Issue 26, Volume 83

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Designing our future in space

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Issue 26, Volume 83

CREW MODULE

FUEL TANK

UH is home to the only space architecture program in the world. Here’s how they’re crafting the future of space travel. | PG. 6

SECOND FUEL TANK

ENGINE

LAUNCH MOUNT

SPORTS

OPINION

Senior javelin thrower shows heart

Special issue: Remembering genocides

Jack Thomas is back on the field after his year and a half long recovery, and he has marked his come back with the second-best mark in program history. | PG. 10

The Opinion section used this issue to honor the lives lost to horrible ethnic cleansing and bring awareness to current ongoing genocides. | PG. 13

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Dana C. Jones & Drew Jones, EDITORS

COMMUNITY

Volunteers 'keep Houston beautiful' with annual clean-up day

The Cougar

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ABOUT THE COUGAR The Cougar is published every Wednesday during the fall and spring semesters and online everyday at thedailycougar.com. The Cougar is supported in part by Student Service Fees. The first copy is free. Additional copies cost 25 cents.

CRISTOBELLA DURRETTE

STAFF WRITER @CRISTOBELLA_

“Just pull the tires out and leave them on the side of the road,” instructed volunteer and former Agape Development employee Ann Vicar.

The streets surrounding Agape Development, a Christian ministry that helps develop community leaders in the Third Ward, were lined with tires and other large-scale debris that had been pulled out from roadside ditches, waiting to be picked up.

This activity is part of the Metropolitan Volunteer Program’s seventh annual Rock the Block event, a day of service aimed at cleaning and beautifying neglected parts of Houston’s historic Third Ward neighborhood.

MVP partnered with local nonprofit Agape Development, the South East Transformation Alliance, or SETA, and GO Neighborhoods to come together for the clean-up event, which was in conjunction with Keep Houston Beautiful Day. “This event is important to the UH community and beyond because I feel like we all claim that UH is supporting our community in regards to the Third Ward, but we’re really not," MVP Director Lisa Menda said. "It’s very important to dedicate

i

COPYRIGHT No part of the newspaper in print or online may be reproduced without the consent of the director of the Center for Student Media.

ISSUE STAFF CLOSING EDITORS

Emily Burleson Jasmine Davis COPY EDITING

Morgan Horst COVER

Sonny Singh

One of the Metropolitan Volunteer Program's Rock the Block locations was Agape Development, a Christian ministry that develops community leaders. Agape Development picked up trash in their surrounding area. | Dana C. Jones/The Cougar

days where we can give back to the community. It’s our duty, it’s our backyard, it’s our community.”

Students spent the day at several different locations throughout the Third Ward, including Zollie Scales Park and George T. Nelson Park, cleaning up the effects of illegal trash

dumping that negatively impact more than just the curb appeal of the neighborhood.

“We’re hoping that people will become aware of the necessity to keep your community clean,” said SETA club president and fifty-year Third Ward resident Pauline Brown.

“It’s health, beautification, as well as safety reasons.”

After a morning spent cleaning up the community, the 130 volunteers stripped off their work gloves in favor of food and fun at the block party held at Agape Development, 6401 Calhoun Road. The closing celebration, which was open to all volunteers and residents of the surrounding neighborhood, featured a large inflatable slide for neigh-

borhood kids, interactive games, a basketball hoop and an array of refreshments.

Undeterred by unseasonably cold and drizzly weather, participants stood outside eating snow cones and jovially interacting with members of the community.

“It’s always nice to give back to the community, the campus and around the campus,” said True Furrh, an environmental sciences and civil engineering sophomore, about the event. “You have to give back to the area directly surrounding campus to be able to really engage in your community. It’s a direct way of giving back.” news@thedailycougar.com

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Part of the Student Life portfolio in the Division of Student Affairs, the CSM is concerned with the development of students, focusing on critical thinking, leadership, ethics, collaboration, intercultural competence, goal-setting and ultimately, degree attainment. While our students are engaged in producing and promoting media channels and content, our goal is to ensure they are learning to become better thinkers and leaders in the process.

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Some of the debris were tires that were left in ditches. A pickup truck came around the block several times, filling up the trunk with them. | Dana C. Jones/The Cougar

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PROFILE

Becoming blind helped a student quit drugs, start new life MICHAEL SLATEN

ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR @MICHAELSLATEN

Houston native Mikey Fields has been blind for eight years. Since then, he met his wife, had two kids and graduated in summer 2017 with an associate's degree from Houston Community College.

He began taking classes at the University in spring 2017 and now expects to graduate by spring 2020 if all goes right, he said.

Fields was a heavy drug user and dealer and struggling to keep employment before he lost his vision. The now 35-year-old graduated high school in 2001, and in the nine years that followed, he was arrested several times and bounced around, living in different areas of Houston.

Fields' transformation from a heavy drug user and dealer to a public relations junior with a wife and two kids came after years of loss and depression. Changing his life for the better came from a combination of help from his closest

loved ones and being forced to by becoming blind.

“If you would have saw me back then, you really wouldn’t have liked me,” Fields said. “You wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me. I probably would have stolen something out of your car.”

Before the blindness After graduating from Smiley High School in 2001, Fields worked at McDonald’s and joined a rap group called Livewire. He says his mindset then was “get high, get high and make some money.”

Livewire performed throughout Houston and even had a few performances in Louisiana and Mississippi. In the summer of 2001, Livewire, along with Fields, was traveling to Louisiana for a performance. The group rode in a minivan with four people and an SUV with three people.

Fields was riding in the minivan

BLIND STUDENT

Continues on page 8

Mikey Fields with his wife Lenora, and their two kids Mikey Fields junior and Michael Fields. | Richard Fletcher Jr./The Cougar

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North York Boat Launch is one of the six locations showcased by the Encounter project. "Crossing Horizons" represents the connecting of the Second and Fifth Wards on either side of the bayou. | Dana C. Jones/The Cougar

WHERE

FRESH & FAST MEET

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WE DELIVER! VISIT JIMMYJOHNS.COM TO FIND A LOCATION NEAR YOU

ART

Graphic design project aims to 'cross horizons' between Second, Fifth Wards DANA C. JONES

FEATURES EDITOR @DANACJONES_

Buffalo Bayou is one of Houston’s many historic sites, and it serves as a border between the Second and Fifth Wards. The nonprofit Buffalo Bayou Partnership focuses on one 10-mile section — out of the 52-mile long waterway — that flows from Shepherd Drive to the Port of Houston Turning Basin.

UH graphic design students created temporary art installations that reflect the cultural and industrial nature of those neighborhoods for the Partnership's Saturday event called "Encounter."

Its purpose was to “bring these neighborhoods to the bayou,” and gather the community's thoughts on how to bring the neighborhoods together, said Buffalo Bayou Partnership President Anne Olson. “Now they’re disconnected, so one goal is to preserve the legacy of those two neighborhoods."

Graphic design associate

professor Fiona McGettigan introduced the opportunity for UH design seniors to build installations along the bayou. “(McGettigan) was looking for a project for her students and also does graphic design work for Buffalo Bayou Partnership,” Olson said.

Planning for the "Encounter" project started in December 2017. The students had to present their projects at an exhibition at Sunset Coffee Building in one of the would-be locations: Allen’s Landing.

After the presentation, they started construction on their installations.

The installations are strung along the bayou, starting at Allen’s Landing on Commerce Street in Downtown. There are five more points thereafter east of Downtown, stretching down to Yolanda Black Navarro Buffalo Bend Nature Park.

