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Inside Why boycott Gheav?

A year after Hurricane Sandy

DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE

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NUMBER OF AFRICAN STUDIES FACULTY MEMBERS

MAGAZINE. Send submissions to ydnmag@gmail.com

Let the Light Shine

small talk by ISABELLE TAFT

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10

06

observer by ANDREW GIAMBRONE

Walking Together

small talk by ROSE BEAR DONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T WALK

IN LIMBO feature by AARON GERTLER

12 31

SWEPT AWAY

The Uncollected Works of Filomena Zarra profile by MIA THOMPSON

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personal essay by IVY NYAYIEKA

AMERICAN BODIES

feature by AMELIA EARNEST

20 34

LOOKING FOR AFRICA cover story by SCOTT ROSS

I Will Be Back, Nairobi.

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The Body Politic crit by AARON LEWIS

Exclusive Offer

fiction by NATEY WEINSTEIN

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DAILY NEWS

MAGAZINE Editors Sarah Maslin Joy Shan Managing Editors Abigail Carney Alec Joyner Photography Editor Henry Ehrenberg Design Editors Jennifer Lu Daniel Roza Mohan Yin Copy Editors Adrian Chiem Ian Gonzalez

Elizabeth Malchione Douglas Plume Design Assistants Samantha Bensinger Renee Bollier Olivia Hamel Jilly Horowitz Aparna Nathan Anna Smilow Editor in Chief Julia Zorthian Publisher Julie Leong Cover design by Henry Ehrenberg and Mohan Yin

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D

REAL TALK

Collector’s

iane Charney, a college writing tutor, is a collector of beautiful boxes, miniature figurines, exotic teas, and many other things. Her office in Timothy Dwight College is a collection of collections: each compartment in her wide array of shelves displays a group of items curated to follow one theme. One shelf features different prints of Monet’s “Water Lilies,” reflecting Charney’s love of French Impressionism. Another shelf is crammed with a rich mosaic of tea containers from other countries.

The collection shown here is testament to her love of birds, each bird a souvenir of a beloved memory. The gold-embroidered cloth was a gift from a former student who worked in China as a journalist. Two basket-woven partridges, once colorfully painted decorations that hung from a window shade, are now honey-toned from years of constant exposure to the sun. A miniature duck figurine was brought home after a trip to New Hampshire, where Charney heard loons sing on the lake.

NICA NOELLE Award-winning writer, producer, and director of adult films. Style according to her website: “Putting people together who have some chemistry and then asking them to simply make love.”

Excerpts from a Nov. 15 event hosted by Yale’s Sexual Literacy Forum

ON FILMING PEOPLE HAVING SEX It can be boring sometimes. I’ve counted the minutes ‘til a scene is over. I’ve yawned.

ON “EROTICA” It’s porn that’s considered more tasteful, more classy. People say to me, “Nica, you don’t make porn, you make erotica.”

But I’m comfortable with calling it “porn.”

ON THE KIND OF PORN SHE MAKES I wanted to film people having real sex, without opening up to the camera. When performers open up to the camera, they turn away from each other, and the emotional connection plummets.

ON WHETHER OR NOT SHE MAKES “FEMINIST PORN” I don’t understand why we have to bring politics into it. Why not just call it “porn”? Women are sexual beings, too.

ON ACTORS’ “PORN HABITS” SHE HAS TO BREAK Opening up to the camera. Faking it. Positions when you look at them and say, “She’s lying on gravel at a construction site — that must feel terrible!”

ON WHAT A PORN SET IS LIKE Everyone knows everyone. It’s kind of like a small town.

ON PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE PORN INDUSTRY We call them civilians.

4 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

LAUGHING MATTER

Corner

Malcolm Gladwell’s Rejected Book Ideas

by Will Adams SPEAK: ORATORS, MUTES, AND EVERYONE IN BETWEEN “Actions speak louder than words”: in Speak,

I take that cliché, flip it, reverse it, and prove the reverse to be true.

With the help of time-tested theories from Adam Smith, Plato, Martin Luther King Jr., Martin Luther, Michel Foucault, my mother, the Wright brothers, and Tyra Banks, I find that people who speak tend to have more advantages than people who don’t. Also, I interview MIT physics professor Janice Copley, who tells me that body movement rarely matches the amplitude of a spoken word. So my theory seems to hold water. But you don’t have to use this idea if you don’t want to.

