Volume 50 - Issue 3

THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N

VOL 50 / ISS 3 / NOV 2017

THE NEW JOURNAL

A FRAGILE SANCTUARY The walls of a New Haven church protect Marco Antonio Reyes Alvarez from deportation. No one knows for how long.  1

THE NEW JOUR NAL

editors-in-chief Eliza Fawcett Natalie Yang

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby

managing editor Victorio Cabrera

advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Eric Rutkow, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin

executive editor Ruby Bilger senior editors Jacob Sweet Oriana Tang Victor Wang associate editors Antonia Ayres-Brown Chris Hays Mark Rosenberg Annie Rosenthal Robert Scaramuccia Arya Sundaram copy editors Philippe Chlenski Marina Tinone Amy Xu

friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

design editors Julia Hedges Hazal Ă–zgĂźr photo editor Elinor Hills web developer Philippe Chlenski

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2017 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 50 issue 3 nov 2017

SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

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cover A FRAGILE SANCTUARY The walls of a New Haven church protect Marco Antonio Reyes Alvarez from deportation.

No one knows for how long.

Eliza Fawcett

17

feature

BY NO MEANS IMMUNE A new emergency drug policy at Yale attempts to draw addiction out of the shadows.

Max Graham

standards 4

points of departure MUCH ADO ABOUT MUSHROOMS — Sarah Adams NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICS — Molly Montgomery SIGN OF THE TIMES — Noah Macey

10 snapshot

FREEDOM OF MOBILITY — Andrew Sandweiss

A bus ride through New Haven reveals the deficiencies of the city’s transit system.

14 essay

MEMENTO MORI — Henry Reichard

Reflections on a farm, a childhood, and an old sheep’s skull.

26 poem

LATE OCTOBER — Anna Sudderth 38 endnote

TRACES OF SPICE — Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

MUCH ADO ABOUT MUSHROOMS Foraging with the Connecticut Valley Mycological Society Sarah Adams

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t was raining steadily in the woods in Hurd State Park, an hour northeast of New Haven. I stooped down by the base of a dying tree. There wasn’t much to see except for damp leaves carpeting the ground. Then I spotted it: a few clusters of small tan caps. “Coprinellus micaceus, inky caps,” said Beth Karwowski, without missing a beat. Karwowski, whose laugh carries through the forest, is the president of the Connecticut Valley Mycological Society (CVMS). She turned one of the mushrooms upside down, revealing its sooty black under-cap. “This is a wood-decaying mushroom and can be used to make ink,” she explained.

Nearly twenty members of CVMS were crouched by rocks or trees throughout the forest. It was a Sunday morning and the day of the group’s weekly forage, when members come together to search for mushrooms and share their interest in mycology, the study of fungal life.

CVMS was founded in 1975 by Ed Bosman, who led the first foray in Sleeping Giant State Park in Hamden, Connecticut. Today, the organization’s Facebook group—which anyone interested in Connecticut’s mushrooms can join—has over 400 members. But only official members who pay the annual fee (fifteen dollars for an individual, twenty dollars for a family) know the locations of weekly forays, printed in a blue book.

“If we gave away the locations, some people would go a day before and collect them beforehand,” one member warned. Some of the rules are even more strict: “YOU ARE PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE PROPER IDENTIFICATION OF ANY MUSHROOMS THAT YOU EAT!” is printed in bold at the top of the CVMS website and participation waivers.

At the Sunday morning forage, members first met at the park pavilion, then disappeared into the woods in pairs or by themselves. In spite of the chilly air, the pavilion vibrated with the warmth and enthusiasm of those looking to share their knowledge with people 4

from all levels of foraging experience. Karwowski and I continued down the path after finding the inky caps, dodging horse dung and rocks slick from the rain.

“It’s been a very strange year for a lot of reasons,” she said, pointing at small white spots on the tree trunks surrounding us. “See that white stuff on there? Gypsy moth egg.” This past year, gypsy moth caterpillars decimated entire forests in Connecticut. Much of the

illustration fiona drenttel

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destruction affected oak trees, which are dependent on the fungi that grow on their roots to live, causing the fungi population throughout Connecticut to plummet. Paradoxically, however, gypsy moth populations are kept in check by another fungus, Entomophaga maimaiga, which infects caterpillars with its spores.

“It rained enough this spring that E. maimaiga was able to grow,” Karwowski said.

As the clock approached noon, people returned to the pavilion with wicker baskets and egg cartons full of fungi. Thick orangish-white shelf croppings, Laetiporus cincinnatus. Burnt-red, jelly-like, and brain-shaped heap, Tremella foliacea. Small round puff balls with spiny studdings, Lycoperdon perlatum. “We’ve got about twenty or thirty years’ worth of data on forage findings,” said Walt Rode, one of CVMS’s expert identifiers. “We want to make it accessible and reportable so that we can see how changes in the environment, and climate change, has an effect.” Unlike other foraging groups in the region, CVMS not only deals with finding edible fungi, but seeks to contribute to scientific research. Members send fungi DNA to laboratories for further study and have even helped to discover new species.

The weekly forages are also social gatherings.

“When I first joined CVMS, I thought, ‘who needs a group?’” laughed Connie Borodenko, another expert identifier. She sported a well-worn mushroom identification guide T-shirt under her bright orange rain jacket. “But this group is so full of scientific minds, I began to learn so much more quickly.” Borodenko’s grandmother from Poland first taught her family mushrooming; Borodenko spent twenty years searching on her own before she found CVMS. “I used to be shy and withdrawn too,” she said, “but the group brought me out of my shell.”

“It’s the best feeling when you come onto something wonderful in the company of somebody else who thinks it’s wonderful. Often those fungi are edible… but even the unusual little fungi [are wonderful],” added Jean Hopkins, one of Borodenko’s friends. People in CVMS hail from all sorts of backgrounds, none of which involve mycology. Before retiring, Borodenko was an art teacher and building mechanic at a phone company. Rode has worked as a librarian computer specialist for twenty-five years. Karwowski works in finance. Other people came as couples or tagged along with family members, united by a common curiosity for mushrooms and the fungal world.

“Food, medicine, dye material, taxonomy and systematics, biological and ecological; there are lots of different ways that people become interested in mush 5NOVEMBER 2017

rooms, but we try to add more to that too,” said Bill Yule, education director for CVMS. “But mostly we’re here for fun, and food,” he laughed.

Today’s forage wasn’t just any outing––it was the “Tailgate Forage,” the last major one of the year, complete with a potluck of homemade mushroom dishes.

As I waited in line for a helping of hen-of-the-woods soup, someone offered me a taste of freshly sautéed Coprinus comatus. I took a bite; the scaly white mushrooms were buttery, with a subtle, earthy undertone.

Raincoats hung from the ceiling near the fireplaces, and people huddled at the pavilion tables, admiring their finds or simply laughing and telling stories.

“It’s a religious experience,” Hopkins winked. “But don’t write that down.”

— Sarah Adams is a sophomore in Morse College.

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NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICS Turkey’s divisions materialize on Middletown Avenue Molly Montgomery

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n October 29, ninety-four years after the founding of the secular Republic of Turkey, a solemn Turkish-American man named Feray Gökçek stands before thirty people in his backyard on Middletown Avenue, across the Quinnipiac River from Fair Haven. A two-and-a-half-ton, thirteen-foottall bronze statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Turkey, looms over him. “What we are doing here today,” Gökçek says in Turkish, “is contributing to world peace and protecting democracy and secularism.” Barely a smile crosses his lips. It is raining, and from a stereo on his screened porch the Turkish national anthem plays, followed by the American one.

The listeners stand observant, arms at their sides.

Gökçek grew up in a city in Turkey on the Black Sea, but left in 1991 to escape political violence. He says he was a freedom fighter. He erected the statue of Atatürk on May 19, 2016, the one-hundred-and-thirtysixth anniversary of Atatürk’s birth. He is a member of the Atatürk Union of USA, a private organization made up of about one hundred and fifty people around the East Coast who support Atatürk, secularism, democracy, and freedom. The entire Union helped pay for the statue. It was originally supposed to go up in New Jersey in another member’s yard, but they didn’t own the land. Gökçek volunteered his. Bronze Atatürk’s face is tilted up in a fierce, mysterious smile. His right hand clutches his suit jacket. At his feet, Gökçek refills vases of red and white carnations every week.

Gökçek plans to rename a tiny street near his house “Atatürk Street.” He has collected over three hundred signatures to petition the city. “From Dunkin’ Donuts,” he explains, “from Walmart, the oil change, the hotel, downtown, Lowe’s, Aldi, the barber shop.” He points out that a street in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, is called John F. Kennedy Caddesi (“avenue” in Turkish), in recognition of JFK’s support for strong Turkish-American relations. John F. Kennedy Caddesi is a major boulevard. Scarboro Street is a 250-foot dead-end that runs alongside Gökçek’s yard.

He calls his yard “Atapark.” Turkish and American flags of all sizes fly side by side. He refers to a hut in the yard as “Ankara,” and to his house as “Çankaya,” the Turkish equivalent of the White House, which Atatürk

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built in 1921. President Erdoğan replaced it with a palace called the Presidential Complex in 2014. “He fuck it up,” Gökçek says. “Sorry–my language. He is an asshole. He is an asshole.”

There are three signs on Gökçek’s fence: a list of all the cities in Turkey, the words “Adalet–Justice” in red against a white background, and a laminated, blown-up biography page about Atatürk from BBC History.

Behind the page, Gökçek has painted “HAYIR”—“No,” in Turkish—in response to Erdoğan’s 2017 referendum to strengthen his presidential powers, which he narrowly won. Gökçek supports the CHP, also called the Republican People’s Party—Turkey’s secular, leftist opposition party, the party of Atatürk. Erdoğan leads the AKP, also called the Justice and Development Party—the Islamic conservative party. Under Erdoğan, Turkey’s government has become increasingly religious and authoritarian. In just three years, between 2006 and 2009, he constructed nine thousand Ottoman-style mosques in Turkey. Thousands of Turks have been arrested for denouncing his presidency. Some have begun to call him “Sultan Erdoğan.”

A

cross the street from Atapark, a Turkish government-funded mosque has been under construction for at least two years. The Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs—the religious chapter of the Turkish government, founded in 1924 under Atatürk— funds an American organization called the Diyanet Center of America. With this funding, the center has helped pay for Turkish mosques in other cities around the U.S. including Louisville, Charlotte, Portland, and Queens. The Turkish Diyanet gave the New Haven congregation white minarets and a white dome with glaucous tops and crescent peaks. They were shipped across the ocean from Turkey in over a hundred pieces and reassembled on Middletown Avenue. But the staggering eighty-one-foot tall minarets apparently violated city zoning law, and construction was halted.

City officials and the congregation’s president, Haydar Elevli, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

When I visit the mosque on a Friday morning before prayers, it is full of congregants even though it’s still under construction. Elevli’s wife shows me the carpeted THE NEW JOURN AL

illustration julia hedges

prayer rooms, the bathrooms and the ablution rooms where worshippers may wash their feet, the empty tiled dining room that will be full of dishes and tables and hungry congregants when construction is completed.

Upstairs are open, well-lit classrooms where children learn how to speak Turkish and how to cook, how to read the Quran and how to pray. In one, the children have written their names on rounded blue rectangles pasted to the wall below a peaked border of tiny Turkish flags. A red balloon printed with the flag’s white crescent and star hangs in the middle of the room like a chandelier.

On the third floor, right below the dome, all is ragged and metal. It looks like we’re standing inside a malformed egg. Elevli explains how busy her husband is, waking up at four every morning, running his restaurant in Wallingford, mediating between the Turkish government and the city about the mosque’s construction, not always returning home at night. “All for Allah,” she tells me, “all for Allah.” She explains that she too works for Allah.