CROSS HORIZONS

Continues on next page

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CROSS HORIZONS

than the others. The landing is considered the first port of Houston and where the city Many of the installations started. The location features have stencils along the wharfs a crash course in all the other of the bayou in addition to points in the route, represented interactive pieces. One of the through boxes designed by stencils was at the North York graphic design senior Nadia Boat Launch. As visitors enjoyed Tran. zydeco music, free Saint Arnold's “You can read about their beer and food truck fare, they history, you can learn about could see the words "Crossing what the site's about, and you horizons" spelled on the wharf. can also engage with it by The new mural is the work of writing your response to what graphic design senior Isabella you want to see in the Buffalo Serimontrikul.

Bayou,” Tran said.

“It’s kind of a poetic narrative Tran said she and other about crossing horizons that students have worked on talks about connecting Fifth and projects like this one in the past, Second Ward in this community but they never came to fruition. recreational space that they’re “We’ve done other community trying to make,” Serimontrikul projects before that didn’t said. happen, but this one is really Her interactive was an interesting because we can see it entire map of Buffalo Bayou in real life, and people from the and the other five points. “On community can interact with it,” that map we marked Houston Tran said. neighborhoods, the boat After doing this project, launches along the bayou Tran said she hopes to do more and the nine access points to community-based projects the bayou in that area,” said that have to deal will social Serimontrikul. awareness once she graduates.

The first location at Allen’s This project offers a Landing has more historic roots chance for1the3/29/18 Buffalo Bayou 10-11210_Cougar News April_2_print.pdf 9:45 AM

Continued from previous page

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Fiona Sinha/The Cougar

Partnership to have dialogue with the community. Three of the installations — at Yolanda Black Navarro, Japhet Creek, and the Gravel Silos — are still posted along the bayou.

“At this event, we’re at out sites and engaging the community in different ways,” Serimontrikul said. “We just want people to come out and have fun and tell us what they want Buffalo Bayou Partnership to put in these park spaces.” features@thedailycougar.com

Design students Erick Valasquez, Jessie Vittoria, Sharon Chu, and Isabella Serimontrikul who worked on the North York Boat launch. | Dana C. Jones/The Cougar

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Jan 28, 1986

Dana C. Jones & Drew Jones, EDITORS

July 21, 2011

First and only lift off disaster of the space shuttle program

Space shuttle program ends

~2020s

May 6, 2002

July 20, 1969

NASA, SpaceX want to go to the moon

SpaceX founded

Apollo 11; first man on the moon

Sept 28, 2008 Falcon 1 is the first privately developed rocket to orbit Earth

April 12, 1981

Feb 6, 2018

First flight of the space shuttle program

May 5, 1961 First American in space

SpaceX launches its largest rocket, sends a Tesla roadster into space

Nov 20, 1998

First segment of the Internation Space Station launches

~2033

NASA projected Mars mission

Sonny Singh/The Cougar

IN FOCUS

TECH

'Space City', UH look to lead future of spaceflight research DREW JONES

CAMPUS EDITOR @DRWSZN

Houston, we have a problem.

Those famous, often misquoted words are emblematic of Houston’s identity as the home and heart of human attempts to explore the far reaches of space as early as the Apollo 13 mission.

Such is the prominence of the city in the space industry that UH has become home to a one-of-itskind program and many other research projects dedicated to solving the problems of spaceflight before they reach the desks at Mission Control.

Yaritza Bernal, an industrial engineering masters student, said she always wanted to help people in addition to being an astronaut as a kid, so she went into the medical field and graduated from UH with a biomedical engineering degree in 2017. Instead of going into space herself, Bernal studies how astronauts' bodies react to being in space.

She entered the space research arena through NASA’s Career Exploration Program in high school, and that co-op internship allowed her to combine her interests in medicine and space.

Now she works at NASA’s Johnson Space Center as a human factors engineer in the anthropometry and biomechanics laboratory, which focuses on the

human body’s movement, its measurements, proportions and, as it relates to space, what happens to the body in microgravity.

“It’s a neat experience to be able to do and help with the space program; especially the people,” Bernal said. “I’ve learned a lot of things on the job, but UH definitely gave me the background I needed to get started.”

Through her work in anthropometry, Bernal and her team perform 3-D scans of astronauts—she has worked with more than 50—after they return from space and observe how their bodies differ from pre-flight scans.

She studies how the human body operates inside a spacesuit, which is more intimate job than just engineering a suit, which mostly focuses on functionality, not ergonomics, she said.

Bernal's team at JSC consists of eight people, and they can work on up to four projects at a time, she said. She’s working on analyzing the data from an underwater motion capture study and another project involving how people in spacesuits respond to microgravity.

One-of-a-kind Olga Bannova, director of the Space Architecture program at the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture at UH, said students who enter are given the

more sustainable ( for everyone).”

'Space city'

From a young age, Yaritza Bernal always wanted to explore the field of space.

Now as a graduate student at UH and a human factors engineer at NASA, her dreams are becoming reality. | Courtesy of Yaritza Bernal

freedom to choose the projects that align with their passions.

In recent years, SICSA projects varied from designing a singleperson spacecraft to a Martian orbiter to a three-person spacecraft intended to travel to and collect samples from Mars’ moons.

SICSA is working closely on projects for NASA, private contractors and European and Russian space agencies like the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, an orbiting station designed to facilitate transport to Mars and farther deep-space locations.

Space architecture students are encouraged to focus on all aspects of a space-related challenge, Bannova said. Whether it’s using limited resources, designing

a habitable space, building an upper stage launch vehicle or 3-D printing materials, they do it all.

To achieve extensive manned space travel, engineers, scientists and students in programs like SICSA will need to solve issues like protecting people and equipment from cosmic radiation, how to recycle water on long journeys, sustaining air quality and producing food mid-trip that can support life, Bannova said.

She believes commercial spaceflight will play an important role in the coming years by taking on some of the responsibilities that have thus far belonged solely to the public sector.

“I hope that there will be more commercial presence,” Bannova said. “Because that would make it

Human spaceflight research is what drew David Temple to UH. He's a doctoral candidate and teaching assistant in the Health and Human Performance department.

“Being in Houston, you’re in Space City, so there’s a lot of opportunities,” Temple said.

Before coming to the University, he'd spent a summer at NASA in the Space Launch System program.

Temple has worked with Health and Human Performance assistant professor Beom-Chan Lee and professor Charles Layne on the “effects of tibialis anterior vibration on postural control when exposed to support surface translations,” according to the Somatosensory and Motor Research report.

The new direction with which private companies are heading is incredible to see, Temple said, and he believes there’s exciting new potential for human spaceflight research.

He knows firsthand what it’s like to envision new opportunities.

As a child, he wanted to become an astronaut but discovered in his adolescence he was colorblind,

SPACE CITY

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The space shuttle program developed six orbital spacecraft over its 30-year history: Atlantis, Challenger and Columbia (both destroyed), Discovery, Endeavour and Enterprise. | Drew Jones/The Cougar

SPACE CITY

Continued from previous page which would prevent him from passing a NASA-required physical.

Private companies could open up more people to the experience of spaceflight with different rules or regulations, Temple said, and he still hopes to one day sail beyond the atmosphere.

Lauren Gulley Cox, another doctoral candidate and research assistant in Health and Human Performance, received an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Her end goal was always to come to Houston.