THE MISSING LINK: WHY CHILDREN HAVE THE POWER Using behavioral economics and PBS viewership statistics, I prove that children are actually smarter than adults.

Case studies will include: trends in Girl Scout cookie sales in the 1990s; Shirley Temple (both the child actress and the nonalcoholic cocktail); and kids who watch TED talks. From these unique yet universally applicable stories I conclude that children have power over adults in every respect, and therefore the United States must reform its education system. How? I don’t know — give me a break! I think this idea is pretty good.

PINNACLE: HOW THE TOPS OF THINGS GET THERE In this book, I explain the fascinating common thread between the tops of things, like: cherries on sundaes; hair on heads; lampshades; penthouses; stars on Christmas trees; oils, fats, and sweets on the old food pyramid; and chimneys. Okay I’m gonna be totally honest I just took some Nyquil and Sudafed and I don’t even know where I’m going with this. You don’t have to use this one.

TO SLEEP, TO DREAM: NYQUIL AND SUDAFED You don’t have to use this one.

Langston Hughes Poetry

MAP OF THE MONTH

FROM THE BEINECKE

The Communities that Make Up America

he American Communities Project, directed by journalist T Dante Chinni, is a political science and data journalism effort at American University that uses demographics to break the nation’s 3,100 counties into 15 community types.

Pen cases from El Salvador Bahia doll from Brazil (Jana: “I have a matching costume at home!”)

by Alison Mosier-Mills

T

he Beinecke’s extensive Langston Hughes Collection, a gift from the Hughes estate, houses an eclectic assortment of 670 boxes.

Inside are Hughes’s professional letters, notes, manuscripts, poems, and lyrics, which, together, portray him as a multifaceted artist with broad interests.

Although the collection — which also includes photos, passports, diaries, and scrapbooks — delves deeply into his personal life, it is in examining drafts of his poetry that readers are offered a rare insight into his creative mind. His attention to detail is evident: he spent more than five years perfecting the poem depicted here. He covered his typewritten drafts in his distinctive scrawl, sometimes debating for years the placement of a single word, a comma, or a line break.

“Brain Reconstituent” alcohol from Nicaragua

Folk art ox cart from Nicaragua

Superwoman notebook (Jana: “That’s me!”)

Comic books from Brazil, which Jana uses to teach Portuguese

DESKSIDE

WITH JANA KRENTZ Librarian for Latin American Studies yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 5

SWEPT

AWAY

by Andrew Giambrone

photography by JohnCarlo Giambrone

L

ast year, on Monday, Oct. 29, Hurricane Sandy struck the fourblock-wide peninsula of Rockaway, the tight-knit beach community in Queens, N.Y., that I’ve called home since the age of eight.

News of the approaching storm reached me the night before, when I was buried deep in the library after returning from fall break. Like my classmates, I was excited by the prospect of an extended weekend and was periodically refreshing my email to check for announcements about cancelled classes.

At around 7 p.m., I called my parents to check in about preparations for the storm. All seemed well; according to my mother, the sandbags were in place, the windows were shut, and the dinner (roast pork) was in the oven. Five minutes into our conversation, my mother paused on the phone. She must have been looking out our front window.

“Hey, Frank,” she said, addressing my father, “that’s a lot of water coming up the block …” Less than a minute later, the line went dead.

What happened next was a foregone conclusion.

Storm surges from the ocean came racing like chariots up our street and joined Jamaica Bay on the northern side of the peninsula, damaging thousands of houses, cars, and electricity poles in their path,

observer and leaving Rockaway’s residents stranded in the dark. For a good six hours, as my father said later, Rockaway “disappeared off the map.”

I

had a hard time sleeping that night, not only because I knew my family was in danger, but also because I didn’t know the nature of their distress. Did they have electricity or a reliable phone signal? Could they leave Rockaway by car if they needed to?

It wasn’t until several hours later that I learned the answer to all these questions was “no” — the aborted phone conversation with my mother left me with only my imagination. Before going to bed, I read an article a friend had sent me, which reported massive fires breaking out along Rockaway’s peninsula. As the front page of The New York Times stated the next day, “flames … fueled by Sandy’s neck-snapping winds and undeterred by its steady rains, leapt from house to house, then block to block.” When my friend asked in his email how my family was doing, I couldn’t answer. I simply had no idea.

Throughout the night, a vision from the film Titanic flashed repeatedly in my mind: a few members of the ship’s orchestra begin to play music, trying to calm the passengers as they await their watery end.