“M

y community,” Gökçek says, “is the secular people. Not the religious people.” I ask him if he erected his statue and collected his signatures to protest the mosque.

“No,” he says, “Not to protest.” Only to affirm secular Turkey. Only to send a message overseas to Erdoğan.

Though he did tell the New Haven Independent that the congregants have “religion brain,” which, he said, is “worse than drugs.” And that he imagined them “screaming every day” at his statue. He did tell me that “religion [is] more dangerous than cocaine, heroin.” I ask Elevli how her community feels about Mr. Gökçek and his yard.“ I don’t like talking about him,” she says.

The sun glints off Bronze Atatürk and the mosque’s golden crescents. The worshippers arrive to pray and Gökçek refills his vases of red and white carnations.

—Molly Montgomery is a junior in Branford College.

7NOVEMBER 2017

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

SIGN OF THE TIMES Increased student interest helps formalize American Sign Language courses at Yale Noah Macey

O

n a recent Wednesday evening in a basement room of Yale University’s Dow Hall, four students attempted a translation of the song “I’ll Make a Man out of You,” from Disney’s Mulan. Hands, fingers, and arms jumped, fluttered, and glided their way through the lyrics. The class broke into a fit of giggles when the professor, Jessica Tanner, forced them to re-sign the line, “Tranquil as the forest but on fire within.” Their signs for “fire,” she suggested, had been underwhelming. Her hands, fingers, and eyebrows flew vigorously upward from her chest and out into a shower of sparks as she demonstrated the proper gesture. It couldn’t have looked more fiery had she flicked open a Zippo.

Right now, Yale students can only study American Sign Language (ASL) through small not-for-credit classes offered through Yale’s Directed Independent Language Study (DILS) program. Tanner’s ASL group has been one of most popular DILS programs since it began in 2010. In recent years, she’s had to turn away prospective signers due to the program’s limited resources. But come spring, with expanded resources and administrative support, the university will offer two full-fledged, five-days-a-week ASL classes through the Linguistics Department, which petitioned the Language Study Committee last spring for the course’s approval.

Raffaella Zanuttini, the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Linguistics department and author of the proposal, says it’s no surprise that it has taken Yale so long to create a formal ASL class. Universities have been slow across the board: although the University of Rochester became the first college in the country to offer ASL as a foreign language in the 1990s, ASL has been around much longer. It’s taken two hundred years for ASL to float down to New Haven from just up the Connecticut River Valley in Hartford, Connecticut,

8

illustration julia hedges

where in 1817 a Yale graduate, with advice from thenYale president Timothy Dwight IV, founded the American School for the Deaf (ASD). The children who came to ASD brought with them their home and local sign languages, which combined with the university’s French Sign Language to create ASL. The path to Yale’s first-ever ASL course had enough hurdles to be a track event. It required coordination between the DILS program, the Linguistics department, the Yale College Council, and the Dean’s Office. Last spring, Kate Rosenberg, a senior Linguistics major and recent founder of the ASL at Yale club, approached Zanuttini about adding an ASL option to the Blue Book. Zanuttini soon discovered that there was also strong faculty interest in ASL, a YCC task force report showing high demand for ASL instruction, and a beloved instructor—Jessica Tanner—already teaching ASL at Yale. “It was quite a discovery,” she recounted.

Zanuttini submitted a report to the Language Study Committee, the panel that oversees Yale’s foreign language offerings, which gave the program two thumbs up this past summer. The pilot program will begin this spring, and Jessica Tanner will move from DILS THE NEW JOURN AL

to a lecturer in the Linguistics department, teaching introductory and intermediate level courses. Students say they have every reason to believe her classes will make Yale a more positive and welcoming place for people with disabilities.

For Rosenberg, learning ASL has given her an opportunity to access and communicate with a rich culture that many people do not know exists. “A lot of people distinguish between little-d deaf and big-D Deaf,” she said. “Little-d deaf means that someone cannot hear; big-D Deaf is where you’re Deaf and proud of it, and you interact with the community and use signing as your main method of communication.”

Tanner, who is Deaf, embeds this sort of cultural education in her classroom, as any other foreign language instructor would.

Benjamin Nodalsky, who led the YCC Disabilities Task Force last year, hopes that the ASL program will improve awareness of Deaf culture at Yale. “By introducing ASL, we’re clearing the way for more people with links to Deaf culture to come here,” he said.

Zanutinni hopes the course will dispel pernicious misconceptions about sign languages in general: “Things that we mark through intonation, for example, are marked through facial expression,” she said. “They really are languages with the same level of systematicity and richness of expression and creativity…It’s not just pantomime, and the signs aren’t just spellings of the words in spoken language.”

From the vantage of Tanner’s DILS classroom, the work of inclusion looks like four students practicing their Mulan translation. On their lyrics sheets, “Let’s get down to business to defeat the Huns” is transcribed as “HUNS, COMING, HURRY, BECOME, SOLDIERS,” which they sign in time with the music playing from a laptop. One student signs out of time with the others, and everyone cracks up. As the students’ hands leap around to debrief before rehearsing again, the classroom is silent, but not at all quiet.

– Noah Macey is a junior in Timothy Dwight College.

9NOVEMBER 2017

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SNAPSHOT

FREEDOM OF MOBILITY

A bus ride through New Haven reveals the deficiencies of the city’s transit system

Andrew Sandweiss

A

fter two heart attacks, a stroke, and thirty-seven days in the Palm Beach County Jail, Dennis DeMartin had grown tired of Florida.

Following an incident that caused him to lose his Delray Beach condo, he moved into a federal housing project in New Haven called Bella Vista. His apartment is near the end of the 212 bus line, close to his childhood home in West Haven. Since he doesn’t own a car, the 212 is his only means of leaving the housing complex. “I live alone. The walls close in on me,” he said.

A stout 74-year-old man with white hair and a bushy, Santa Claus-esque beard, DeMartin is buoyant and energetic. He uses the bus to visit friends, family, and his doctor. “I take four buses a day,” he said. “I rely on the bus one hundred percent for everything I have to do.”

The buses of Greater New Haven are the veins of the region. For those without access to a private vehicle, public transportation is not an alternative mode of transit. It’s a lifeline. In Dixwell, Dwight, Downtown, and the Hill, more than 35 percent of the population does not own a car. For those residents, public transit is their primary, if not sole, mode of access to employment, education, healthcare, and even groceries.

The buses of Greater New Haven are the veins of the region. For those without access to a private vehicle, public transportation is not an alternative mode of transit. It’s a lifeline.

The system is widely used: riders took 8.3 million trips in 2016. But delays, a disjointed central hub, disconnect from employment opportunities, and inconsistent disability access plague the system. These issues prompted the city to begin a collaborative study in October 2016 called Move New Haven, a comprehensive review of the region’s bus network with support from the city, state, and regional authorities. After months of data collection, the study released a report of transit statistics in 10

illustration julia hedges

August. This January, Move New Haven will unveil a series of recommendations for the system. A schedule for enacting those recommendations has not yet been set.

DeMartin has already completed his own study of New Haven’s bus network. In 2015, he self-published a book called Riding New Haven Buses. This past fall, he invited me to take a ride with him. We met on a cold, sunny day in November. I shivered against the wind as we walked down Elm Street toward the New Haven Green.

The main hub of the system includes eleven separate bus shelters that line the Green and lower Chapel Street. End to end, the shelters stretch just under half a mile. It’s “not very customer-friendly,” said Matthew Nemerson, Director of Economic Development for New Haven. “It is spread out and open. [You have to] withstand the heat of the summer, the cold of the winter.” Although cities across the country have central bus terminals, New Haven’s hub consists of nothing more than sidewalks and open shelters designated as bus stops.

When I arrived with DeMartin, the hub was teeming with commuters. By our shelter, there were roughly fifteen people waiting, and large crowds were gathered back at the corner of Church and Chapel. All of the CT Transit routes run through Downtown New Haven— there are no crosstown lines—so the stops around the Green are always busy.

DeMartin and I boarded the 212, one of the system’s most popular buses, at Temple and Elm, DeMartin’s usual stop. Most of the city’s current bus routes date back to New Haven’s extensive trolley system, which shut down in 1948. “The buses follow the same pathTHE NEW JOURN AL

Map credit to Andrew Sandweiss. (Map has been modified from original.)

ways as the trolleys,” Nemerson said. “People who want to change directions need to come into the center of town.”

This “hub and spoke” system is addressed by the Move New Haven study, which found that with the “single downtown hub…bus riders are forced to transfer to complete cross-town trips and riders are forced downtown even if their travel does not require a downtown visit.”

The system’s layout is especially problematic for people living in the city and working in the suburbs. Jobs and industry that used to be clustered along Whalley and Winchester Avenues, such as the Winchester Repeating 11 NOVEMBER 2017

Arms Factory, have closed down or moved out to suburban towns like Milford and Hamden. Of the approximately 380 thousand jobs in the New Haven region, only eighty thousand are in city limits. For example, if someone worked in the Amity Plaza shopping center by the Merritt Parkway but lived on Morse Street in northern Newhallville (a ten-minute drive away), they would have to take the 238 bus ten minutes to the Green, wait for the 243, and ride another eighteen minutes back out to Amity.

Doug Hausladen, former Ward 7 alder, has been New Haven’s Director for Public Transportation, Traffic, and Parking since 2014. According to him, the city is devising a plan to fix the bus hub by converting many oneway streets surrounding the Green (and elsewhere in 11 THE NEW JOUR NAL

Downtown) to two-way streets, with the aim of reducing travel and transfer times. Hopefully, Move New Haven will also propose best practices for rerouting bus lines to better serve changing workforces and workplaces.

However, it is the Connecticut Department of Transportation, and not the City of New Haven, that runs CT Transit, the service that manages New Haven’s network.

Changes to the system happen at the state level, and New Haven commuters and officials often struggle to make their voices heard. “If you want to lobby a complaint on CT Transit, there is no hearing, no meeting on public performance for CT Transit,” Hausladen said.

I inserted my bus pass into the small machine by the driver and sat in a window seat next to DeMartin as the bus rolled away from the Green. Despite opposition

Changes to the system happen at the state level, and New Haven commuters and officials often struggle to make their voices heard. from New Haven Mayor Toni Harp and New Haven residents, fares were raised across the transit system last year to compensate for a $37.5 million cut in state funding. Now, the one-way fare for a local ride in the New Haven area is $1.75, up 17 percent from $1.50 a year ago.

(By comparison, the commuter rail fare, which serves a population with a much higher median household income, increased only 5 percent.) “We’ve gone backwards on access to jobs and access to upward mobility,” Hausladen said. “In Connecticut, a lot of our poorest

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communities are in the biggest cities. We’re starving them from an adequate transit system.”

With the state distributing funding, cities often have to scrounge to finance their transit systems. “We have a great relationship but we have real needs,” Nemerson said of the association between New Haven and the Department of Transportation. “We need to fight with every other city in the state to get resources here.” In tough budget years like 2016, proposed state budgets drastically reduce funding for buses. Some of these proposed budgets eliminate it altogether. Although the more radical proposals get heavily amended, there have been budget cuts to bus service. Cities like New Haven are at the mercy of the state.

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he 212 bus crossed the railroad tracks as we left Downtown and passed under I-95. Moving beneath the shadow of the abandoned English Power Station, we crossed a modest concrete bridge into Fair Haven. As we continued down Grand Avenue, past a bustling series of small grocers and Latin American restaurants, the bus slowed its pace as pedestrian and automobile traffic began to increase.

Traffic limits bus reliability in New Haven. Part of the problem is the overabundance of bus stops. On a recent ride I took on the 238 along Dixwell Avenue, the evening rush out of New Haven was repeatedly stalled by passengers disembarking. The bus stopped practically every block, and halfway through the route, at Dixwell Avenue and Putnam, we were already running twenty-eight minutes late, according to the schedule posted on CT Transit’s website.