She was always most interested in the human aspect of space travel, and after an internship at the neuroscience laboratory at Johnson Space Center, she hopes to work at the agency researching astronauts’ health in the future.

“I would love to be a researcher,” Cox said. “Making sure the astronauts have sensory motor health or exercise. I would be happy to help in any aspect (of space life science).”

Newcomers enter the field Now, zealous private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX are leaping into spaceflight and taking over responsibilities like resupplying the International Space Station.

SpaceX is laser-focused on building faster, higher-powered rockets, which is propelling the

future of deep-space travel toward a bold new horizon.

Bannova, who directs UH's space architecture program, views the private-public balance mostly as a collaboration. She wants students to focus on their projects through the lens of teamwork.

She challenges them to expand and adapt their work to include people from different backgrounds who perform different activities, like biologists or chemists, because private companies could introduce specialists who are non-astronauts to space missions, she said.

Bernal, the UH alumna, believes the private-public balance is necessary because of the issues NASA has faced moving cargo since retiring the space program.

She said she’s proud of the fact that the company leading the charge into space is U.S.-based.

But who really holds jurisdiction in space and issues surrounding national security could make the proper balance between private companies and government agencies confusing, Cox said. She believes SpaceX and NASA should be required to work together and develop common standards for the projects they team up on.

Temple believes newcomer companies should respect the experience of an agency like NASA. Temple and Cox agreed on safety being the top priority in future missions, and both said caution should be taken to ensure expediency doesn't take precedence over proper standards and procedures.

“The last thing you’d want would

be to have an inexperienced or not-as-well trained astronaut going up there and causing a big problem,” Cox said.

for research and observational purposes, showed that being isolated from people on Earth takes more than just a physical toll, she said.

In the words of Kelly himself, “a year is a long time to live without

Knowing the risks Still, researchers across the world are concerned with the longevity of space missions into the far reaches of the solar system and the effects of prolonged travel on the human body.

“There’s still a lot we don’t even know,” Temple said. Information is still lacking about the harmful effects of radiation in space and the risk factors of sensory motor deprivation, bone deterioration and mental stress, he said.

While our understanding of microgravity is ever-increasing, nearly all of its effects on humans are negative, Temple said. One example: Astronauts who have returned from even six-month missions on the ISS don’t adapt quickly to functioning normally, he said.

That’s before considering how to logistically get astronauts back to full health on a mission to Mars, he said, which has one-third the surface gravity of Earth and, by most estimates, would take three years.

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SPACE CITY

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BLIND STUDENT

Continued from page 3 but wanted to switch over to the SUV. The people inside the SUV — while drinking and smoking — had a louder music system and fancy rims. Fields thought being in there would “make the ride a lot easier.”

He switches from the minivan to the SUV. Driving down the interstate, the minivan in front of the SUV calls and says a state trooper spotted them.

The SUV's driver hands Fields, who's sitting in the passenger seat, a beer, and he hides it under his seat. The state trooper pulls them over and pulls the driver out of the SUV. About 30 seconds pass, and the state trooper goes to question Fields.

The state trooper questions Fields' lack of seat belt and asks for his ID. “Right when I was putting my hand in my pocket, he started fumbling first, and yelled ‘FREEZE FREEZE, PUT YOUR HANDS UP,’” Fields said.

Fields puts his hands up, and the state trooper asks him to move his seat belt away from him slowly.

Fields moves the seat belt with his right hand and looks to his left.

“I look to the left and see a gun on the dashboard, and I’m like, what the hell is this,” he said. “This is why he’s weirding out like that.”

There was a small revolver on the dashboard. Fields spent a lot of money in the aftermath of his arrest, and that’s when things started going bad for him.

“I think about this situation a lot,” said Fields, who left Livewire when he was 21. “When young brothers get killed by the police, that could have easily been me.”

After the incident, Fields says he hung around the wrong people even more. He began using cocaine in high school, and at that point, he started to use PCP and ecstasy.

Fields was arrested again in March 2003 for selling marijuana.

He lost his job at McDonald’s a few months later. The 20 days he spent in jail for the drug charge were some of the worst of his life, he said.

“I was hanging around people who would steal and rob,” Fields said. “ I think that’s the most dangerous thing, when it becomes normal.”

Home life Now Fields lives at Lighthouse Living Center 2 on the southwest side of Houston, his home of seven years. Lenora Fields, his wife, drove for METROLift — a transportation service for people with disablities — when they met.

The couple has two kids, Mikey Junior, five, and Michael, who is one. They say Michael is the “boss

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Dana C. Jones & Drew Jones, EDITORS

of the house.” Junior runs around the house stirring up trouble.

Lenora married Fields in December 2012, a month away from giving birth to Junior.

“When I met him I decided to be serious with him. He’s not a 'blind man' to me,” Lenora said. “He’s a man who happens to be blind.”

Lenora — an HCC student — said her main goal was for her husband to go to Criss Cole Rehabilitation Center in Austin to gain independence before they got married.

Criss Cole taught Fields how to navigate city streets, use a computer, cook and care for himself.

Learning how to use the computer being blind was the most important skill he learned, Fields said.

Lenora doesn’t like when Fields plays the blind card when it comes to home duties. One day, she was taking all the groceries inside and became dog-tired doing it without any help from Fields. She made him start taking the groceries inside.

It was challenging for Lenora, learning to live with Fields. “I’m pretty positive about everything, and I had no idea it would get as challenging as it has,” she said.

Numb the pain

Mikey Fields has spent the last several years transforming his life. The former heavy drug user is now married with two kids and one year away to completeing his bacherlors' degree in public realtions | Michael Slaten/The Cougar

In 2003, Fields met who would be his girlfriend of four years, Karla Youngblood. They were close. They would get high together all the time, and neither would stop one another from going too far.

Youngblood died from an overdose of a combination of

Fields' turning point came when he was living at Cuney Homes in August 2007. He walked outside one late summer morning and saw three pregnant women looking for crack rocks on the ground.

"(I'm) either going to go to jail, be on crack, or die and go to hell."

Mikey Fields, public relations junior cocaine and prescription medicine in March 2007. Fields feels partly responsible for her death.

He got a call about Youngblood’s death from her uncle. “I already knew what happened,” he said. “I knew how high she would get.”

He went outside the apartments he was living in at the time with her and began crying. He fell into a depression over her death.

Fields went to live with Youngblood's sister at Cuney Homes Apartments in the Third Ward, and he stayed for a few months. Around this time, Fields started having inflation and pain in his eyes. “Like having a really bad toothache in your eyes,” he said.

He went to the doctor to receive medicine for the pain. He was diagnosed with uveitis, or inflammation of the eye. He didn’t have insurance at the time, so by summer, he had no way to deal with the pain other than taking drugs.

Moving to grandma’s

It broke his heart.

Fields, who now attends church regularly, felt Jesus spoke to him at that moment. He says he was told that those babies didn’t have a chance, but he did. With the way things were going, he said, he was "either going to go to jail, be on crack, die and go to hell."

The next morning, Fields wanted to get out of Cuney Homes. He was let on a METRO bus with no ticket and ended up riding it to his grandmother’s house across town. His grandma took him in. He was not working for a while and still dealing with pain in his eyes.

But after seeing the pregnant women looking for crack and now living with his grandma unemployed, Fields made himself not take hard drugs again, and he hasn’t, to this day.

'Saving his life' Fields developed glaucoma in 2008. His vision worsened over the next two years before he became

totally blind. Glaucoma occurs when the nerve connecting the eye to the brain is damaged, and it affects 2.2 million people in the U.S., according to All About Vision.

