the works to add decorative trees — Japanese maples, redbuds and crape myrtles — along the back and side fences, and to plant blue and white hydrangeas as shrubs between the trees. Magazines and books on gardening litter my desk. I’m reading “Plants for Houston and the Gulf Coast” and I have ordered “Botany for Designers: A Practical Guide for Landscape Architects and Other Professionals.” I am by no means a professional gardener, just someone who has found a new passion amid an unprecedented time in all of our lives. David D. Medina is the director of Multicultural Community Relations in Rice’s Office of Public Affairs and a Rice Magazine contributor.
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Meditation for This Moment To combat stress caused by COVID-19, I take refuge in an ancient practice of meditation — and you can, too. By Alejandro Chaoul ’06
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COVID-19 HAS hijacked our amygdala — the reptilian part of the brain that helps regulate emotions and motivations, particularly those related to survival. This reptilian brain has taken charge, causing us to adopt a fightor-flight response mode in our daily lives. Usually, once a stressful situation is over, the brain gets back to “normal.” But when we don’t have time to rebalance our system between increasingly dire or stressful events, we may fall into a kind of chronic stress. This is the case for many people today as the worries and anxieties associated with COVID-19 pile up . Chronic stress has shown to have deleterious effects to almost all the biological systems in our bodies. Unmanaged, it can speed the aging process through shortening of our telomeres, which protect the integrity of our chromosomes, and increase the risk for heart disease, sleeping difficulties, digestive problems and even depression. Chronic stress also causes us to forego healthy eating and exercise habits — does this sound familiar? I was born and grew up in Argentina. At a young age, I had what I called “existential attacks.” I would wake up, sweating, with terrible uncertainty of what will happen to me after I died. From my crunching stomach to a mind imagining worst-case scenarios, I could feel a deep sense of anxiety.
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When I was just a bit older, I read the novel “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse. The story spoke about the sufferings of birth, old age, sickness and death, and about meditation and other practices to appease one’s relationship to these sufferings. I soon realized that “Siddhartha” was a novel about the life and teaching of the Buddha, and that knowledge led me to find a meditation teacher and to start a daily meditation practice. This helped me deal with my chronic anxiety. After graduating college, I traveled to India and Nepal, where I spent almost a year and met many Hindu and Buddhist teachers, including the Dalai Lama. That trip changed my life, and meditation became a central part of my lifestyle. Before long, I returned to Nepal to learn more about Tibetan yoga and the different forms of Tibetan Buddhist practices. That desire for learning eventually brought me to the University of Virginia, where I earned a master’s degree in religious studies. There, I learned about the science of meditation and was especially fascinated by the work of Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and the founder of Harvard’s Mind/Body Medical Institute. Benson’s research showed that meditation can counteract chronic stress and introduced the term “relaxation response.” This response explains the mechanism that counteracts the fight-or-flight impulse, rebalancing the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems so that the person can resume with a sense of normalcy.
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In 1996, I came to Houston to pursue a doctorate in religious studies at Rice at the suggestion of my Tibetan teacher, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. At the time, he was a Rockefeller fellow working with Anne Klein, a professor of religion at Rice, helping to translate ancient Buddhist texts. I had the wonderful opportunity to learn the academic aspects of Tibetan spiritual practices as well as deepen Tibetan mind-body practices like meditation and Tibetan yoga with my teacher and the meditation community in Houston. I also unexpectedly discovered a new focus for my career. My dad, who at that time had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer, was visiting Houston and asked me to go with him to MD Anderson for a consultation. Luckily, all went well with his treatment, and my dad has been healthy and cancer-free for more than 20 years. That visit to MD Anderson opened the door for me to apply my academic studies and personal meditation practice as a resource for people touched by cancer. I started as a volunteer, teaching meditation practices to cancer patients and their caregivers. By the time I graduated from Rice, I had started working as a mind-body intervention specialist at MD Anderson. With a few colleagues, we had also published our first study on the effects of practicing Tibetan yoga in a group of lymphoma patients. Some of the benefits included better sleep quality, quantity and latency — the time from when you want to sleep until you fall asleep — and less use of sleep medicine. In addition, patients in this group had fewer intrusive thoughts and reported having an increased spirituality. In other words, mind-body practices like meditation, mindfulness and yoga did not cure cancer, but they significantly improved quality of life and symptoms. In my two decades as a teacher at MD Anderson, I have led weekly meditation classes for patients and caregivers, continued to conduct research on the potential benefits of mind-body practices in people touched by cancer and directed the educational programs of integrative medicine. As our family realized the dangers of COVID-19, we canceled spring break plans with our collegeage children. Then came the news that both of their colleges, like Rice, would continue instruction online for the rest of the semester. We had to readapt our empty nest and plan how to divide the house into workstations. We also had to adjust to buying more groceries and doing more laundry, all the while listening to our children’s rap music.