Empirically assessing the reliability of New Haven’s bus lines is nearly impossible because CT Transit keeps no data on bus timeliness, according to Hausladen.

As for a bus-tracking app, (e.g. TransLoc for the Yale Shuttle) CT Transit unveiled the “Transit” app in April.

The real-time bus information app, however, doesn’t advertise any data on bus reliability. The Move New Haven study laments this lack of data, stating, “Reliability issues are only known through information reported through community outreach.”

We left Fair Haven and headed into East Haven, crossing a rusting bridge over the Quinnipiac River. As we climbed the hill away from the riverbank, DeMartin pointed out the homes of old ship captains that rose above the trees on the hills above the Quinnipiac.

Behind the homes, at the crest of the hill, the goliath

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Bella Vista towers rose into view.

Many of the residents at Bella Vista depend heavily on public transit. DeMartin maintains a waiting room for commuters, carved into the lobby of one of the larger towers. He makes sure that the latest schedules are always posted, and circles each of the bus times that are relevant to Bella Vista. Unlike nearly every bus stop in New Haven, the space offers commuters a warm place to wait for the bus in the winter. Move New Haven reports that of the 943 bus stops in New Haven maintained by the city, only 103 have shelters. Of those, only twenty-one have benches. None are heated.

On the way back from Bella Vista to downtown, we stopped at the corner of Church and Chapel, where the bus switched routes to the 238. The doors swung open to let a line of passengers board.

A middle-aged man in a wheelchair pulled up to the bus’s front door. The floor at the head of the bus popped outwards and became a ramp to the sidewalk.

The man pushed forward, and the driver assisted him to the designated wheelchair spot on the bus. The passengers occupying the area were glad to move. The driver knelt to connect the belt buckles that would hold the wheelchair in place, but the man waved him away and fastened them himself.

Unfortunately, New Haven buses are not always so accommodating of riders with disabilities. Former 2017 candidate for Ward 22 alder Yansee Horan, who uses a manual wheelchair, claims he has been treated poorly

“Sometimes the buses get so packed ... You want to get on, but the driver’s like, ‘Yo, I can’t let you on. There’s too many people.’” on public transit before. Horan, known as “Brother Born” in the Dixwell and Newhallville communities, has been riding buses for years. “Sometimes the buses get so packed,” Horan said. “You want to get on, but the driver’s like, ‘Yo, I can’t let you on. There’s too many people.’”

At a Move New Haven public presentation on the findings of Phase 1 on November 1, residents voiced similar concerns. One elderly woman, a friend of DeMartin, claimed her daughter, who is in a wheelchair, faced an identical situation: she was denied entry to a bus because passengers refused to move from the foldable seats. TC Taylor, a resident of the Dixwell neighborhood who rides the 238 bus every day, said access is an even bigger problem in wintertime. “The [snowplows]

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push the snow drift higher and higher. They don’t have people in position to make the areas accessible to walk,” Taylor said. “You have children, the elderly, the ambulatory in the street. It’s virtually impossible for them… to make that connection onto the bus.”

Horan agrees. “During the winter months, they rarely even clean the bus stops,” he said. “So during the wintertime, I’m going nowhere. Trust me on that.”

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ur country is emerging from an era of car dominance. The spaces we occupy, from grocery stores to school, privilege the private automobile, providing parking spaces and right-of-way. In Downtown New Haven, the Temple Street Garage looms over its neighboring properties, spanning two entire city blocks. Even at the Bella Vista housing complex, parking garages occupy as much ground as the towers. Since the construction of the Oak Street Connector in 1959, a network of highways has choked the city center.

But with a renewed interest in support for public transportation—through initiatives like Move New Haven—the city has been given another chance to condemn the inequitable and destructive policies of American car culture and become universally accessible. Although the committee has not yet released its recommendations, inklings of what it could include have already been published in the first phase’s full report. Connecting routes to contemporary job locations, smarter intermodal connections, rethinking the hub and spoke system, and providing a reserved spot for wheelchairs at all times are just some of the many possibilities. For many New Haven residents, like DeMartin, who rely on the city’s bus lines, simply identifying these problems is a sign of progress. If any of these ideas were pursued, New Haven would be better off.

“We design our ecosystems around the assumption of the automobile,” Hausladen said. “It used to be that civil rights was where on the bus you sat. Now it’s about where your bus goes and how long it takes to get there.”

— Andrew Sandweiss is a junior inTrumbull College.

13 THE NEW JOUR NAL

E S S AY

MEMENTO MORI Reflections on a farm, a childhood, and an old sheep’s skull Henry Reichard

illustration julia hedges

W

e found the skull in a field by the creek.

We were young then, my sister and I, young enough that an old sheep’s skeleton, still mostly preserved, still unravaged by dogs, was no more than a curiosity, and the heavy skull, still greasy, still smelling strongly of brains, was a trophy waiting to be brought back and presented to our mother. She accepted it, washed it, and finally decided to display it on a shelf in the basement. She cherished most of our macabre prizes—the fox skeleton, the crow skull, the hardened bird nests and torn snake skins—but, more than a decade later, she told me that she was never fond of those which came from sheep. She discreetly returned almost all of these to the fields. “In some sense,” she explained, “they were a testimony to my inevitable failure as a shepherd to keep things from dying.”

My family came to the farm sixteen years ago. My mother competed actively in sheepdog trials in those days, and she had grown tired of training her dogs on other people’s sheep. And so, when I was a little over four, my parents sold their tiny apartment in west Palo Alto for an improbable sum and bought fifty-three acres in rural Maryland, which they then populated with a flock of about fifty sheep. I have no recollection of Palo Alto—for me, it is a city that lives only in mantel pictures. My earliest memories are of wading through weedy meadows down by the creek, of sculpting clay 14

with my sister on the banks, of wondering what it would be like to get lost in the woods, of staring at mistrustful ewes that always kept me thirty paces away from their lambs. It was in these years that our basement became a repository for dead animals: we accumulated several shelves full of their remains. For much of my childhood these bones watched over me while I played with blocks in the basement, and I expect that most of them will never leave the farm. One familiar bone, though, left about a month ago, and now it resides in a strange country without fields, creeks, or sheep. It sits on the table before me in my dorm in New Haven. It is the only part of the farm that I have carried with me into the city.

The skull is old now. There are cracks running through it, down the middle and along the sides, and in many places the bone is fraying—where the outer surface has worn away, the honeycombed interior resembles a desiccated coral. The deterioration is worst around the nose: there, the bone has thinned to a paper’s width, and it has fractured so jaggedly that if I run my finger along the edge, I fear that I will be cut. Amidst my never-living books and papers, the skull seems out of place. It has never heard traffic before or been much inclined to religion, but in the city a thousand cars pass by it every hour, and every hour it is startled by the sound of church bells. My dorm’s single window gives it a slanted view of Temple Street, but THE NEW JOURN AL

the scene beyond the glass never changes. It watches people hurrying past, pushing each other aside, checking their watches: moving with urban urgency. And it never sees any sheep.

My family has had this skull for nearly fifteen years.

By now it has lost most of its weight—has become lighter than a newborn lamb—and has also lost its smell. Or rather, it has lost its original, unmistakable smell. What it has retained is faint, subtle, and indescribable. It does not smell like hay, but it reminds me of springtime lambs nursing in a hay-stocked barn; it does not smell like grass, but it reminds me of yearlings grazing on a summer paddock; it does not smell like wool, but it reminds me of old ewes huddling under their fleeces in an autumnal frost; it no longer smells like carrion, but it reminds me of a childhood January when I saw vultures arcing lazy spirals over a snowy field. It does not smell like sheep, but it reminds me of sheep in a way that the skull’s hollow eyes, fractured nose, and jawless grin never could.

S

ometime in early March of every year I can remember on the farm, I have woken to hear bleating from the season’s first lambs echoing down from the barn. On the matted hay and between the small blue stalls, the lambs come out covered with placenta. They are ugly at first, and wobbly, and as tired from labor as their mothers. Yet they stand and nurse within an hour, and they are steady within a day, and within a few weeks they are on the wide green fields, crying petulantly and incessantly for milk, tumbling and jumping in their little lamb races over the hills.

This was the single season when we children were regularly conscripted to farm work. It is by spring that I best remember the farm, and it is by the lambs that I best remember the sheep.

The Border Collies, on the other hand, have never been fond of lambs. A sheepdog is accustomed to a cer-

NOVEMBER 2017

tain respect from livestock, and most ewes, remembering the dog’s ancestors, grudgingly give it to them. But a month-old lamb, too young to remember anything, will sometimes approach a Collie, sniff its nose, and seem to ask whether the dog would like to be its friend.

This spectacle is almost as traumatizing for the dog— who would like nothing better than to eat the insane lamb but knows it is not allowed to do so—as it is for the lamb’s horrified mother. Collies prefer carrion, which for them is not only a delicacy, but also a perfume even more captivating than feces. Sheepdogs who have beautified themselves with such perfumes are, as one might imagine, best admired from afar. But if one admires them from the proper distance, if one watches as they circle around a flock, as they creep up slowly on it, ready to dart left or right, their unblinking eyes steady and fixated, dominating the sheep through sheer will, their tail down, neither wagging nor tucked, their deliberate paws silently treading the ground, slowly closing the distance…from that vantage, my mother’s dogs are nothing less than beautiful.

W

hen our sheep have had to run from neighbors’ dogs, they have almost always chosen to run downhill, and that always leads them into water. There is some safety in this habit—it’s harder for the dogs to get a grip on the sheep while they are swimming—but sometimes they reach the water too late. And so it was that, about ten years ago, a year-old ewe jumped into our little pond and two black-and-white German Shepherds jumped in after her. I was only ten. What I remember is a frenzy of unfamiliar barking from the yard and a commotion in the kitchen and my mother shouting to my father and my father running upstairs and coming down with the long black rifle and then the sound of gunshots and an end to the sound of barking. Silence. My father coming back into the kitchen and returning to the fields with a knife. More silence. Silent minutes pooling like summer molasses. Then finally my mother storming back into the house furious at the woman who had let her dogs get into our sheep and my father following her 15

and washing his hands and then explaining to his children in measured tones that the yearling whose throat he had just slit had already been bloody and mangled and gasping and dying. Telling us it was happier now that it was dead.

My father is not a violent man by nature. None of this came naturally. He loves dogs and sheep, and he could never kill either of them without regretting the need for it afterwards. His first and favorite dog, a beagle named Rupert, was exactly the sort of unruly animal who would terrorize sheep if given a chance. Years later, when he became a buddhist and started to begin each dinner with a prayer for the happiness of all sentient beings, he regretted shooting dogs even more. But if he is a poor buddhist when he runs upstairs for the gun, he is also a good shepherd.

O

ver the years, my father has shot four more dogs.

The most recent one was a yellow and brown Labrador mix named George, who broke into our sheep twice with his brother Fred. There will not be another. Now, there are hardly any sheep left for them to chase. My mother gave up sheepdog trials years ago and began teaching philosophy at a small college.

Vic, Lark, and Bonnie—the dogs she once brought to trials —are all buried beside the pond, and the current generation of Collies is beginning to grow gray. So are my parents. They are both in their 50s: a fine age for teaching philosophy and for counting breaths, but an unwieldy one for maintaining a farm. That is part of the reason why, this past summer, they sold all but our three oldest sheep, and why they hope to sell the fields those three will die on within a year. The other part, which my mother confided to me only a few days ago, is that she can no longer bear to be a shepherd.

She can no longer bear to help a ram lamb take its first steps and nurse, knowing that after six months of sunny green pastures she will send it to the butcher.

She could no longer bear to eat lamb five years ago: that was when she began feeding it to the dogs, selling it to friends, or if she served it to us, not eating it herself. But soon that will all be behind her, for the lambs are gone, the farm will soon go, and my parents have just made an offer on a little green house in New Haven. And perhaps here, in the city, eating lamb will be easier.