T

he hurricane was not the first time I felt cut off from my family.

Just a few months before, in May, I was even farther from home, studying abroad in France. As a French major, this was what my studies had gradually been building towards. I could walk through the Luxembourg Gardens, visit some of the world’s most gorgeous monuments, and picnic along the Seine, all in a single day. Like Ernest Hemingway, I was a young man with the world before me, and I had a moveable feast at my feet.

The night after I arrived in Paris, my parents made an emergency Skype call to inform me that my grandfather and namesake, Andrew, had suffered a massive heart attack and died on the way

8 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

to the hospital.

Sick to my stomach, I sat alone in the room my Parisian host family had provided for me. I felt angry and foolish and sad all at once, especially when I remembered my grandfather’s last words to me before my departure.

“Parlay-voo-frahns-say?” he had asked, with his usual toothy grin. I had rolled my eyes and chuckled. Now, over 3,000 miles away from home, my French textbooks and travel brochures, which had earlier beckoned me with the excitement of new experiences, only seemed to mock me.

Although we’d learned how to ask for directions to the bathroom in French class (où sont les toilettes?), we’d never learned to express grief. I apologetically stumbled through the facts while speaking to my host mother the next morning — using words like de mauvaises nouvelles (“bad news”), grand-père (“grandfather”), décéder, (“pass away”), and hier soir (“last night”) — before scurrying off to class and embracing the anonymity of the Paris Métro.

At my father’s request, I wrote a tribute for my grandfather’s funeral once class had ended that afternoon, and sent it to my brother using the free wireless network at a Starbucks near La Bastille.

A part of me wanted to return home, but the reality was cold and clear: I couldn’t book another flight and postpone my studies. (In my parents’ words, I needed to “do what I needed to do.”) From what I’m told, my brother JohnCarlo delivered the speech with grace and poise. I know I couldn’t have.

Hurricane Sandy made the recollection of those first days in Paris come flooding back. Along with it came another memory, still vivid in my mind, of the first week of my freshman year.

In between what could’ve been the 12th and 20th orientation events of the day, my parents called to tell me that my maternal grandmother, after battling pancreatic cancer for months, had died.

I soon found myself in a car headed home, the pomp and circumstance of

Yale forgotten.

T

he morning after Hurricane Sandy struck, I received a spotty phone call from JohnCarlo, who wanted to make sure I knew my family was OK. I had never heard him sound as exhausted as he did then. Only later did I learn that JohnCarlo and my father had stayed up the entire night with a fire extinguisher at the ready, lest the flames that burned so near to our house leapt in the wrong direction.

In a single night, Hurricane Sandy had smashed through Rockaway and left its storm-shocked residents to pick up the pieces. About a dozen houses within two blocks from our own had burned to the ground. The beach house down the street had crumbled into the sea. But miraculously, our home had survived.

From the isolation of my college dorm, I realized that for the first time in our lives my family had become dislocated — popped out of place, like a shoulder or a spine. The floods destroyed nearly all the belongings I had accumulated up to that point, including my Harry Potter books, a cherished collection of The Adventures of Tintin in French, and childhood friends dear to my heart: Winnie the Pooh, Barney, and over three dozen Beanie Babies. So they wouldn’t grow moldy from the flooding, my parents lined up these toys like tiny soldiers on our front porch. The ones they could salvage they gave away to children who walked by our house.

A

s winter crept into Rockaway, schools and stores closed.

Children stopped playing on the streets, and families deserted the peninsula to stay with relatives in nearby Brooklyn or Queens. For about two months after the storm, mine moved in with my grandmother and aunt, who live in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn. Like many of our neighbors, my parents returned almost every day to the peninsula, in a pickup they had rented, to repair our house and clean up the debris. This required them to take

observer weeks off from work to trudge back and forth between boroughs in a sad caravan of displaced residents and FEMA trucks.

Meanwhile, JohnCarlo — then a senior in high school — had to adjust to living in a new home as he finished his college applications.

One night at home over Thanksgiving break, my father joked to him, “Well, at least you’ll have a good personal statement now.” JohnCarlo rolled his eyes. Mine dropped to the floor.

Knowing my family had survived loosened the knot I had felt in my stomach during the storm. But, unlike my brother, I didn’t have to deal with a lack of heat, hot water, and electricity at school, or assist with the recovery efforts. When I contemplated returning to Rockaway the weekend after the storm, my parents adamantly told me to stay at Yale and “do what I needed to do” — just as they would at home.