50 RICE M AG A ZINE SUMMER 2020
The silver lining of this pandemic is having our children back at the house and spending more time together as a family without social distractions. I got to spend my birthday with them, which hadn’t happened since they were in high school. My wife, Erika de la Garza, who worked at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, and I started a morning routine to keep our sanity. The routine begins with meditation and Tibetan yoga movements and ends with enjoying several cups of mate — an Argentine beverage that tastes like a strong tea. Meditation and mind-body practices (and for me, sharing a cup of mate every morning) can help one cope, feel a little better and reconnect to a sense of normalcy. We don’t always have to be in the perfect space to learn about and practice meditation. In fact, sometimes when our life is going along as usual, we don’t reach for mind-body tools such as meditation because we don’t feel we need such practices. It is when our lives feel threatened or when we are facing difficulty that the reptilian brain is aroused as a survival mechanism, and we look for anything that may help us calm down a bit. Today, I continue to lead weekly meditations — many just 15 minutes long — for different audiences, including physicians and other health care providers in the Texas Medical Center. These short meditations can serve as an oasis in a long day, a way to connect and breathe into a sense of inner space in our inner home. A simple practice one could do is called the STOP formula. Following the acronym, Stop whatever you are doing in that moment, then Take a deep breath (bring your breath all the way down to your abdomen, not just your chest), Observe how you feel and then, only when you are ready, Proceed to what you need to do next. For me, it is important that we think of this time and the lessons learned in the context of our communities. It’s not just about one of us learning from these experiences, but each of us, so that we can have a whole community of flourishing individuals. As we continue dealing with the stresses of this pandemic, we cannot meditate the virus away, but meditating can help people cope and improve their well-being. Alejandro Chaoul is the founder of the Mind Body Spirit Institute at the Jung Center in Houston, where he leads regular meditation practices and other programs. Learn more at mbsihouston.org.
UNCHARTED Robert Stein, the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science, has been studying voting behavior and election administration since the early 2000s when he started working hand in hand with Secretary James A. Baker. Now Stein and his team of Rice faculty, including Elizabeth Vann, Philip Kortum, Dan Wallach and Claudia Ziegler Acemyan, are using their expertise to advise the Harris County Clerk’s Office on early and election-day voting, security, institutional influence, voting laws and more. Stein’s group was among the first to receive a grant from the Rice-sponsored COVID-19 Research Fund. Their goal is to assist Harris County in identifying and implementing safe and accessible voting opportunities. The project includes summer fellowships for three undergraduate students, who will analyze poll worker and voter survey data and recommend optimal locations for early voting in November. “The best way to make voting safe in the face of COVID-19 is to increase vote by mail, especially among those voters over 65 who are most vulnerable to the virus. The 12 days of in-person early voting can also contribute to safer conditions by spreading out the days and hours voters cast their ballots. These locations need to be spacious so social distancing can be maintained. The challenge, and one we are addressing in our study, is persuading voters to choose these options when casting their ballot in November.”
The COVID-19 Research Fund supports projects in diverse fields that mitigate current challenges, help end the pandemic and prepare for similar outbreaks in the future. Visit rice.edu/rice-responds to learn more about Rice’s global response and how you can help.
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NEXT UP 20 in Their 20s
A parallel between making movies and architecture has been a guiding force for Giorgio Angelini ’13, who earned his Master of Architecture at Rice. After a few years as a successful working architect, Angelini changed his blueprints to produce “Feels Good Man,” a documentary about the creator of the Pepe the Frog meme. Directed by Arthur Jones, the film won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Emerging Filmmaker at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and follows Pepe’s transformation from a cartoon to a symbol of hate. COVID-19
Kindness Stories
These Owls appeared on the cover of our Fall 2018 issue for the “20 Under 30” story.
Our Fall 2020 issue of Rice Magazine will feature a new round of 20 accomplished young alumni under 30 years old. Nominations came from a variety of sources, including fellow alumni, current students, staff and faculty. While Rice alums are always passionate and forward thinking, this distinct group has accomplished a lot in a short span of time. We’ll spotlight those who are enthusiastically pursuing vocations or avocations and have a unique story to share as they’ve created their own paths since exiting the Sallyport.
The COVID-19 pandemic altered the way we socialize, work, shop and accomplish daily tasks. While the initial shutdown was abrupt and challenging on many levels, members of the Rice community put aside their needs for the greater good of our campus and beyond. From cooking and donating food, to assembling personalized care packages, to creating protective equipment, to offering online art classes, the creativity and selflessness made an unprecedented time better for many. To date, more than a dozen “Tiny Acts of Kindness” stories have been written and posted online.