In a city, it is so easy to buy lamb stuffed into lifeless packages from sterile counters—packages that do not bleat, that do not remind you of living creatures racing across spring meadows: packages that were prepared by others. In a city, perhaps my father will finally be able to make the Prātimokṣa oath of nonviolence that he could never commit to on the farm. Here, no sheep

16

will die because of that oath, and so keeping it will be easy. Many things will be easier in a city. And maybe that is why, since I have lost the sheep and the fields, I feel that I must keep the skull. I will set it on a shelf in my dorm, and there it will remind me of what it meant to live on a farm.

— Henry Reichard is a junior in Silliman College.

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THE NEW JOUR NAL

BY NO MEANS IMMUNE

BY MAX GRAHAM

photos elinor hills

A new emergency drug policy at Yale attempts to draw addiction out of the shadows.

“I

f this gets any worse, I’ll think I can fly,” Wes thought, as he looked down onto College Street from the top of the Silliman tower. He had taken LSD and cocaine an hour or two earlier.

Afraid of what might come next, he backed away from the window.

Within moments, he threw up.

He closed his eyes. A feeling of doom swept over him. He was certain that he had died and was experiencing a post-death state.

17

He dialed home.

“Mom, I think I’m dying.”

“Physically or mentally?”

“Both.”

He hung up the phone, got in a cab to Union Station, and boarded a train home to New York.

I

t was a Friday afternoon in October 2015, the fall semester of Wes’s sophomore year at Yale. Wes was not dying. He was hallucinating. Although he THE NEW JOUR NAL

feared he was overdosing, he was actually just having a bad trip, an experience marked by overwhelming terror and anxiety that can occur when using LSD. About thirty minutes before arriving in New York, Wes sobered up. Only then did he realize he was safe.

Five days after this harrowing episode, Wes (a pseudonym used to protect his identity) requested a medical withdrawal from Yale, telling school officials that he needed time off to seek help for “depression and anxiety.” He intentionally omitted the real reason: substance use disorder, otherwise known as drug addiction.

“YALE IS BY NO MEANS IMMUNE TO THE NATIONAL OPIOID EPIDEMIC.” Wes did not disclose his drug use because he worried about getting in trouble. He thought the university would be more sympathetic if he claimed he was seeking help for depression. If he told his dean he did drugs, he assumed there would be disciplinary or legal consequences.

At the time, there was no written policy suggesting that the University would treat the use of illicit drugs as a medical concern. The Yale College Undergraduate Regulations lists “unlawful possession, use, purchase, or distribution of illicit drugs or controlled substances (including stimulants, depressants, narcotics, or hallucinogenic drugs)” under “offenses subject to disciplinary action.” In other words, Yale’s only written policy on drug use was labeled as a disciplinary issue.

On October 23, 2017, the University updated its Medical Emergency Policy. The new Policy states that if a student overdoses on alcohol or drugs and another student calls for help, neither student will face disciplinary action. The goal of the policy is to ensure that students will not hesitate to seek help in the event of a substance use emergency. Before the change, the Medical Emergency Policy only covered alcohol. If a student overdosed on heroin or cocaine, for example, they would not have been exempt from disciplinary charges.

It was and still is Yale policy that if a student gets caught using drugs in any non-emergency situation, 18

even if they suffer from substance use disorder, they are subject to disciplinary action. However, this does not mean the student will be disciplined. There have been cases in which students struggling with substance use disorder were forthcoming with school administrators and did not face punishment.

After becoming the first-ever director of Yale’s Alcohol and Other Drugs Harm Reduction Initiative (AODHRI) in June 2017, Dr. Lynn Fiellin pushed hard to update the Medical Emergency Policy to encompass “other drugs.” Emphasizing that the health and safety of students should be the University’s primary concern, she argued that it “makes no sense” for a medical emergency policy to apply only to alcohol. Students are more likely to trust a policy that covers all substances.

As for why the policy was not changed until October 2017, Yale College Dean of Student Affairs Camille Lizarribar said the delay was not due to concerns with changing the policy, but rather the fact that “it took time to get input, changes, and processes in place.” She said the biggest challenges were logistical, such as the arrival of Dean Chun and the death of three students last fall, which required more urgent attention.

Riley Tillitt, a senior and president of Yale Students for a Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), an undergraduate organization that pushed for the policy change, said his organization did not face much resistance from the administration. “I think most deans would support a drug amnesty policy,” he said, adding that the most common argument against it was a concern it would encourage drug use.

Tillitt’s predecessor at SSDP, Clay Dupuy, a senior, said the University wanted to wait and see how the alcohol Medical Emergency Policy would pan out before they extended it to all substances. According to both him and Dr. Fiellin, there has been an uptick in the number of transports called for alcohol-related emergencies since the alcohol policy was adopted.

The increase could have been due to higher levels of alcohol consumption or the fact that people are more comfortable calling for help. Dr. Fiellin believes it is the latter, saying the alcohol Medical Emergency Policy has been a success and ought to serve as further evidence that the policy should include other drugs.

Concerns about the worsening opioid epidemic also influenced the policy change. Although the rate of opioid overdoses at Yale is lower than the national average, “Yale is by no means immune to the national THE NEW JOURN AL

opioid epidemic,” Dr. Fiellin said.

The crisis extends well beyond needles and heroin.

Many people get hooked on prescription painkillers after undergoing surgery or getting wisdom teeth removed. Some do not know they are addicted until it is too late. Opioid use disorder “doesn’t stay away from smart and talented people,” Dr. Fiellin said.

Opioid use is claiming the lives of tens of thousands of people around the country, including New Haven and the rest of Connecticut. According to the CDC, on average, 142 people die from a drug overdose per day in the U.S., and at least ninety of those deaths are caused by opioid use. In Connecticut alone, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner projects 1,078 drug overdose deaths in 2017, which is more than a 15 percent increase from last year.

The risk of a Yalie overdosing is greater now than ever. Lindsey Rogers, a student at the Yale School of Public Health who is studying the opioid epidemic, said she is “one thousand percent sure” that, given the extent of the crisis, there will be an opioid-related death on Yale’s campus in the next five to ten years.

L

ast year, Jeff came close. Jeff, who is a current Yale student but was not enrolled at the time of the incident, does not fit the profile of a stereotypical heroin addict. Jeff (a pseudonym used to

19 NOVEMBER 2017

protect his identity) is smart. He wears nice clothes.

He is a talented musician. He is, by all standards, functional. Yet despite this exterior, Jeff struggles with opioid use disorder.

Before arriving on campus, Jeff did not do drugs.

He had smoked marijuana only three times in his life and rarely, if ever, drank alcohol. His views aligned with societal norms; he thought drugs were “bad” and had no desire to start using them, he said.

But after coming to Yale, Jeff’s attitude changed.

He began drinking during his freshman year at parties and other social gatherings—but only moderately, “like any normal freshman,” he said. In addition, many of the older students in Jeff’s music group smoked often, and Jeff and his fellow freshmen in the group felt encouraged to join them. “It wasn’t anything crazy, just about once a week,” Jeff said, describing the frequency of his use. He remembers being really excited about drinking and smoking with friends. Getting high and drunk was novel and fun, he said.

During his sophomore year, Jeff’s drug use ramped up. He started smoking much more regularly—one, two, even three times a day. He had grown tired of the pressure of school and found that smoking helped him cope with stress. By the end of his sophomore year, “I was addicted to weed,” he said.

19 THE NEW JOUR NAL

Jeff’s foray into drugs other than alcohol and marijuana did not start until the spring semester of his junior year, when he was studying abroad in Amsterdam. He made a group of friends there who introduced him to a variety of new substances: MDMA (ecstasy), cocaine, LSD, and hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Jeff was excited to push his limits. Marijuana and alcohol had become all too familiar. The new drugs seemed like windows into unknown worlds. “I was using for the novelty,” he said. “My overall theory was that I would know myself better as a person if I had had every experience known to man.”

He tried several new substances overseas and continued using them, though less often, when he returned to the U.S. But there were some paths he was afraid to go down: “The two drugs I told myself I’d never do were methamphetamine and heroin,” he said, knowing them to be especially addictive.

Then, just a few months later, Jeff got his wisdom teeth removed and was prescribed oxycodone, an opioid painkiller. He was given dozens of pills but told to take only a few as needed. Jeff started with a couple, but he did not stop there. Loving the way they made him feel, “I took one, two, three, until I finished the bottle,” he said. “I had no idea that I was getting addicted to these [pills]. I was so oblivious to the fact that these are aggressively addicting.”

Before he knew it, he was hooked. He went back to the pharmacy and got a refill. When he finished

BECAUSE JEFF APPEARED ‘FUNCTIONAL’, HIS STRUGGLE WITH OPIOID USE STAYED UNDER THE RADAR. the refill, he searched around his house and found several of his parents’ old prescriptions. When he ran out of those, he turned to the Dark Web—the black market of the Internet—where he ordered a nasal spray laced with fentanyl, an opioid up to 50 times more potent than heroin. (According to the Office of the Chief Medical Officer, fentanyl is projected to kill 644 people in Connecticut in 2017, more than any other drug.) Jeff used the nasal spray every day for the rest of the summer.

20

While he was using, no one, himself included, realized that he was becoming seriously addicted. He was able to keep up his music and maintain strong friendships. Some of his friends were faintly aware that he was using narcotics recreationally—Jeff said he sometimes even offered his friends the nasal spray at parties—but it did not strike them as a big deal.

Because Jeff appeared “functional”—he had a job that summer and the “Yale student” label still applied to him—his struggle with opioid use stayed under the radar. “It’s definitely possible to be a productive member of society as an addict,” Jeff said.

A few times, his friends caught him nodding off, a sign of an opioid high. Still, no one suspected he was struggling with addiction.

Upon returning to campus in the fall, Jeff stopped using for a few days when he did not have access to narcotics. He felt extremely hot one moment and awfully cold the next. Every minor prick and pressure caused him immense pain, and he suffered uncontrollable diarrhea. Going through withdrawal THE NEW JOURN AL

was one of the most miserable experiences in his life, he said.

The solution was clear to him: he would swear off opioids forever. He had not signed up for this when he started abusing prescription painkillers a month earlier. Jeff described having a “coming to Jesus moment” and was determined to get sober.

BOREDOM AND LONELINESS WERE HIS TWO BIGGEST TRIGGERS. But after two months without opioids, Jeff was feeling restless on a dreary November day and decided to order more fentanyl from the Internet. Boredom and loneliness were his two biggest triggers. On nights when not much was happening and he did not have an outlet for his restlessness, he struggled to resist using narcotics. Even though he was well aware of the risk of relapsing, “I was not in a place where I cared,” he said.

A couple evenings later, Jeff, high on fentanyl, fell to the floor of his off-campus apartment. Upon finding him lying unconscious, one of his roommates called an ambulance, which arrived in time to inject him with Narcan, a highly effective antidote. Had an ambulance not come, Jeff almost certainly would have died. He was discharged from the hospital the next morning.

Although Jeff was in New Haven at the time, he was not enrolled in Yale. As a result, he was not at risk of facing disciplinary consequences, and his roommate was able to call for help without any hesitation.

Had Jeff been enrolled, he could have been brought before the Executive Committee, which could have imposed a punishment ranging from “reprimand” to “expulsion,” according to Yale College Undergraduate Regulations. Jeff overdosed in the fall of 2016.

At the time, the University handled all drug-related incidents on a case-by-case basis, so there was no way of knowing exactly how Jeff’s situation would have turned out. In the spring of 2014, thirty-three drug-related cases were brought before the Executive Committee, according to the Executive Committee Chair’s Report from that spring. The Report does not specify the outcomes of those cases.