A

fter my grandmother’s funeral my freshman year, doing what I needed to do meant meeting as many people in my entryway as possible, and throwing myself into my books and classes. Sometimes, while reading The Odyssey, I’d get lost in the hero’s struggles and temporarily forget those of my family. In Paris, the summer when my grandfather passed away, I took to wandering the streets. One day, I stumbled upon a book fair outside SaintSulpice, where vendors were selling limited edition books and artwork under white tents.

“Look at this book here, young man,” an elderly woman said, holding out a collection of poems by Paul Verlaine. “I think you might like it.”

I bought the book and read a few poems on the steps of Saint-Sulpice. To my surprise, I found that I was happy.

After Hurricane Sandy, I returned home to Rockaway for the holidays, but the weary sight of my family and neighbors told me that things had changed. Running had always been a way to clear my head; now, without a boiler or hot water, I ran to keep

warm. (My family received a few government-issued electric heaters, which I’d accidentally knock over while walking around the house in my fuzzy slippers, much to my parent’s chagrin.)

Without an open grocery store in the neighborhood where I could buy fresh ingredients, I got creative, using nonperishables we had saved from before the storm to cook. (Dry oatmeal with peanut butter, honey, and a sprinkle of cinnamon became a staple.) Without my books to read, or access to the Internet, I began writing again.

Unexpectedly, Hurricane Sandy allowed me to spend more time with my family and friends from home than I would’ve otherwise. Meals became extended conversations that lasted for hours; nights spent at my aunts’ and uncles’ apartments had all the wonder of childhood sleepovers (and just as many cookies). In the same way I had found solace in the classrooms of Yale and the strange streets of Paris after my grandparents passed away, my shifting

circumstances after Sandy gave me opportunities to cope.

A

t Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt’s one year ago, a month after the storm, neither my grandmother nor grandfather was present. This meant no fried rice on the table and no money under our plates (traditions of theirs, respectively). Yet we still had a 25-pound turkey and enough stuffing and dessert to feed an army.

My parents, brother, and I left the meal as full and as warm as ever, even as we headed back to my grandmother’s — a house that was not our own. The next day, as we crossed the bridge to Rockaway to repair our home, I gazed over the peninsula and saw mounds of debris shining in the sober sun.

We were returning to a junkyard of houses, cars, and memories, as seagulls and scavengers flew overhead. The hurricane had taken us many places, but our home was still there, waiting.

A SPELL I will pick up the garbage lids this morning and twist them like ice cube trays, free an oval of leaves and water that will split as it hits the stoned driveway.

The cold has been coming and receding for days but it will stay now. The furred caterpillars will be recollected and the length of their sweaters will be appointed as measure of the oncoming depths of our snow, and one will tell the story of a youth where the wooly thing was just sweater, no head, no tail. Bronze. And back inside, in the morning kitchen, J. will come down sleep-eyed and rumpled and we will both smell Listerine on his lips, not mint but the astringent gold that burns and tastes like iron, but not like blood, and he will slice himself two pieces of the pumpkin loaf the aunt mails us each November, and put too much butter on them. The coffee will get cold fast and we will sit with our backs to the burning woodstove, the glint of a cloudless sky kept at just the right distance outside the frost-threaded windows, and we will tell each other how cold it is, how muted things look glazed in ice.

— Katy Clayton

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine |9

Let the Light Shine A visit to New Haven’s Masonic Temple

by Isabelle Taft photography by Alexandra Schmeling

O

n the morning of Oct. 19, the New Haven Masonic Temple — a grand three-story brick building on Whitney Avenue, guarded by a regal staircase and four thick columns — was crawling with people. Most of them were members of one of the 10 lodges that use the building. A few, like me, were curious members of the public.

Freemasons, The Simpsons and National Treasure had taught me, were robed men chanting Latin spells and conducting the occasional ritualistic sacrifice, all while infiltrating the highest ranks of politics and finance.

But one recent afternoon, jogging down Whitney, I had seen a massive banner hanging off the imposing façade of the temple: “MASONIC OPEN HOUSE! All are welcome!” So here I was, wandering in and wondering how “Masonic open house” wasn’t an oxymoron.