Fields jokes that the worst part about becoming blind was he couldn’t play the Grand Theft Auto anymore. He would dream about playing the video game after he went blind.

When Fields started receiving disability income for his blindness, he made sure to pay his grandmother every month for taking him in and “saving his life.” Fields started hanging with the people he did for years less often, which helped him stay out of trouble.

Fields started becoming more aware of the services offered to disabled people, having learned from others after visiting the doctor so often for his health concerns.

He moved into his current house — Lighthouse Living Center Apartments — in 2011 after living with his grandmother for three years.

Drugs — outside of marijuana — were no longer a part of his life.

Looking forward Being blind on such a large campus has its challenges, Fields says. He gets help from his classmate Celeste Cornett walking between two of his classes, but the rest of the time, he navigates campus he uses UHPD’s escort service. He takes his tests online or at the Center for Students with

DisABILITIES. He’s at school to sharpen his skills.

Fields is over a decade older than the average student at the University. He’s not bothered by it and says he connects with others easily. But he wishes he would have gotten here earlier if he hadn’t been getting in trouble before.

“Darn dude, you were tripping, you could have got this out of the way,” Fields says to himself about going to college now.

Lenora says being blind helps him see things from a different perspective, and it’s his unique trait.

His grandmother, who was there helping him the whole way, passed away from cancer in December 2016. Fields thinks she knew she had cancer but didn’t want to receive treatment.

Fields was saddened by her passing but felt he did right by her with cleaning up his act when he moved in with her. Before she died, he told her the “little shack in the middle of the hood” felt like a mansion to him. He was safe there. The walls of her home were rickety, and people could feel the outside breeze inside the house.

His grandmother worried she hadn’t done enough to help him, but he reassured her right before her death.

“Just always know your shack, with your kindness, you saved my life.” news@thedailycougar.com

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NEWS

Dana C. Jones & Drew Jones, EDITORS

Inside SICSA, graduate students are earning masters of science degrees in the world’s only space architecture program able to identify and solve the problems of the future of space travel. | Drew Jones/The Cougar

SPACE CITY

Continued from page 7 into the future of space, the private and public spheres should split their focuses and delve into the areas with which they are most comfortable.

“You could argue that Elon (Musk) and other companies should worry about Mars, and let NASA get out of human spaceflight altogether and just do universe exploration,” Layne said.

As federal administrations shift rapidly from one priority to another, the balance between NASA and the private sphere has been difficult to maintain, he said.

Layne worked at NASA in the Space Life Sciences Program during the late '90s studying interactions between living organisms and characteristics of the space environment. He remembers when President George H.W. Bush said he wanted the U.S. to go to Mars, while NASA employees wore buttons saying “Mars 2030.”

Layne believes SpaceX should take over developing larger, cheaper rockets, like the “world’s most powerful” Falcon Heavy rocket, because it will drive down the costs of hardware, allowing space agencies to focus on larger priorities.

“The hope is that if NASA can spend less money doing the basic things that private companies can do," Layne said, "then there will be more money to devote toward better telescopes, or better preparation to go into deep space."

But all wouldn’t be solved by handing the reins of space travel over to the Tesla-driving, “Space Oddity”-loving CEOs of the world, Layne said.

On the other hand, Bernal believes that expertise should play

a major factor in who sends out the next manned trip, so NASA should handle manned crews and private entities could handle shuttles and cargo.

A new era Thirty-seven years ago on April 12, the Space Shuttle program at NASA began as a triumph with the maiden voyage of Columbia.

Over the course of its 30-year history sending people and cargo into low-Earth orbit, 135 missions were flown by the Space Transportation System, yet it endured two major tragedies — Challenger exploded upon takeoff and Columbia disintegrated during reentry.

The accidents killed 14 astronauts.

While disasters are inevitable given the power and dynamics of rockets, the success rates are surprisingly high given the low number of mission-ending malfunctions, Layne said.

Agencies and companies are entering uncharted territory because there’s never been an alternative to manned missions piloted by NASA, he said, so it could become difficult to assign blame.

“If SpaceX (was at fault), people would say, ‘Oh, (the astronaut) knew the risk,’ but if NASA (was at fault), then there would be a crisis,” Layne said.

NASA is currently developing the Orion spacecraft, which is expected to take humans farther than any mission has gone and will begin testing later this year. Orion will feature “crew and service modules, a spacecraft adapter and a revolutionary launch abort system that will significantly increase crew safety,” according to the agency.

SpaceX’s current directive, at

the behest of its founder, is to complete a cargo mission to Mars aboard the reusable BFR rocket by 2022 and send a crew to the red planet by 2024. Beyond 2030, Musk wants humanity to “become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species,” meaning naturally inhabit more planets than just Earth.

NASA’s efforts, as outlined by its 2018 Strategic Plan, revolve around four strategic goals: expanding human knowledge through new scientific discoveries, extending human presence deeper into space and to the moon for sustainable long-term exploration, addressing national challenges and catalyzing economic growth and optimizing operational capabilities.

Outside of potential disasters, Layne said radiation and crew housing are significant limiting factors in spaceflight.

Layne has also contributed to research on programs like Mars in a Box, which is a UH collaboration with NASA designed to improve and maintain astronauts’ sensorimotor function during space missions.

UH has a significant advantage in having NASA “in its backyard,” Layne said, because of the valuable face-to-face interactions students are able to receive from the agency’s scientists.

SICSA, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, started as the dream of space startup founders James Calaway, Guillermo Trotti and Larry Bell.

Bell, who started at UH in 1978, helmed the program for nearly its entire history until stepping down last year, leading to the appointment of Bannova.

With the help of a Japanese benefactor, Bell and UH received the endowment to begin the program, which in 2003 became

The Space Architecture program at UH and its director, Olga Bannova, challenge students to envision a foundation for solutions to problems once considered far off but are now just over the horizon. | Drew Jones/The Cougar

the only program in the world to offer a master of science degree in space architecture.

Students come to UH and the space architecture program because of its proximity to Johnson Space Center and for the expertise and inspiration they receive from NASA professionals who are excited to share their work, Bannova said.

“When you meet people who are really devoted to what they’re working on, and excited and motivated, it’s wonderful,” she said.

Accepting the challenge Due to budget cuts and the difficulty present in funding programs NASA wants to pursue, collaboration with the commercial space industry is a positive sharing experience, Bernal said.

Regulations have become stricter, she said, but private companies like SpaceX should take on NASA’s “we’ve done it before” attitude.

She considers Kelly's time in space to be NASA's highest achievement of the past few years.

It was also an endeavor to see how long he could stay in space based

on what was happening to his body.

Her work remains challenging because no two people are alike when it comes to test results, she said, and the impact of spaceflight on the body can vary widely based on the duration of the mission, the health of the astronaut and how accustomed they are to being in space.

She plans to go further into the realm of her research, which she truly enjoys, she said. She values being able to come to UH with the goal of becoming more well-rounded by gaining a valuable engineering background to complement her work with the human body.

While NASA is under intense scrutiny because of its sky-high profile, a manned mission to Mars is “definitely” possible by the end of the next decade, she said, and hopes SpaceX will follow suit in chasing humanity's dreams into the final frontier.