The new Medical Emergency Policy, however, 21 NOVEMBER 2017

states that a person “consuming alcohol or other drugs who is helped will not be charged by the Yale College Executive Committee with alcohol or other drug violations, but may have to complete counseling, educational, or training programs within an agreed upon timeframe.” Under this policy, a student in the same position as Jeff would not be brought before the Executive Committee.

I

n January 2014, Clay Dupuy stood helpless in the Hopper College courtyard as he watched his friend get handcuffed and carried away by four Yale policemen. He and his friend had taken LSD a few hours earlier.

Clay began using LSD during his freshman fall to cope with his depression, which was undiagnosed at the time. “I discovered that I could use [LSD and marijuana] recreationally, and have everyone believe that I was using just as they were, when really it was quite therapeutic for me,” he said.

Over winter break, Clay was formally diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed medicine, so he

21 THE NEW JOUR NAL

resolved to stop using LSD. But he and his friend had been planning to take LSD for over a month. Clay did not want to reveal his diagnosis, so he decided to take the drug one last time.

The friend had a bad trip, freaked out, ran down a flight of stairs in Hopper and broke a vase in a fellow’s suite. The fellow, who was in the suite at the time, immediately called the police.

When paramedics arrived, Clay told them everything—when, what, and how much he took—concerned his friend was in medical danger and hoping that the information might save his life. He was also entirely forthcoming with his dean. It did not occur to him that he might face serious disciplinary or legal consequences.

Clay said he knew the punishment for marijuana was not severe, and since LSD is “safer,” he thought the punishment for it would not be bad either. The University’s written policy did not and still does not differentiate between marijuana and LSD. Both fall under the category of “illicit drugs.”

The next day, Clay went before the Yale Executive Committee, facing a penalty that could range anywhere from a slap on the wrist to full expulsion. After a series of hearings, the Committee decided to suspend Clay for three semesters. In addition, Clay was

22

charged criminally by the Yale Police Department. If he had been found guilty, he would have had to serve up to 22 years in prison and pay up to $100,000 in fines. Eventually a deal was struck: charges would be dropped if Clay did not get arrested for a year.

Clay is still suffering the consequences. His family went into serious debt paying for a lawyer, which Clay has had to work hard to pay off, and his suspension will be visible to potential employers for the rest of his life.

It is hard to know exactly how things would have played out had the updated Medical Emergency Policy been in place at the time. Although the policy does not define “medical emergency,” Dean Lizarribar said, “A ‘medical emergency’ has no one answer.

Anytime a student is concerned or in distress they should always call for help, and as long as they do so and follow through on what AODHRI and [Yale College] requests of them, they will not be subject to discipline by [Yale College].” A bad trip, such as the one Clay’s friend had, would likely qualify under this broad understanding of “medical emergency.” Clay’s specific case, however, would not have been covered because neither he nor another student called for help.

THE NEW JOURN AL

U

nlike Clay, Wes was not upfront about his drug use. In the two years before his bad trip in the Silliman tower, Wes was able to hide his struggle with substance use disorder from just about everyone, including his parents, friends, and girlfriend. Cocaine and LSD—the two drugs Wes was on that day—were not the only ones he regularly used. During the first month of Wes’ sophomore year, he was doing anything he could get his hands on: alcohol, marijuana, LSD, MDMA, cocaine, painkillers, ADHD meds, tranquilizers, and antidepressants.

“I couldn’t go an hour without doing something to change how I felt,” he said. Wes was using multiple substances a day, often attending class intoxicated, if attending at all. He had developed a constant craving for stimulation. He needed the high.

To make matters more difficult, his growing dependency was complicated by worsening anxiety. “The constant rush of chemicals was devastating as far as my ability to absorb stress,” he said. His psychological state was in endless flux, up one moment and down the next. Wes observed that the “comedown” associated with stimulant use—the state of feeling very

23 NOVEMBER 2017

low after experiencing a rush—exacerbated his anxiety. His frequent stimulant use caused a never-ending psychological rollercoaster, which had crippling effects on his emotional stability. The more he used, the worse his anxiety got, and the worse his anxiety got, the more he used. It was a “chicken and an egg sort of thing.”

THE MORE HE USED, THE WORSE HIS ANXIETY GOT, AND THE WORSE HIS ANXIETY GOT, THE MORE HE USED. Yet despite the extent of his drug use and emotional turmoil, no one had a clue about just how far his life had gotten away from him. Wes did a remarkable job of concealing his struggle. “If you looked in on my life from the outside,” he said, “it would’ve 23 THE NEW JOUR NAL

looked like I was put together. I was always going to pull some shit, make something up, and come out on top, feeling in control. But I was becoming increasingly depressed and anxious.” Wes had built up a façade that no one could see through. From the outside looking in, he could have been any Yalie.

Wes’s relationship with drugs began long before he enrolled at Yale. As a kid, he was diagnosed with severe ADHD and prescribed Ritalin. He took the pills on a daily basis through middle school and high school. In addition, Wes struggled with anxiety disorder. When he was fifteen, he started smoking with marijuana with friends and discovered that it helped him cope with his anxiety. By junior year, he was smoking just about every day. “I knew from the beginning that the way I related to substances wasn’t normal,” he said.

During his senior year of high school, Wes’s drug use took a turn when, as in Jeff’s case, Wes got his wisdom teeth removed. He was prescribed thirty Vicodin pills to ease the pain but told to take only 24

three. Wes finished the entire bottle in the course of a weekend. On Monday, out of pills, he felt terribly ill. “A darkness came over me,” Wes said. And so began his addiction to hard drugs.

Opioids were not the only ones. As high-school senioritis kicked in, Wes started snorting his ADHD medicine, giving him a more intense high. To offset the anxiety of the comedown from that high, he began using Klonopin, an anti-anxiety medication that Wes called “pretty much a tranquilizer.”

“It was scary to be doing this,” Wes said. “I knew it was out of control. I knew it wasn’t a good idea.”

Two days after he delivered the valedictory speech at his graduation, Wes voluntarily went to rehab.

The second he arrived, he was terrified. As an educated kid from a privileged background, he said he couldn’t relate to the people there, who were much less well-off. “Yet the way they spoke about drugs and alcohol—the way they obsessed over drugs, the way drugs made them feel—I identified with it. That terrified me,” Wes said.

Wes hated rehab so much that after a month he checked himself out against medical advice. That created a huge rift between him and his parents, who wanted him to continue treatment. Things got so heated that Wes contemplated cutting off all ties. He came out of rehab thinking, “Fuck my parents. I’m not done [doing drugs]. I can handle this.” A month before coming to Yale, his parents told him that they would only pay for college if he had a sober coach, drug testing, and took steps to seek treatment and stay sober on campus.

HIS PARENTS BOUGHT HIS LIES. THEY THOUGHT HE WAS RECOVERING, BUT HIS ADDICTION WAS ACTUALLY PROGRESSING. For the next thirteen months, Wes lived what he called a “double life.” He faked his drug tests with synthetic urine, and he successfully convinced his parents to get rid of the sober coach. His parents bought his lies. They thought he was recovering, but his addiction was actually progressing. During his freshman year, Wes smoked and used stimulants THE NEW JOURN AL

daily and began experimenting with new drugs, like cocaine, LSD and MDMA. His substance use and anxiety gradually worsened throughout the year, but he was able to keep up with his social life and academics, even maintaining above a 3.5 GPA.

WHILE HIS GIRLFRIEND LAY ASLEEP IN BED BESIDE HIM, HE SNORTED LINES OFF HIS DESK.

After the incident in the Silliman tower early in his sophomore year, Wes spent the weekend at home.

Although his parents could tell that something was wrong, he did not tell them about the cocaine and LSD, saying he had had an anxiety attack and needed to unwind for a few days at home.

Wes returned to campus before the next school week, but his façade was about to come crashing down. His drug use was out of control, and a month finto the semester, he was nearly a month behind on his schoolwork. One night, he had to read an entire book for seminar the next day and felt he needed something to get him through it. “If I do cocaine, I’ll be able to read the whole book,” he thought. While his girlfriend lay asleep in bed beside him, he snorted lines off his desk. By 6 a.m., he had run out of the drug. He crashed. When he woke up, he realized he had slept through the seminar.

“I was in the middle of a trifecta: I had crippling anxiety; I was a month behind on schoolwork a month into the semester; I couldn’t stop doing drugs and drinking,” Wes said. It was at that moment that he decided to take a medical withdrawal.

seeking help. And Jeff observed that being stigmatized for using drugs is harmful: “The one thing that I’d tell Yalies is to question the stigma, to question the prevailing norms surrounding substance abuse, and in that, to question the way they treat people.”

Two days after overdosing, Jeff resumed using fentanyl. A few months later, he quit, but then relapsed within weeks. Eventually, at the beginning of the summer of 2017, he went to rehab and has been sober ever since. But he still worries that, if he ever gets bored or lonely enough, he might relapse again.

Wes spent his year and a half away from Yale at a residential treatment center, where he made large strides in his struggle with substance use disorder. He was reinstated in Yale in the spring of 2017.

As he finished telling me his story on a sunny September day in the Silliman courtyard, his mood was remarkably upbeat. “I’ve built myself into a person I can be proud of,” he said. There were a few setbacks along the way, but “every time I slipped, I picked myself up faster each time.”

With Yale’s updated drug policy, students will hopefully be more upfront about their drug use and seek the resources they need. Although the policy applies only to emergency situations, it is a step toward creating a culture of openness. Still, students and school officials must continue working on ways to dispel the stigmas that have prevented many from seeking help.

— Max Graham is a sophomore in Davenport College.

T

he threat of disciplinary action is not the only barrier between students who struggle with substance use disorder and a willingness to seek help. “Shame about having a problem with drugs or alcohol, compounded with concerns about how the person with the problem will be viewed, get in the way of people talking openly about substance use or getting help when they need it,” said Dr. Richard Schottenfeld, former Head of Davenport College and a leader in the field of addiction science.

Wes said much of the shame he felt kept him from

25 NOVEMBER 2017

25 THE NEW JOUR NAL

On the couch together, in the casual light of the afternoon, my legs draped across her, and both of us sipping tea, she reached to brush a bit of dirt from my forehead, only it wasn’t dirt, it slipped back up into my hair, and neither of us wanted to believe it, but it was true, I had been scratching for days. So, because I wasn’t home for long, with no time to waste, we did the whole thing, just as in childhood: bathed my scalp over the sink with the stuff from the blue bottle, rinsed it out, her hand over my eyes to keep them dry, and finally, just after sunset, began: strand by strand, she picked the nits out, small and clear as beads of water on her comb. Like returning

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poem

LATE OCTOBER Anna Sudderth

to a dream we’d shared, but couldn’t quite remember, except through reenactment, each small gesture spurring the next, she pushed my head forward and back, I sighed, and the lamp, with its shade removed, kept us in its light, even as outside became dark, and the windows turned to mirrors, reflecting all of it back to me, already exactly how I would remember it: me, slouched forward, tall body bent so that my mother could best reach, and my mother, cheeks unevenly red, grimacing, working over each clump of hair again and again, hands trembling slightly—we spent

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four nights like this, and then I left, and as it turned out, it had worked, the lice were gone. And I told everybody, all my friends about it, the infestation, and of course, they laughed at such a disclosure.

Mama, although I am away from you now, I think you will be glad to know that I am doing better these past days, I am spending the weekend in a cabin on a lake way north even of Connecticut. It is so beautiful, the sky, and all the leaves just changing; see, across the lake, those yellow trees— they are truly gleaming, they are really that bright. Oh, and the lake, sparkling, blue, wind hurrying the surface of the water, all those ripples, fast and cold.

illustration fiona drenttel

— Anna Sudderth is a junior in Pierson College.

27 NOVEMBER 2017

27 THE NEW JOUR NAL

A fragile sanctuary

By Eliza Fawcett Photos by Robbie Short

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Marco Reyes Alvarez and his wife, Fanny Torres Reyes, in his room in First and Summerfield UMC.