After helping myself to a free bagel, I asked to speak to someone who could tell me about the New Haven masonry’s past, and was introduced to Brad Cooney, Martin Ede, and Steven Ellison. All three are middle-aged. Ellison and Cooney wore polo shirts; Ede wore a blazer and khakis. Ellison explained that only the Scottish Rite Masons wear robes, and only during certain ceremonies. But he does have a top hat for special occasions.

Much like the Boy Scouts of America and World of Warcraft, masonry has a complicated system of levels of recognition, called degrees. To advance in degree, men must undergo “Masonic education,” which Cooney called a “transformative experience.” Light, he said, plays a major symbolic role in masonry, and the open house is a chance 10 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

to correct misconceptions and “let Masonic light out into the community.”

Ede and Ellison’s lodge, Hiram Lodge, was the first to be founded in Connecticut, in 1750. According to a booklet I found in Sterling Memorial Library, published by the New Haven Masons in 1916, the lodge held its first documented meeting “at Jehiel Tuttle’s place,” an inn on College Street very near present-day Calhoun College. A few American lodges were founded earlier, but “Old Hiram” has outlasted them all, and now holds meetings in the Whitney Avenue temple, which was built in 1926.

Couches in the “Ladies’ Lounge,” the black and white tile floors, and one of New Haven’s oldest elevators are all largely unchanged from the building’s early years. Each of the temple’s several vast meeting rooms — each uniquely decorated with a Greek, Roman, or Egyptian motif — is fitted with an organ. In each room, a master’s chair faces toward the east, and a golden “G,” surrounded by sun-like rays extending outwards, appears in several places. Depending on whom you ask, the meaning of this symbol is “God,” “geometry,” subject to interpretation, or a complete secret.

Standing in the Greek room with Ellison and Gary Matican, a member of the Cosmopolitan Lodge, I ask if there are any disputes between the lodges.

Not really, they say, though there are two small areas of contention: gavels and chicken.

On gavels, Cosmopolitan is the clear winner. Matican bangs the Cosmopolitan gavel on a table and it makes a surprisingly high-pitched ringing sound. I nod,

solemnly.

On chicken, however, Hiram dominates. Each year, it hosts a fundraiser called the Hiram Chicken Challenge for a local hospital. All of the lodges field a team of four chicken-eaters. What sort of chicken? I ask.

“Like giant chicken tenders,” Ellison says. “The winner ate 43.”

Matican rolls his eyes. “How long did your guys starve so that you could make a good showing at the Chicken Challenge?”

“Trade secrets,” Ellison says, solemnly.

Hiram has won for the past three years.

Part of me was disappointed to find that the Freemasons, so enigmatic and patrician in our collective consciousness, had been reduced to participating in competitive eating contests. But the Masons, Ede said, are a “quiet society,” not a secret one. And they don’t hide what they really are: open, friendly, philanthropic, and occasionally willing to eat inhuman quantities of chicken in order to benefit charity and cultivate the ties of brotherhood.

As I prepared to leave the temple, I met a pair of Yale students standing by the bagel table and asked whether they’d enjoyed the event.

“Wait, what is this?” said one.

“We just crossed the street because we saw free food,” said the other.

They had never heard of freemasonry, so there were no misconceptions for the open house to correct. I suggested they look at the impressive Egyptian Room. They shrugged and went inside, apparently unaware that they were basking in more than 250 years’ worth of Masonic light.

Walking Together

by Rose Bear Don’t Walk photography by Tasnim Elboute

A

bundle of sage sits below my dorm room window. When lit, its smoke cleanses my mind, body, and spirit. It rids the air of bad energy, and it keeps me sane.

It reminds me of home: a reservation life that never eludes me. The sage is placed alongside my hand-beaded Yale pennant, my moccasins, and my handdrum. These objects are small tokens of my Crow and Bitterroot Salish heritage and they keep my identity close.

I come from a reservation in Montana. My homeland is Indian country, a place of Medicine Dances and camas bakes. Coming to Yale, I was worried about the distance from my culture: how could I practice here?

But by my second semester, I was singing and drumming with the Blue Feather Native American drum group, joining on-campus activism with the Association of Native Americans at Yale, and beading with friends every week at the Native American Cultural Center.

There are 162 Native American undergraduate students currently enrolled at Yale. Many arrived equipped with traditional knowledge and keepsakes to remind them of home.

But others had not yet explored their indigeneity before starting college.

Yale’s Native American community has helped them build an awareness of their heritage, hundreds of miles from home.