“It’s a good challenge,” Bernal said. “We need something new to keep the public faith alive.” features@thedailycougar.com

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Peter Scamardo, EDITOR

Javelin thrower Jack Thomas came back after two years of not competing for the Cougars and threw the second best distance in program history (71.58m) in his very first meet. | Courtesy of UH Athletics

TRACK & FIELD

Unlikely senior javelin thrower stands alone in his field PETER SCAMARDO

SPORTS EDITOR @PLSCAMARDO2

Every year, an athlete at the top of their game, ready to take on the world, comes crashing down due to an unforeseen injury.

That happened to senior Jack Thomas in a big way. In 2016, after taking an entire semester off from the track & field team to improve a heart condition, Thomas accomplished that and went on to compete in the javelin throw at the Olympic Trials. But an injury to his UCL knocked Thomas out of competition for the next year and a half.

Yet in his very first meet back from injury, the Cougar Spring Break Invitational on March 15, Thomas threw the second-best mark in program history at 71.58m, the sixth-best javelin throw in the NCAA this season.

“If you ask any athlete, they will tell you they feel like they have more in the tank and they always want to throw further,” Thomas said, “but it was definitely exciting.

Also to do it at UH with all my friends who I hadn’t got to compete

with ( for so long), it was great.”

Making connections Thomas is one of just a handful of track & field athletes at UH who was not recruited.

While still playing baseball and football at Fort Bend Christian Academy, Thomas frequently came up to the University to receive lessons from Rayner Noble, the Cougar baseball coach from 1994 to 2010.

It was during these visits that Thomas met Tom Tellez, the former UH head track & field coach who trained Olympic gold medalists Carl Lewis and Leroy Burrell. Tellez started helping Thomas develop his speed for football, and he convinced Tony Levine, UH's head football coach at the time, to recruit Thomas as a walk-on.

Thomas redshirted his freshman year on the football team, and in the offseason Tellez convinced him to come to the track team and compete in the javelin throw, even though he had never thrown one before.

“I came in as a walk on, I got redshirted. Nothing was going

wrong with football, but at my first track meet I threw 65 meters, which is far enough to qualify for regionals," Thomas said. "So I thought, 'Maybe I have potential in this.' It was more of what went right with track versus what went wrong with football.”

As the Cougars' only javelin thrower, Thomas lacks a partner to hold him accountable and push him to improve, like most athletes do. Despite throwing alone, when he's in shape, Thomas has been a key cog in the track & field machine.

"It does make things kind of lonely," Thomas said. "But hey, I don’t have to worry about anyone stealing my javelins."

Beat of the heart During the 2015 and 2016 seasons, Thomas was being treated for atrial fibrillation, a condition that can cause the heart to beat sporadically. Thomas said his father shares the same condition. In 2016, Thomas felt arrhythmia in his heart, despite the drugs he was prescribed to prevent it.

That required a checkup at the

hospital, where Thomas decided he wanted to get to a point where he could compete without having to rely on medication.

“I didn’t want to be medicated.

My dad is not medicated,” Thomas said. “The only reason I was (medicated) was because I was in a competition setting, so my doctors and cardiologists were a little bit concerned that I could go into AFib while competing. But I didn’t want that to be the case, so I took the semester off to get that situated.”

Thomas also used the semester off to recover from scapular impingement in his shoulder, which was preventing him from throwing.

But Thomas got to full heath just in time to compete in the Olympic trials in 2016.

At the trials, he tore his UCL in his elbow, knocking him out of competition and keeping him sidelined for the entire 2017 season.

The Truman Show Thomas’ historic season-opening throw was made even more special given his medically-induced breaks in competition. The success the whole program has been

experiencing makes Thomas feel like Jim Carrey in "The Truman Show," in which Carrey learns his life is actually a TV show, and he is the star.

The national media has caught on to how well the sprinters are running for UH. They expect to win at nationals. With athletes like senior distance runner Brian Barraza in the 3000m steeplechase and sophomore multi Nathaniel Mechler in the decathlon, the Cougars are rounding out a squad to make a run at the title come May. Thomas’ presence on the team gives the Cougars one more weapon at the national meet.

“In many ways I feel UH’s story right now is like (a movie),” Thomas said. “It seems the parts are just randomly coming together in such a way that we will be in a perfect position to do well at nationals and potentially win the national meet.

Especially, ( for me) coming off that surgery there was no guarantee that I was going to be able to throw the way I did before it. It definitely feels like the stars aligned.” sports@thedailycougar.com

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SPORTS

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Peter Scamardo, EDITOR

FOOTBALL

Q&A: Ward Jr.'s 'little brother' ready to make plays JACKSON GATLIN

STAFF WRITER @JTGATLIN

John Tyler High School is the embodiment of a true Friday night lights football school, producing notable alumni that include 1977 Heisman Trophywinning running back Earl Campbell, former UH linebacker Tyus Bowser and former quarterback Greg Ward Jr. The Cougars may have found Ward's doppleganger in freshman quarterback Bryson Smith.

Rated a three-star recruit by ESPN coming out of high school, Smith closed out his senior year with 3,277 yards passing and 55 total touchdowns - 32 passing, 23 rushing.

Smith made his debut for the Cougars at the Red & White Game on Saturday, going nine of 15 passing for 99 yards and rushing for another 26.

The Cougar spoke with Smith after practice to discuss his transition from high school to college and his future here at the University of Houston.

The Cougar: You were recruited by some top-level schools, including UT and SMU, when you came out of high school, so what ultimately made you want to come to the University of Houston?

Bryson Smith: I just wanted a place that felt like home. I wanted to pursue a good education, and it's perfect for me because it isn’t far from home.

I don’t really like being too far away from my family, so that played a major part.

Redshirt freshman quarterback Bryson Smith's stats and stature make him look like the second coming of Greg Ward Jr. The John Tyler High School alumnus even chose Houston over schools like Texas and SMU to follow in the footsteps of his former classmate, who he sees as a big brother. | Peter Scamardo/The Cougar

TC: Were you aware of what Greg Ward Jr. was doing here before you came up?

Smith: Yeah, he’s like my brother.

We went to the same middle school, same high school and now the same college.

He and I are real close, and he had a lot of influence on me coming here.

TC: Do you see any similarities between yourself and him? We already know you’re wearing his number.

Smith: Of course. We have similar playstyles, but at the end of the day he’s his own person and I’m my own person.

We’re just guys who make plays.

TC: What’s it been like coming into the program here?

Smith: We’re just trying to get in tune with everything, like with the new offense.

Defense right now isn’t really making a lot of changes, but we’re just trying to move forward and get better every day.

TC: How have you and D’Eriq King been working on adapting to the new offense?

Smith: Getting into the film room and a lot of studying. Really though, it just comes down to us ballin’ at the end of the day. We’re just playmakers, and you’re going to see a lot of that this season.

TC: Do you have any personal goals for yourself this season?

Smith: Matter of fact I do. When my number is called, I just want to be ready and be the playmaker that I’ve always been.

TC: What were you hoping to accomplish at the Red & White Game on Saturday?

Smith: Being fluid with the offense, minimizing my mistakes and just having fun. Enjoy the moment.

TC: Do you have a specific matchup you’re excited about this fall?

Smith: Every week is a specific

In the Red & White Game, Smith showed his ability to throw and run with the ball, passing for 99 yards through the air and adding another 26 on the ground, all in limited playing time. In a full four quarters, he has the potential to put up numbers just like the last person to wear the No. 1 jersey. | Peter Scamardo/The Cougar

matchup. We just try to take it one game at a time and beat whoever we have that week.

sports@thedailycougar.com

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Peter Scamardo, EDITOR

BASEBALL

Two Houstons to face off in second annual Sanders Cup ANDRES CHIO

ASSISTANT SPORTS EDITOR @ CHIOANDRES

In 1836, Sam Houston led Texas in declaring independence from Mexico and started a revolution.