THE WALLS OF A NEW HAVEN CHURCH PROTECT MARCO ANTONIO REYES ALVAREZ FROM DEPORTATION. NO ONE KNOWS FOR HOW LONG.

M

arco Antonio Reyes Alvarez’s bags were almost packed. He had his ticket for a flight the next morning, August 8, to Ecuador, the country he left twenty years ago for the United States. At his home in Meriden—a small city midway between Hartford and New Haven—Fanny Torres Reyes, his wife of twenty-four years, their three children, and thirty relatives had gathered for his final hours in the country. His deportation loomed on the other side of the night.

“We were saying goodbye, crying, making his suitcases,” Torres Reyes remembered. She is forty years old, slight, with expressive eyes and dark brown hair that falls just below her shoulders. “He was even [packing] some tools to bring over there so he would be able to work.”

It would be a two-hour drive to the airport in New York City, a six-and-a-half-hour flight to Ecuador, and a decade before he could begin to petition the United States government for re-entry. That process alone could take up to five years. By then, his twelve-year-old daughter, Adriana, an American citizen, could sponsor her father’s request for

29

readmission. Or maybe one of their other children—twenty-three-year old Evelyn and twenty-one-year-old Anthony, both DACA recipients—would have gained legal status through marriage and could vouch for him. But he would still need to apply for a waiver of his removal order. It could be well over a decade before Reyes Alvarez saw his family again, or perhaps he would never be able to return.

“Muy, muy, muy, muy duro,” Reyes Alvarez said with a heavy sigh, remembering that night. “You had to say goodbye to your son, your wife…”

Forty-five years old, Reyes Alvarez has a compact build, a soft, square face, and dark hair trimmed close to his head.

He has a quiet gentleness that belies his steadfast resolve.

In 1997, he made the two-week trek from Ecuador to Texas, sometimes walking for days on end, in search of better prospects for his family. He settled in Connecticut and established himself as a construction worker skilled in everything from sheetrock and drywall to carpentry and framing. His young family soon joined him. For the next twenty years, he was their sole provider.

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Now, years of fighting a deportation order dating back to 2009 would end at dawn. The week before his deportation date, Erin O’Neil-Baker, his Hartford-based attorney, had filed a motion to reopen his case with the Board of Immigration Appeals on the grounds of asylum. If Reyes Alvarez returned to Ecuador, O’Neil-Baker said, he would be in certain danger. His brother-in-law had recently been murdered there by a suspect who, after a brief prison sentence, was now free and threatening other members of the Reyes family.

For the past two years, Reyes Alvarez’s requests for stays of removal had been granted, extending his legal ability to remain in the country. Each request involved demonstrating that he had no criminal record, was employed, and paid taxes. But on June 27, 2017, for the first time, his request was denied. His situation is characteristic of a new trend in immigration court proceedings that began soon after the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

“ICE is now targeting people with old removal orders, not people with criminal records. They're seen as low-hanging fruit.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is “now targeting people with old removal orders, not people with criminal records,” O’Neil-Baker said. “They’re seen as low-hanging fruit.”

In Meriden, Reyes Alvarez’s family cried and prayed as they packed his bags. Late in the evening, friends and members of Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), a New Haven-based immigrants’ rights group, arrived and they all gathered in the dining room, Torres Reyes remembered. They reminded Reyes Alvarez that there was a last option: he could take sanctuary in a local church.

If he did, he would join a growing number of undocumented immigrants across the country who have sought refuge from deportation in places of worship, continuing to fight their cases from spare rooms and basements.

Since 2011, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has recognized schools, hospitals, and places of worship as “sensitive locations”—only in exceptional circumstances, such as public security threats, would ICE agents enter the premises to question or detain a suspect. The Obama-era policy was adopted to ensure that agents “exercise sound judgement when enforcing federal law” and “avoid unnecessarily alarming local communities,” according to ICE. In 2015 and 2016 combined, there were eight public cases of undocumented immigrants taking sanctuary from depor 30

tation in places of worship. Since January of this year, there have been thirty.

In late July, Nury Chavarria, a mother of four from Norwalk, won an emergency stay of removal less than a week after taking sanctuary in a Fair Haven church. Her case was far from resolved, but it offered a sense of hope to undocumented immigrants in Connecticut facing their own deportation dates.

Still, if Reyes Alvarez took sanctuary, there would be no guarantee of a legal victory. He might have to live for weeks, months or years in a single space, awaiting a final immigration decision. But late that night, he decided that it was a risk worth taking. “Seeing his kids crying—and also me, because I couldn’t stop crying—we decided, last minute, that he would take the last resort,” Torres Reyes said.

B

y 11 p.m. that night, Jesus Morales Sanchez, an organizer for ULA, had spent the last two hours in New Haven writing a press release for Reyes Alvarez’ departure. Suddenly, John Jairo Lugo, the head of ULA, who had been at Reyes Alvarez’s home that night, called him with the news that Reyes Alvarez had decided to stay.

There was no sanctuary waiting to take him in, so a network of communication sprang into action. Jairo Lugo called Paul Fleck, the pastor of the Hamden Plains United Methodist Church and an organizer of the Sanctuary Movement in the New Haven area. Fleck has spent the past year helping a handful of religious communities prepare to host someone seeking refuge from deportation. But he had already gone to sleep by the time Reyes Alvarez made his decision, so didn’t see Jairo Lugo’s message until he woke up unexpectedly at 2 a.m.

Thirty-five miles away, in Wethersfield, a suburb of Hartford, Juhye Hahn had just crept into bed after a long night of work when her phone pinged from another room.

“When you hear that message sound that early in the morning, you have to check if something is wrong,” Hahn said. “The message came from Paul: someone needed sanctuary. So I said, ‘I’ll be there.’”

Hahn had only been the pastor of the First and Summerfield United Methodist Church in New Haven for a month.

The towering red-brick church on the corner of Elm and College Streets has a history of social justice, but this past year, its activist mission took on a new sense of urgency.

In February, then-pastor Thomas Kim delivered a sermon rebuking President Trump’s executive order banning travel from seven majority-Muslim countries. He encouraged his congregation to put their progressive principles into practice. “I strongly felt that I was called to preach that becoming a sanctuary church is one of the ways that we can be [the] salt and light of the world,” he wrote in an email, referring to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew. “And the members of FSUMC agreed with me.” That spring, THE NEW JOUR NAL

the members of the church council voted unanimously to become a sanctuary church, one of the first in Connecticut.

In the past year, the Sanctuary Movement has taken on a new sense of urgency as the Trump Administration cracks down on undocumented immigrants, said Rev. Noel Andersen, the national grassroots coordinator of the Church World Service (CWS), a humanitarian aid organization. Although the tradition of taking sanctuary has ancient origins, the practice became a full-fledged movement in the United States in the 1980s, when churches began providing shelter for those fleeing violence in Central America, whom the U.S. did not recognize as asylum-seekers. CWS has become the “connective tissue” of the Sanctuary Movement, Andersen said, coordinating networks of faith communities across the country. Although sanctuary churches tend to be “progressive-leaning,” he said, they cut across a broad spectrum of denominations.

For Hahn, agreeing to host Reyes Alvarez was a natural extension of her religious conviction. “When Jesus fed the hungry, I don’t think Jesus asked, ‘Do you have proper I.D.?’” she said. “Jesus just fed people, because he saw the need. For me, it’s the same thing.”

Although many of the churches in the New York Conference of the United Methodist Church—450 congregations scattered across Long Island, New York City, and half of Connecticut—have become sanctuaries in the past year, First and Summerfield is the first to actually host someone.

As of November, two other churches in the New Haven area had taken in sanctuary seekers: Iglesia De Dios Pentecostal in Fair Haven, which hosted Chavarria, and the Unitarian Universalist Church in Meriden, which is still hosting sixty-eight-year-old Sujitno Sajuti, who faces deportation to Indonesia.

There are logistical concerns involved in becoming a long-term sanctuary, Fleck says: the building needs to have a kitchen, shower, and makeshift bedroom. But more importantly, a congregation must take the “considerable leap of faith” involved in hosting someone, essentially committing

to a massive, protracted advocacy effort and the politicization of its spiritual mission.

After she replied to Fleck’s text, Hahn went back to bed, but couldn’t fall asleep. Eventually, she got up, showered, and began driving toward New Haven in the pale early morning light. She didn’t know anything about Reyes Alvarez, but was heartbroken for him and prepared to give him the protection he needed.

In their homes in Hamden, Wanda Harris and Adeline Tucker, longtime parishioners of First and Summerfield and members of the church’s social concerns committee, had also received early morning messages from Fleck. They arrived at the church at 6 a.m., joining a small group including Hahn and Fleck waiting for Reyes Alvarez to arrive. All at once, he and his wife entered through the church’s side door on College Street.

“It was intense, it was hurried and rushed,” Fleck said.

“We situated him and let him know where everything was.”

Harris and Tucker showed Reyes Alvarez around the labyrinthine building. In the basement was the dining hall with its bright, white-tiled floor and windows just below street level. On the second floor were the offices of the three Yale unions, Locals 33, 34, and 35. On the first floor was the main sanctuary, a large, square room with a gleaming, circular hardwood floor at its center; a soaring, dark-paneled altarpiece; and tall, green stained-glass panels running along two opposing walls.

Just past Hahn’s office, at the end of a dim, blue-walled corridor, was the maroon-carpeted meeting room that would be now be Reyes Alvarez’s bedroom. It was still cluttered with church furniture, which they began to remove and rearrange. There was no bed yet; Fleck would bring one that afternoon. As Reyes Alvarez began to get settled, his immediate family arrived, followed by the thirty relatives who had come to see him off the night before.

“It was really hard to see the family,” Hahn said. “I could tell they cried all night, because their eyes were red. They were shaken, not knowing what would happen.”

“When Jesus fed the hungry, I don't think Jesus asked, 'Do you have proper I.D.?'”

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Marco Reyes Alvarez’s room in the church. From left to right, Anthony Reyes, ULA organizer Jesus Morales Sanchez, Jason Ramos (son of Giaconda and Franklin Ramos), Marco Reyes Alvarez.

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Three months into his stay at First and Summerfield UMC, for Reyes Alvarez, life is uneasy and claustrophobic.

“I'm most scared because I don't have any answer for my kids if I have to go back to my country. I don't want to separate my family.”

By 11 a.m., however, Reyes Alvarez was standing resolute behind the iron fence at the top of the stairs to the church’s main entrance, flanked by his family, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Mayor Toni Harp, church leaders, and ULA organizers, as he addressed a crowd of supporters.

“We came to this country with a lot of dreams and it is very difficult to be going through what we are going through now,” Reyes Alvarez said, as his son-in-law Brian Martinez translated. “Here I am, here is my family, here is my community, and here are all of us who want to live in a better world.”

F

anny Torres Reyes enters her husband’s room and sits down at the wooden table next to him. It’s a Monday afternoon and Reyes Alvarez has been living at First and Summerfield for the past seven weeks. Even in the soft light from the chandelier overhead, the strain of their ordeal shows in their faces.

With Reyes Alvarez in sanctuary and unable to work, the family has been working hard to make ends meet. Torres Reyes started housecleaning. Their son Anthony works long days in construction in a nearby town. Their oldest daughter Evelyn, who is studying dental hygiene at Gateway Community College in New Haven, works at a deli, and she and her husband have moved back in with Torres Reyes. When Reyes Alvarez entered First and Summerfield, the family set up an online donation page that, by October, had raised about $3,000 of their $10,000 goal.

The room’s only windows overlook the light brick wall of a Yale School of Music building; there’s rarely any direct sunlight. But Reyes Alvarez and his family have made an effort to make the room feel cozy. There’s a colorful throw folded neatly on a brown couch on one side of the room; cards and flowers line the windowsill. A single bed nestled into a corner of the room almost looks like it was meant to be there. Reyes Alvarez’s heavy-duty toolboxes are stacked one on top of the other, next to his Shop-Vac, at the end

32

of his bed. Along one wall, there’s a bookshelf lined with identical copies of prayer books, a ceramic water jug and a large stack of packaged food.