Houston's name has inspired movies, television shows, books and, of course, the city where this publication and University lie.

Two schools inspired by the general will face off next week in a clash of two of the top teams in Texas college baseball.

Sam Houston State and the University of Houston will play in the second Don Sanders Cup, a contest born out of the two rising programs' competitiveness and shared history.

Over the last four seasons, the two schools have been consistently strong while sitting near the top of their conferences for the first time in the programs' histories. The competitiveness is apparent in their head-to-head records, as Sam Houston has a narrow 8-7 lead over Houston during head coach Todd Whitting's tenure.

From 2011 through the 2016, the two teams played each other twice each year and split the series each time, except for in 2015, when the Cougars won both matchups.

The Bearkats got revenge last

season by winning 5-4, 12-2 and 3-2 in a clean sweep of the inaugural Don Sanders Cup.

Common bond Don Sanders is another man who connects the two schools.

Sanders, an alumnus of Sam Houston State, was appointed to the University of Houston System Board of Regents and served from November 1983 to August 1989.

Baseball has been one of Sanders' greatest passions. He has owned many Texas teams, including the Houston Astros and Corpus Christi Hooks, and he helped found the Round Rock Express.

Sam Houston State named its baseball stadium after him in 2007 after he donated $1 million to the baseball program.

Due to Sanders' contributions to the schools and the sport of baseball, the schools decided to name the series after him.

Shootout potential The series' first game will be at UH's Schroeder Park on Tuesday, the next one at SHSU's Don Sanders Stadium on Wednesday, and the third at a neutral site, the Constellation Field in Sugar Land, almost two weeks later, on May 1.

The first half of UH's season

Junior relief pitcher Nolan Bond could receive his third start of the season in the midweek series against Sam Houston State. The Cougars have struggled to find stability in the Tuesday pitching slot this season. | Thomas Dwyer/The Cougar

has not been ideal. The team is going 19-12 in the first 31 games, while Sam Houston has a 24-7 record, which is much better than the Bearkats were doing at this point last season.

Sam Houston's biggest strength this season has been its offense, which is averaging 6.6 runs per game.

The Bearkats have seven batters hitting over .300, and four different batters have hit five or more home runs so far this season, while the Cougars has only three hitters with batting averages over .300 and no one with five home runs.

But in the midweek games, which test the teams' pitching

depth, the Bearkats have only been slightly stronger, going 5-2 while the Cougars are 4-3.

The series between will likely come down to a shootout, but if the Cougar pitchers can play at their peak, they might just avoid getting eaten up by the Bearkats. sports@thedailycougar.com

Offense lights up at annual Red & White Game Red team rode a strong offensive showing to a 34-17 victory over White

Junior wide receiver Courtney Lark made it clear he will be the No. 1 option for quarterback D'Eriq King. Lark caught just three passes for 107 yards, the longest being a 60 yard pass that resulted in his only touchdown of the day. The second longest pass of the game. | Peter Scamardo/The Cougar

Junior running back Mulbah Car showed off his toughness for the Red team, totaling 72 yards on 10 rushes and scoring two touchdowns. He and junior Kevrin Justice combined for three scores and 171 yards on the ground, showcasing a 1-2 punch in the running game. | Peter Scamardo/The Cougar

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OPINION

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Anusheh Siddique, EDITOR

AWARENESS

How can we remember Rwandan genocide if we don't learn about it?

The Genocide Memorial Church in western Rwanda collects skulls found underneath its sanctuary and displays them in this a reminder and memorial of lives lost to genocide. | Courtesy of Adam Jones

T

he United Nations commemorates April 7 as the Day of Remembrance of the Rwandan Genocide, a day to reflect on the horrors that took the lives of 800,000 innocents 24 years ago. The history of the Rwandan genocide is one that is barely recognized in U.S history books and strikes a deep discomfort within us.

This discomfort is JANET not enough for us to MIRANDA aide the citizens of OPINION COLUMNIST six countries who are currently in the midst of genocide.

We cannot honor a history we do not present in our curricula or our public policy. Our selective amnesia, which leads to diplomatic unresponsiveness and general ignorance, extends to every genocide and prevents us from preventing them in the future.

It is not that we do not remember; instead, we have chosen to forget.

In Rwanda, neighbors murdered neighbors. Hutu husbands murdered their Tutsi wives. Tutsi women were

raped as an act of war, spiking the country's HIV rate and plaguing innocent women and their newborns.

The Tutsis, the minority, were swiftly and methodically murdered by the Hutus, the majority. There was no escape as the borders were blocked and the country sunk into a manhunt for Tutsis.

The Hutus used radio and television to spew propaganda that mandated the death of the Tutsis.

It was especially easy to quickly identify people of the Tutsi ethnicity due to the group classification ID introduced by the Belgian colonial government. The existence of an ethnic ID card introduced the rigidity of a racial concept that had never existed before.

The country was left in ruins as survivors struggled to bring the wrongdoers to justice.

The United States and the U.N. claimed to be unaware of the violence, but some months before killings began, a U.N. general sent an infamous “genocide fax” warning of the plot to exterminate the Tutsis.

Former President Bill Clinton was apprehensive about any deployment after the catastrophe in Somalia that cost 18

U.S lives. Eighty-five percent of citizens at the time were categorized as neither well informed nor interested in foreign policy, and there would be no support for deployment of solders in Rwanda.

People in the United States have a shallow understanding of genocide.

Political discourse and misinformation have tainted its meaning, and that led to an insensitivity toward Rwandan victims.

The education system presents a distorted version of the Holocaust, the most well known genocide in our curriculum.

We learn about the event and its victims but not the about the socioeconomic conditions that surrounded it. It is a challenge to prevent such conditions from arising again when we aren't even taught what they are.

Anne Frank's diary is the crux of that curriculum because it is so well documented, but her most iconic quote —"In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart"—does not reflect the reality of these grim years.

U.S. history curricula skim over the transition from ghettos to concentration camps and propaganda in the media about the Jewish and the other victims

of the Holocaust, such as LGBT and/or disabled survivors.

The Holocaust is understood as an isolated incident, an anomaly in history, as opposed to an event the Nazis had been slowing introducing since Hitler's rise to power in 1933.

The world was horrified when the true atrocities came to light, and there was a global consensus that this could never happen again.

That resolve lasted for 49 years.

It took 100 days and 800,000 lost lives for the Rwandan Genocide to make history as the quickest-ever killing spree.

We should commemorate the 24th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide not only by acknowledging those victims but by remembering other genocides, such as the Armenian and Kurdish, in our history and by aiding the ongoing ones, such as in Myanmar and Syria.

Human life is precious, and we owe it to the victims to remember them as complex individuals, just like us, who dreamed, hoped and yearned.

Opinion columnist Janet Miranda is a marketing junior and can be reached at opinion@thedailycougar.com.

Genocide Remembrance The Day of Rwandan Genocide Remembrance was commerated on April 7.

The lack of public awareness and concern for historical genocides has led to a selective amnesia that hinders us from aiding current victims of ongoing genocides.

The Opinion section used this issue to honor the lives lost to this horrible ethnic cleansing and bring awareness to current ongoing genocides.

True liberty involves attention, compassion, discipline and education.

Awareness and hope are the forces of change.

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Anusheh Siddique, EDITOR

REMEMBRANCE

Despite 'vow to never forget,' mass amnesia perpetuates genocide

EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR IN CHIEF

Emily Burleson MANAGING EDITOR

Jasmine Davis

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Sonny Singh WEB EDITOR

Marialuisa Rincon CAMPUS EDITOR

Drew Jones

FEATURES EDITOR

Dana C. Jones

CHIEF COPY EDITOR

Morgan Horst

SPORTS EDITOR

Peter Scamardo COOGLIFE EDITOR

Julie Araica

PHOTO EDITOR

Thomas Dwyer OPINION EDITOR

Anusheh Siddique ASSISTANT EDITORS

Michael Slaten, Andres Chio, Bethel Biru, Richard Fletcher Jr., Erin Davis, Maya Dandashi, Brianna Myers, Oscar Aguilar

STAFF EDITORIAL

Tamor Khan/The Cougar

R

eports from the various genocides throughout history come in scrambled bits and pieces from survivors.

Whether it be Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Myanmar, Palestine or Guatemala, these narratives rarely receive international recognition due to Western nations' entrenched culture of neglect and forget when it comes to genocide, a word distorted ANUSHEH politically and SIDDIQUE culturally.

OPINION EDITOR These mass atrocities have forced millions from their homes and led to the torture, rape and murder of even more. The international community cannot be bothered to remember these historic and ongoing cruelties, yet it simultaneously totes the slogan "Never Forget" as the Holocaust continues to be the only mass ethnic cleansing recognized by most of our history books.

We ask ourselves how this manages to happen over and over again, how a majority rises to power and eradicates an entire group of people for bearing the burden of their identity. The answer lies in apathy —extreme apathy —and purposeful amnesia that allows for history to repeat itself viciously and take more victims as each new genocide coincides with the next generation of weaponry.

The Nuremberg trials were the

first international attempt to hold monsters accountable for crimes against humanity. It was a noble effort. The world was left horrified in the wake of the Holocaust and the loss of 6 million Jewish lives to Hitler's Final Solution.

We are taught from a young age in the United States that this must never happen again, that hate and bigotry must never trump justice and compassion.

We are taught that the United States is the watch dog of liberty, despite once having a president who ethnically cleansed 4,000 Native Americans and eradicated 16,000 in the Trail of Tears.

We are taught the Holocaust should be the only tragedy to stain history books, despite the forgotten Armenian genocide that preceded the Holocaust by only 18 years.

Yet 30 years after the world vowed to never forget, 1.7 to 2 million political dissidents, doctors, teachers and students were tortured and murdered in the Cambodian genocide. Fifteen years later in 1994, 800,000 to 1 million innocent Rwandans lost their lives in the Rwandan Genocide. A year later, 100,000 Bosniak and Croatian civilians were cleansed by the Serbs in the Bosnian Revolution. Eight years after, in 2003, while the United States unnecessarily invaded Iraq, the Sudanese government murdered 300,000 of its own Dafuri civilians.

We ask ourselves why human history is plagued with such monstrosities.

We can claim ignorance, we

can claim apathy, we can claim every damn excuse in the book, and there's enough to fill all the history books that lay vacant from the gaps in reality. Every country that had the power to prevent these horrors from occurring has blood on its hands.

The United States has a guilty conscious. We've grown desensitized to the word genocide because it has become a weapon in the political arsenal to defame third world nations. It has been robbed of the distinction that ignites infamy.

These crimes follow us today.

From Myanmar to Ethiopia to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Sudan to Syria, ethnic cleansing continues today, according to the International Alliance to End Genocide. The statistics are enough evidence to prove we recognize what is happening. It is better to admit the international community does not care than to maintain this façade of ignorance.

The Rohingya in Myanmar are among the most persecuted people on Earth. Their stories are characterized by the utmost cruelty mankind is capable of; stories of women being gang raped, children being murdered in front of their parents, babies being tossed in fire. These stories should break our hearts, should spur us to action, but no one is listening.

No one, especially not in the United States can be bothered to call this a genocide because that means we'd have some responsibility to help.

This violence is intimate. It is

purposeful and driven by centuries of ethnic hatred. The scariest part of these brutal cases all over the world is they are entirely intentional.

What is happening in these places does not feel like open persecution, and that is intentional. Many people are victims of what is referred to as incremental genocide, or a steady application of conditions on a group that assures its destruction. A prime example is Palestine, where the identity of the Palestinians is being slowly eroded and deconstructed. Israel has managed to convince the world that what they're doing is not genocide, and that is because they're successful at this incremental tactic.

Incremental genocide makes mass persecution palatable to an international audience.

There have been too many victims because of this staged amnesia, and their voices in Myanmar and Palestine and Syria and every other corner of the globe are begging for at least our attention and at most our aide. They deserve so much more than our apathy and superficial concern.

Our propensity to forget turns history from our most intimate ally to our most vengeful enemy, and the casualties sustained by it are always inflicted on the innocent.

Opinion Editor Anusheh Siddique is a finance freshman and can be reached at opinion@thedailycougar. com.

The Staff Editorial reflects the opinions of The Cougar Editorial Board.

All other opinions, commentaries and cartoons reflect only the opinion of the writer. Opinions expressed in The Cougar do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Houston or its students as a whole.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR The Cougar welcomes letters to the editor from any member of the UH community. Letters should be no more than 250 words and signed, including the writer’s full name, phone number or email address and affiliation with the University, including classification and major.

Anonymous letters will not be published. Deliver letters to N221, Student Center North or email them to editor@thedailycougar.com.

Letters are subject to editing.

GUEST COMMENTARY Submissions are accepted from any member of the UH community and must be signed with the author’s name, phone number or email address and affiliation with the University, including classification and major. Commentary should be limited to 600 words.

Guest commentaries should not be written as replies, but rather should present independent points of view. Deliver submissions to N221, Student Center North or email them to editor@thedailycougar.com. All submissions are subject to editing.

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ACTION

Despite its beauty, Ethiopian government allows genocide

E

thiopia is home to 80 ethnic groups, in which more than 88 languages are spoken. A beautiful and incredibly diverse country with valleys that spread across thousands of green acres to historic landmarks that include the Nile River, it is known for its rich culture with 1,000-year-old traditions.

It’s also BETHEL BIRU home to tragic ASSISANT OPINION EDITOR and mindless bloodshed of its own people, with countless incidents of ethnic cleansing.

Behind the image of peace, love and serenity are ethnic groups suffering from extreme prejudice and violence.

It’s been 15 years since the brutal massacre of the Anuak tribe in Ethiopia in December 2003. The Ethiopian National Defense Force, killed 424 indigenous Ethiopians simply for oil, land and other natural resources.

More than 400 Anuak houses burned to the ground, and many more civilians fled into the forest or took shelter in compounds belonging to two of the town’s largest churches.

Forty four years-ago under the Derg communist regime from 1974 to 1987, Ethiopia endured one of the worst genocidal manmade famines of the 20th century.

Tens of thousands of Amhara, Tigray and Oromo highlanders were resettled into Anuak traditional territory during this period and stayed, even after the overthrow of the Derg regime in 1991.

This led to the first occupation of Anuak land, forcefully driving off natives through intimidation, murder and rape, which growing worse when oil was discovered under by the Gambela Petroleum Corp., a subsidiary of Pinewood Resources, Ltd. of Canada.