Reyes Alvarez peels open a package of pecan Sandies and offers one to his wife.

“It was a busy day today,” Torres Reyes says with a weary smile, her dark hair pulled back from her face in a high bun.

That morning, she had brought their twelve-year-old daughter Adriana to join a protest of nearly two hundred people at the federal immigration court in Hartford against the imminent deportation of Franklin and Gioconda Ramos. Like Torres Reyes and Reyes Alvarez, the Ramos couple is from Ecuador and live in Meriden. Thirty-six protesters, including Fleck, the pastor of the Hamden Plains UMC, sat in a line in front of the court doors, barring entry; they were charged with disorderly conduct and trespassing.

Usually Adriana comes with her mother to First and Summerfield, but today, tired from the early protest and afterschool soccer, her mother left her home to rest. Hours later, the memory of that morning’s protest, and the Ramos family, seemed to weigh heavily on Torres Reyes.

“We’re from the same country,” she said in a wavering voice, looking down at her hands folded in her lap. “So it’s very hard.”

Reyes Alvarez’s day starts and ends with a small task: switching out the rechargeable battery of his GPS tracker, which ICE officials clamped onto his right ankle in July.

It’s a black plastic bracelet that sends data about his location to a private company in Hartford subcontracted by ICE to monitor undocumented immigrants with deportation orders. He has to change the battery every eight hours. If he were to step outside the church, ICE would know immediately.

“He feels like a slave,” Torres Reyes said. “It’s very uncomfortable. I think he got used to it in some way—resignation that he has to wear it for a while. At the beginning, he was very upset that he had to wear it.”

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Reyes Alvarez has about eight visitors every day, he says.

ULA organizer Jesus Morales Sanchez is usually with him every weekday, relatives visit on the weekends. His youngest daughter Adriana comes most days after school. Evelyn visits after classes at Gateway, Anthony on the weekends when he’s off work. Some visitors are ULA members who have made it a habit to drop by to see him. Others are complete strangers who have heard about his case and want to offer their support. To each of them, Reyes Alvarez offers a seat on the couch or around the small wooden table at the center of his room.

Within the church building, Reyes Alvarez can use most rooms when he wants to, but he usually goes back and forth between his room and the downstairs dining hall. In the bathroom down the hall from his room, he installed a shower himself, equipped with a stainless-steel handle. His only opportunity for a breath of fresh air is the church’s handicap-accessible entrance, a small garden patio enclosed by a metal fence. He usually just stays inside, although one of their friends always encourages him to go feel the sunlight. “I try,” Reyes Alvarez says wearily.

Torres Reyes brings her husband food from home or cooks in the basement kitchen. Sometimes Reyes Alvarez cooks, too. His specialty? White rice.

“It never comes out as good when I make it. He puts something special in it,” Torres Reyes says, laughing.

“It’s a secret!” Reyes Alvarez responds with a chuckle.

If no one is visiting, he cooks in the kitchen downstairs, does push-ups, or listens to Bob Marley. In his room, there’s an old television set and a stack of dramas on VCR, although if Reyes Alvarez ever watches something, it’s usually Netflix Christian movies on a desktop in the corner of the room.

Back in Ecuador, he played on a travel soccer team and follows his favorite team, Barcelona, with intensity. But he’s missing out on the games that matter the most: Adriana’s.

“It’s hard because I like soccer, I want to see my daughter… oh my God,” he says, his voice breaking.

Reyes Alvarez met Torres Reyes when he was sixteen years old; they both grew up in Mera, a small town in central Ecuador, in the foothills of the Andes. In 1997, when their

oldest children were toddlers, Reyes Alvarez paid smugglers known as coyotajes seven thousand dollars to make the twoweek journey to the United States border. He and forty others were driven from Ecuador to Mexico, then walked to Texas. A bus and a train later, he was arrived in New Haven, where Torres Reyes’ brother had already settled. In 2000, after he became established in the area, his wife joined him.

A year later, they had enough money to rent a bigger apartment in Wallingford, and their children came too. Five years later, they moved to Meriden, and other relatives soon followed suit, settling in the area.

Although he has adopted a daily rhythm, there is no getting used to life in purgatory.

In 2007, on a family trip to Michigan, the family’s GPS took them off course and they accidentally drove across the border into Canada. Reyes Alvarez was detained for a weekend until his family posted bail. The incident identified him to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which lead to him being placed in removal proceedings, his attorney O’Neil-Baker said. Two years later, he received a removal order. Over the following years, repeated attempts to reopen his case were denied.

Torres Reyes tries to come to First and Summerfield every day and often stays the night so that her husband won’t be alone. When she’s not there, he sometimes can’t sleep or won’t eat, she says. Although he has adopted a daily rhythm, there is no getting used to life in purgatory.

“I’m most scared because I don’t have any answer for my kids if I have to go back to my country,” he said. “I don’t want to separate my family.”

Reyes Alvarez's day starts and ends with a small task: switching out the rechargeable battery of his GPS tracker.

33

Reyes Alvarez lives in a repurposed meeting room in the back of First and Summerfield UMC.

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T

he door through which Reyes Alvarez fled deportation now marks the limit of his world. The entrance to 425 College Street, the side door of First and Summerfield, is made of dull metal, with a scratched, square window at eye level. Between eight in the morning and five in the evening, it’s unlocked, constantly opening and closing with the flow of people through the building. After hours, visitors must press a buzzer to be let in. For the past three months, this door has been the only thing between Reyes Alvarez’s current safety and the certain deportation that lurks beyond. On the inside, he’s protected through ICE’s “sensitive locations” policy; on the outside, he’s vulnerable to immediate arrest.

Though ICE has kept its word on sensitive locations, immigration activists worry that the policy isn’t permanent. “[ICE] says it won’t do anything in those buildings, but that can change from one day to another,” said John Jairo Lugo.

“Maybe one day we’ll wake up with a new memo from the government, and that would be a nightmare for undocumented immigrants.”

This past spring, Paul Fleck said, a group of religious leaders from the New Haven area met with Deirdre Daly, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut, and an ICE community relations officer, who affirmed that agents would not enter sanctuary spaces unless in the case of a public threat. Even so, he said, “my trust for ICE is rather

34

limited.”

“It’s just striking the American public now what an arbitrary, worse than Kafka-esque, rogue agency, in many senses [ICE] is,” said Ramon Garibaldo Valdez, a member of ULA and second-year student in Yale’s political science PhD program. “We’re just going off this intuition [that] they have usually been somewhat respectful of churches, but that precedent does not stand on very strong ground.”

New Haven is a sanctuary city, which means that its police officers cannot provide assistance to ICE in the case of a federal immigration action or inquire about someone’s immigration status. But the sanctuary city status is less secure than many realize; it’s a federal designation that has no substantial legal backing.

“We’re blind to status,” Mayor Toni Harp told me one morning at City Hall. Since the early 2000s, the New Haven Police Department has had a general order stating that officers do not ask people for their immigration status. Public school officials are not supposed to inquire about a student’s status either, and city services are based on residency, not place of origin, she said.

Yet there has been no real push from the New Haven Board of Alders to formally undergird the city’s sanctuary status, Harp added. The Trump administration’s threat to pull federal funding from sanctuary cities doesn’t weaken the city’s commitment to protecting undocumented immigrants, she said, but city leaders don’t want to put a bullseye on New Haven. So, they have adopted more modest measures, like distributing five-thousand copies of a pocket-sized “Family Emergency Preparedness Guide” to schools, hospitals, and libraries, to inform undocumented immigrants of their rights in case ICE agents show up at their door.

A decade ago, New Haven experienced federal backlash after instituting measures to support its undocumented residents. In 2006, the city released its Elm City Resident card, a first-of-its-kind municipal identification card for undocumented immigrants. A year later, ICE agents conducted a massive raid across New Haven, deporting over thirty people at once. In the carefully-selected words of City Hall spokesman Laurence Grotheer, the federal government “took exception” to the city’s new ID program. In the words of Jairo Lugo, the raid was a flat-out “retaliation.”

“Just today, I heard they’re going to start doing raids in California because the government there wants to keep the state a sanctuary,” he said on the phone one afternoon in October. He fears that something similar may soon happen in New Haven. “We don’t know when, but we’re getting ready for it.”

Even in his secluded room in First and Summerfield, the ever-present threat of an ICE raid hangs over Reyes Alvarez and his family. After all, the side door is almost always unlocked.

“We pray a lot to be safe,” said Torres Reyes. “That’s why

An anti-deportation banner on the steps of First and Summerfield UMC.

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Marco Reyes Alvarez and Fanny Torres Reyes with their daughter, Adriana Reyes, 12.

“The administration has lied about what they said they were doing. It's a cruel reversal of policy.”

most of the time, someone is here with me, either me or Jesus [Morales Sanchez] or John Jairo [Lugo]…because if something happens, they can be witnesses of what’s going on.”

O

ver the past three months, the front steps of First and Summerfield have become a gathering place for political action in New Haven. Reyes Alvarez’s supporters flocked to the nine brown stone steps when he first entered the church, and later, when the Trump Administration announced its decision to rescind DACA. It is here that city and state officials have pledged their support for Reyes Alvarez and his family.

But it hasn’t always been the case that high-profile legislators, or even the mayor, have showed up to support cases like these. “Back in the day, we had to beg them to support us, but they’ve become more willing to work with the immigrant community,” Jairo Lugo said. “At the same time, it’s good for the case when they are in solidarity with Marco.”

On the day of Reyes Alvarez’s arrival at First and Summerfield, Senator Blumenthal stood behind the iron fence where a neon green sign read “IMMIGRANTS MAKE AMERICA” and called for a new hearing in Reyes Alvarez’s case. “Our country is better than the policies that have been adopted in the last seven months and focus on people who have lived here for decades, worked hard, paid taxes, raised families,” Blumenthal said over the noise of buses rumbling down Elm Street. “Our country is better than policies that tear apart families.”

Connecticut politicians like Blumenthal and U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro say that the ICE policies that have singled out undocumented immigrants like Ryes Alvarez betray the unusual malice of the Trump administration.

“One policy the president spoke about was that the deportations would target dangerous felons, not upstanding members of our community like Mr. Reyes,” said DeLauro, who has also attended rallies for Reyes Alvarez, told me in October. “The administration has lied about what they said

35 NOVEMBER 2017

they were doing. It’s a cruel reversal of policy.”

DeLauro sees Reyes Alvarez’s case in the context of the long haul: comprehensive immigration reform. “If we win back the House of Representatives, we can change a number of these policies that have been willy-nilly reversed,” she said.

The 2018 election, however, is a long time for Reyes Alvarez to wait. For him, life continues, day-by-day, in his small room in a corner of First and Summerfield, far from the noise of the church’s front steps. By nature a quiet man, over the past few months, Reyes Alvarez has become a spokesman for the predicament that he, and many other undocumented immigrants, now find themselves in. It’s a role he doesn’t seem entirely comfortable with, but has come to accept.

“All of us are afraid—but not all of us can do what I am doing either,” he says in Spanish one afternoon in October.

“Everyone always waits for another to sacrifice themselves, so I guess, recently, it’s my turn. But it’s not that anyone would want to be here and call attention to themselves to say something. I just did it to stay with my family and my wife.”

Ramon Garibaldo Valdez says that people tend to underestimate the force of Reyes Alvarez’s will. He’s isn’t a victim, Garibaldo Valdez says, but has fully accepted responsibility for his decision to take sanctuary. He speaks at rallies that aren’t even about his case, supporting ULA members in any way he can. “I don’t think the first thing that comes to his mind is ‘I’ve been in this country for twenty years.’ I think it’s the idea that ‘I have to be here for another twenty years for my children, especially my youngest, Adriana.’”

“If people want to get a sense of urgency for immigration, they shouldn’t look at large picture data on immigration, they should just see this one case,” Garibaldo Valdez added.

“The possibility of Adriana staying without a father…that’s what people need to center.”

Although Torres Reyes and the children can return home at night, the anxiety and gravity of Reyes Alvarez’s predica-

35 THE NEW JOUR NAL

ment has upended their lives, too. The result of the motion to reopen his case could come tomorrow, or next month, or next year. For all of them, as the weeks pass, First and Summerfield feels less like a refuge and more like a prison.

O

n a Monday night in October, the sanctuary of First and Summerfield is full of voices, as dozens of people take seats in a circle of chairs. John Jairo Lugo, wearing an imitation bird foot around his neck, balances a laptop on his knees and calls the weekly ULA meeting to order.

It’s Columbus Day—Indigenous Peoples’ Day—and Jairo Lugo is wearing a black shirt with an image of Native Americans and “Homeland Security Fighting Terrorism Since 1492” written in white block print. Fluorescent light from the streetlamps filters through the church’s stained-glass windows. The doors next to the altar are open, and across the hall, a square of light glows in the window of the door to Reyes Alvarez’s room. His wife emerges with a few other relatives and takes a seat.

Jairo Lugo asks if there are any cases people want to discuss. There’s a family across the circle from Torres Reyes, a father and mother with a small boy leaning against their legs.

The man stands, his hair slicked back, hands shoved into his pockets. He has a deportation order for early November, he says. A few seats down from Torres Reyes, a woman who has been fighting a deportation order says that she must present herself for supervision in the next few weeks.

“We're going to do anything that is in our power. we're going to inteRrupt your operations. we're going to make noise outside your offices.”

In the New Haven area, there are two or three new cases like Reyes Alvarez’s every week, Jairo Lugo later tells me over the phone from outside the federal immigration courthouse in Hartford: “We walked out from the courthouse and just picked a new case.” The frequency of these cases has rapidly increased since the election, and in his mind, it’s only going to worsen.

“There’s a huge increase of people who are doing what they need to do—showing up to check in—who are then notified that they have to leave the country, their stays are denied, and they are placed on a GPS unit,” Reyes Alvarez’s attorney O’Neil-Baker said.

Since ICE agents sometimes show up at court when undocumented immigrants attempt to appear for their court dates, ULA organizes groups that can accompany them, a 36

show of emotional but also physical support.

“We believe that ICE is much more likely to not detain someone if they see people around them, and even if they were to do that, it helps us because we know it happened, we have witnesses, people recording badge numbers,” says Morales Sanchez.

Reyes Alvarez’s case now hinges upon a decision from the Board of Immigration Appeals that could come any day, or not for a long time. There is little organizing that could swing the balance in his favor. But for other cases, like that of Franklin and Gioconda Ramos, acts of civil disobedience can make a difference, Morales Sanchez says.

“We’re going to do anything that is in our power. We’re going to interrupt your operations. We’re going to make noise outside your offices, or in the case a few weeks ago, we’re going to sit down and not let anyone into your building,” he adds, referring to ICE. “We’re going to disrupt your day and hopefully, that disruption will add enough pressure to have them change their minds.”

At the end of the ULA meeting, Torres Reyes chats with some of the other members and helps dismantle the circle, stacking chair after chair in the corner. Then she slips away across the hall, into the room where her husband’s light is still on.

A

t 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning in October, the bell tower of First and Summerfield begins to chime and Reyes Alvarez and his wife walk into the light-filled sanctuary.

“Hi, Fanny, how are you doing?” says one of the elderly greeters at the threshold.

“I’m O.K.,” she responds with a quiet smile.

“It’s hard, it’s hard,” the woman says, embracing her.

Reyes Alvarez goes over to a small display at the entrance to the church and picks out his plastic nametag, like the other parishioners. As others trickle in, he and his wife take their seats facing the altar, near the front.

Despite the overcast sky and drizzle outside, the tall green and yellow stained-glass windows on either side of the room shimmer with light. About twenty people have come to the service this morning, and though there are many empty seats, the room echoes with the voices of children.

Pastor Juhye Hahn, dressed in white and green vestments, stands behind a lectern, her voice ringing out high and clear as she calls the congregation to worship. The lectern’s dark wood perfectly matches the soaring altarpiece behind her.

Its elegant, rectangular base supports a thin wooden cross and is topped with an angled square that holds her Bible. It is positioned a few feet in front of the altar; Hahn is close enough to hold the gaze of individual parishioners. Reyes Alvarez built the lectern over a few days in the church’s sub-basement. It is his gift to the congregation.

When Hahn became First and Summerfield’s pastor this The sanctuary of First and THE NEW JOUR NAL Summerfield UMC, featuring the lectern that Marco Reyes Alvarez built.

July, she didn’t want to stand behind the altar because she felt disconnected from her parishioners. For a few weeks, she used a black metal music stand, since the church didn’t have the funds to buy a portable lectern. Reyes Alvarez has already spent many hours working on projects around the church—fixing shelves in the kitchen, repainting the wainscoting in the dining hall—and when he heard that Hahn was looking for a new lectern, he offered to help.

“At the beginning, we thought we were doing something for him. But actually, he is the blessing for us.”

The hardest part of building the lectern was getting the materials, Torres Reyes said. She had to track down all her husband’s tools in their home and her brother’s backyard shed. Then there was the two-hour trip to Home Depot, video-calling him in the middle of the aisle to show him all the possible wood grains and stains.

“He was the one who always [went] to that place, so I would show him, ‘This one or this one?’” Torres Reyes said, laughing. “And he would say, ‘Yes, this one,’ ‘No, no, no, bring that one!’”

Eventually they settled on oak, because Reyes Alvarez wanted to build something that would last. Torres Reyes had the wood cut and brought it back to the church. Reyes Alva-

37

rez set up carpentry horses in the basement, brought down his tools and an air compressor, and got to work. It took only two days, he said, but he had to wait another week for the wood stain to dry because the basement was so humid.

On a Sunday in October, they presented the lectern to the congregation.

“It’s not just a lectern,” Hahn said. “I mean, I’m happy to have that lectern, but for me personally, it’s a witness. God answered the prayer that I had in a mysterious way.” She pauses to reflect. “At the beginning, we thought we were doing something for him. But actually, he is the blessing for us.”

For the foreseeable future, Reyes Alvarez will continue living in First and Summerfield, waiting to hear if his petition for asylum is granted and greeting the visitors who stop by every now and then. When the side door opens, snatches of sound from the city street drift down the hall to his room.

From time to time, he’ll step onto the patio for a little air, though it’s getting cold now. On Sundays, he’ll attend the church service and the coffee hour afterwards. And when he can, he will retreat to the basement to work on his next project, a wooden baptismal font in which to display the church’s bare silver bowl. It will be modest but solid, he says. A simple thing of beauty, built with the hope that it will remain in the sanctuary far longer than its creator.

Eddie Joe Antonio Pérez provided Spanish translations.

— Eliza Fawcett is a junior in Jonathan Edwards College.

She is an editor-in-chief of The New Journal.

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ENDNOTE

TRACES OF SPICE Searching for the flavors of home Ananya Kumar-Banerjee

A

few days into my first year at Yale, I was talking to my father on the phone. As any good Asian parent is wont to do, he asked me about the food.

“Is it good?” he said. “Are you eating properly?”

There was a pause on my end. My first response was to say yes, of course I was. I was doing fine. I had begun to develop that tone of disdain that first-years adopt when talking to their parents. I was a college student now; didn’t my dad understand that I was busy? But I caught myself. I listened carefully to the sweetness of his voice, the melancholy uptick at the end of each of his questions. I realized that my father missed me. So I drew my breath and told the truth: “It’s okay. Something’s missing though.”

“Maybe it’s the spice?”

He was right—it was the lack of seasoning that I missed, the salt and cumin and peppers that flavored my memories of home. I didn’t want to cry, so I hung up with a soft spoken I love you and Yelped “Asian Market.” Hong Kong Market was less than five minutes from my residential college.

I walked up Whitney Avenue in the dim evening light. The grocery store’s windows were packed with posters of xiao long bao (soup dumplings) and bags of jasmine rice. A familiar language drifted through the 38

open door: Mandarin. It was a language I learned at a young age through my bilingual school in New York, but hadn’t heard that much since.

When I entered and asked the cashier for chili peppers, she gestured to the stairs a few feet away and asked me to follow. We went down to the basement and past a tall shelf with peeling white paint full of dried ginseng.

It smelled like Flushing, Queens, the air thick with the aroma of soy sauce and natural decay. She led me to a supermarket fridge and pointed to the small plastic bags of red and green peppers. At home, we only had the bright, kelly-green kind. But the shape was right.

I leaned in and realized the smell was right too. They were in that exact plastic bagging that I had only ever seen in Indian markets and inside my refrigerator.

They were the quick fix I was looking for, the garnish that could make any meal taste a bit more like home.

As the subtle, crisp smell of spice crept into my nose, I remembered the warning my mother gave me when I left for college. She said I would miss the food, but I hadn’t listened. I thought I knew better. I thought I’d miss other things—the smell of my cat, the subway, the early-morning sing-song of ambulances. I had been to sleep-away camp before, deprived of my home food for weeks on end, and it hadn’t bothered me. Why would college be any different?

At first, the dining hall seemed to offer all the food that I could possibly want. But after a few days, I found her warning came true. I missed the spice, the aro-

illustration Hazal Özgür

THE NEW JOURN AL

times there’s too much salt. I tried to be okay with the sambar from Thali Too, though it wasn’t the same as what my father makes in the pressure cooker when I’m sick. This is my new home, I keep telling myself. I have to be okay with the food being different because everything is different.

But even as I attempted to recreate the pang of lamb biryani or rogan josh with my peppers, homemade food is as much about the culture the cuisine comes from as it is about the people who make it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss my parents. My roommate tells me one night that she misses the feeling of saying hi to everyone in her Greek village with the knowledge that “everyone knows everyone.” But she claims she doesn’t think much about the food. She’s too preoccupied with meeting new people, reveling in her new life here. She could go years without eating Greek food, she tells me.

She’s sure that this is her home now. She’s perfectly satisfied with her meals at Timothy Dwight. But she also tells me proudly that she refuses to eat Greek food that isn’t from Greece or her parents’ kitchen.

“But,” I ask, “didn’t you go to a Greek restaurant last week?”

“Yes,” she says. “But it wasn’t the same.”

“I know.” mas wafting from my kitchen as my mother made fish curry, the crackle of turmeric karela hitting the pan.

Snapping out of my reverie, I was still clutching the plastic bag of chili peppers under the blue-green fluorescent lights of the Hong Kong Market. When I went back upstairs to check out, the cashier mentioned that the shipment of chili peppers had just come in.

“You’re very lucky,” she said. “A lot of students come in looking for that.”

Her response surprised me. Maybe I wasn’t the only person struggling to find home in Yale Dining food. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that other students could be having the same experience; everyone always seemed happy enough to chow down on the same unsalted mashed potatoes and chickpea salad.

When I brought my chili peppers to the Berkeley dining hall that evening, I plopped the plastic bag on the table, took out three peppers, and placed them on my plate. My best friend Irene chuckled. Clearly, I was desperate. But when other first-years at the table saw my peppers, they began listing the things they missed the most: a mother’s congee, a barbecued bit of pork, a salty soup, a certain sauce. All of our memories from home came down to our dinner plates.

The few Indian restaurants in New Haven don’t make food exactly like my parents do, but I’ll take it.

Sometimes there isn’t enough ginger or methi. Some-

39 NOVEMBER 2017

— Ananya Kumar-Banerjee is a first-year in Timothy Dwight College.

39 THE NEW JOUR NAL

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