A small, peaceful tribe that survived off of fishing and farming, the Anuaks lived in tight-knit communities and didn’t have much communication with the outside world. The Anuaks were also opposed to military service because it was against their moral code to fight people they didn’t know or hadn't personally wronged them.

When the Derg started kidnapping Anuak men in March 1983 for forced recruitment, many young Anuaks fled to Sudan or into the forests to escape, leaving

their villages and women vulnerable to rape and torture. Years later, the start of a coordinated military operation to systematically eliminate Anuaks began again on December 13, 2003 as an estimated 30,000 and 80,000 Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, or EPRDF, troops were deployed on Anuak land, carrying out mass terrorist attacks At least 1,500 and perhaps as many as 2,500 Anuak civilians died in the fighting, most of them intellectuals, public figures, leaders and other educated people.

They were targeted. Hundreds more are declared missing . More than 50,000 Anuaks have fled the terrorism of their native land.

Numerous rural villages where Anuaks and other ethnic minorities resided had been similarly attacked, looted and torched.

Thousands of Anuak homes were burned to the ground.

An early warning of Ethiopia's genocidal plans: the mass raping of Anuak women, a terrible and tragic weapon of war. Anuak women and girls were routinely raped, gang-raped and kept as sexual slaves by EPRDF forces in the absence of the men of their village. Some of the rapists reportedly declared, “Now you won’t have an Anuak child.”

Before the 2003 massacre, there were minor quarrels regarding land and territory between the Anuaks and other minority groups.

Seeing the opportunity to use this against them, the Ethiopian government claimed the killings were a result of tribal warfare —a clear attempt to manipulate the public. However, investigations and the severity of attacks showed that the Ethiopian government had not only authorized the attacks but was involved with them as well.

Sources from inside the military government's police and intelligence network say the code

name of the military operation was "OPERATION SUNNY MOUNTAIN." Public mourning is not allowed, those who want to remember family members and friends who died must quietly grieve their losses in the privacy of their homes with heavy hearts.

The Tigrayan People's Liberation Front and EPRDF regime wants to erase it from the memory of the Anuaks, but we cannot let this happen.

Today, the government is forcing the indigenous people of southwest Ethiopia off their ancestral land Bulldozers are destroying their forests, crops and birthrights that have been a part of their history and a means of their survival.

Meanwhile, thousands of indigenous people are being forced into government-sponsored villages which soon turned into refugee camps, stripping away the Anuak people’s identity, culture and livelihood. The Ethiopian government’s decision to wipe out citizens based on their racial

The colors symbolize unity and independence | Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

or ethnic identities needs to be brought to light and addressed in manners that will invoke change.

Because Ethiopia's government robs, kills and oppresses its own people, it’s up to us to bring these issues to light and remember what they have tried to make us forget. We can no longer dismiss these atrocities for the sake of maintaining international relations. Whether we like it or not, ethnicism is still prominent in Ethiopian culture. We exude an

image of unity, but the division that plagues our people is still as persistent as it was years ago.

If we continue to ignore the massacre of our own people, our history will be tainted with bloodshed and will become the ruins of what was once a beautiful country.

Assistant opinion editor Bethel Biru is a broadcast journalism senior and can be reached at opinion@ thedailycougar.com

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EDUCATION

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Roundtable: How the U.S. is involved in Palestinian ethnic cleansing

T

he Great March of Return, a peaceful rally for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their Israeli occupied land, was conducted in Gaza on March 8 and met with severe violence. The Israeli Defense Force shot 773 unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza, killing 17 and wounding 1,400.

These deadly snipers were deployed when word of protest reached the Israeli

government.

Shooting unarmed civilians violates international law, which is nothing new for Israel. Yet no one is holding Israelis accountable for their crimes, and the international apathy only encourages ongoing genocide in Palestine. Staff writers from the opinion section were horrified by these actions.

Opinion columnist Sarah Tawashy Human Nutrition and Foods sophomore, member of Students for Justice in Palestine

Opinion columnist Brant Roberts History senior, Public Relations Chair for Students for Justice in Palestine

Guest columnist Dina Hamadi Political science and Middle Eastern studies junior, intern for U.S. Rep. Al Green

The Israeli military offensive of 2014, Operation Protective Edge, resulted in the murder of more than 2,000 Palestinians and thousands more injured over the span of 49 days. There were so many corpses that the morgues were filled to capacity, and bodies had to be stored in vegetable refrigerators.

SARAH If Israel and Egypt had opened their TAWASHY borders and allowed civilians to escape OPINION COLUMNIST the onslaught, the death toll would have been lower. Instead, both countries maintained their blockade on Gaza, a strip of land not much larger than Galveston Island, populated by nearly 2 million people.

In February 2008, a former major general of the Israeli Defense Forces openly proclaimed that increasing tensions between Israelis and the Palestinians in Gaza would bring a holocaust on the Palestinians. Genocide is not only applicable to mass murder but also to the crippling of economy and infrastructure. Palestinians as a whole have no major contribution to an industry of their own, and Gaza’s economy has been crippled by the blockade and worsening electricity cuts. Gazans have not even been able to rebuild their homes that were destroyed in the 2014 Israeli offensive .

The majority of the 2 million inhabitants in Gaza are refugees that were expelled from their ancestral lands in 1948, more than 400 of their hometowns and cities destroyed by Israeli militants or repopulated by Jewish settlers.

The U.S. government does not recognize what is being done to Palestinians as genocide because it is a staunch ally of Israel and enables these horrendous acts by sending it billions of dollars every year.

The 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Zionist militias, that would later coalesce into the Israeli military, was a violent process of uprooting 750,000 people and sending them into exile. Palestinians were forced to flee into Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, where they BRANT created makeshift refugee camps in ROBERTS order to survive. Those who managed OPINION COLUMNIST to stay in the areas that now make up Gaza and the West Bank live under a brutal military occupation and apartheid.

It is part-and-parcel of why Palestinians continue to resist settler colonialism and the Israeli state to this day.

Past attempts at solutions did not adequately address the right of return for Palestinian refugees, nor did they made any serious attempts toward an economic platform that would lift Palestinians out of poverty. The two-state solution has effectively been a one-state solution, as Israel controls the borders, the economy and the daily lives of Palestinians.

The only viable solutions that could put an end to apartheid are: one democratic state for everyone living in historic Palestine, the right of return, and serious economic changes that give Palestinians the ability to transform their lives after 70 years of occupation.

For more information, I highly encourage my fellow students read "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" by Ilan Pappé.

When genocide is embedded into the very founding of our country, it is hypocritical to believe that the United States government will intervene in the genocide of another people.

The United States has only ever interfered in a situation when it DINA HAMADI was in its interests. Otherwise, the GUEST COLUMNIST government has blindfolded itself to humanitarian crises. The world watched the United States blind itself in the face of the Rwandan genocide when it led a successful effort to remove most of the United Nations peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda.

The government has failed to recognized the atrocities happening in Palestine as a genocide because the moment it does, it has to acknowledge responsibility.

The United States chose to actively support the Palestinian genocide by funding the Israeli military with $3.8 million in aid every year.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide are at the root of Israel's mission, as it was founded upon the Zionist view of Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land,” even though it was an occupied land. Zionists propagated this idea in the West to justify the establishment of a Jewish homeland. These beliefs are still used today to justify the establishment of illegal settlements in the West Bank.

So long as the United States arms and aids the Israeli military, blood will stain its hands.

Roundtable contributors can be reached at opinion@ thedailycougar.com.