K

odi Alvord ’17 remembers going to powwows as a kid, but only to watch. It was hard for him to

actively participate in his culture while growing up in Mount Pleasant, Mich., far from his Navajo homelands in the Southwest, where he was born. At Yale, Alvord drums and sings powwow rhythms with Blue Feather. He wears a silver bear on a black cord around his neck — a symbol of his family’s Bear Clan. When Alvord drums, the bear feels two beats: the beat of his heart and the new beat of his drum.

On the day David Rico ’16 was born, his grandmother gave him a medicine pouch stitched with a bear claw, the symbol for the Choctaw creation story. Growing up in the mountains of Appalachia, Rico was told stories about the bear claw’s connection to his grandmother’s spirit animal. When she passed away, Rico began wearing the pouch around his neck. “It has become a part of who I am and it’s a constant reminder of my grandmother,” he said.

“Her spirit is always watching over me.”

She watches on as David drums for Blue Feather with his own handmade drum, performs poetry, and passes time in the Native American Cultural Center.

During her first Lakota lesson at Yale, Emily Van Alst ’16 was asked if she wanted to introduce herself as a “Lakota girl” or a “Lakota woman.” Van Alst, a Síhasapa Lakota and Eastern Cherokee, hadn’t given the idea much thought. Her Directed Independent Language Study teacher told her that a “Lakota woman” has an attitude of independence and the ability to fend for herself. Throughout high school in Connecticut, Van Alst

had felt the opposite: isolated, ridiculed, and judged because of her indigeneity.

Back then, she had pushed her identity away. But, after her freshman year at Yale, Van Alst made the decision to introduce herself as “Lakhóta Wínyan hemácha yé,” a native woman. “I’ve definitely grown from a native girl to a native woman at Yale,” she said. “I take my culture as an opportunity to educate instead of pushing it away.”

D

ale Williams is from the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota. Back home, the Mandan Arikara flag flies proudly over her hometown, and buildings display tribal designs. William misses these daily reminders of culture, along with the six annual powwows in her community.

Being separated from her family is not easy for her; sometimes, she feels incomplete at Yale. But the Native American Cultural Center, where Native American artwork is displayed proudly and identity and native issues are discussed freely, feels a little bit more like home.

Home for me will always be my reservation. But here, I can keep home close. My moccasins tread carefully on the pale cobblestone, but I’m not walking alone. I am walking with the people with whom I have created a joint identity: Yale natives. We learn, we love, we sing, and we get homesick.

Helping one another to discover culture and to celebrate it, we walk together.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 11

Gourmet Heaven, wage theft, and the convenience of indecision

BY AARON GERTLER

G

ourmet Heaven, like the heaven in the sky, means something different for each of its customers. It’s a cheap hot breakfast. It’s 90 varieties of artisanal chocolate. It’s a box of cookies from every country in the European Union. It’s your favorite sandwich. It’s where you go between Toad’s and your bed. It’s caffeine at any hour of the night. It’s the jocks and the party girls and the tourists all equal around the buffet line.

It’s buying a bag of Glenny’s Apple Cinnamon Soy Crisps almost every day, until one day, they come in a new, bigger size, and I realize that Gourmet Heaven is a living thing, a genie that grants my wishes without my having to say a word.

But I’m a customer. Customers are the gods of Gourmet Heaven. They come in drunk at three in the morning and scatter trash and foul up the bathroom, and then enter the next day to find the place celestially spotless once again.

Workers at Gourmet Heaven are not treated as gods; depending on your interpretation of recent news, you may conclude that they aren’t even treated as humans. Under Connecticut state law, working humans are owed certain things. Minimum wage. Employment contracts. Overtime pay.

This summer, one former employee — with help from Unidad Latina en Acción (ULA), a local nonprofit focused on immigration and labor issues — filed a complaint charging Gourmet Heaven with failing its workers in all these respects. For the first time in years, the stores closed for an afternoon, while the owner’s lawyer searched for employment records at the behest of the 12 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

PHOTOGRAPHY BY JACOB GEIGER Connecticut Department of Labor.

The Department’s investigation ended the day I finished this article.

Something really was awry beneath those dusky red awnings: Chung Cho, the stores’ owner, will pay $140,000 in back wages and overtime pay in the next three months. And once you realize that a place with seven-dollar sandwiches was giving workers five dollars an hour, Gourmet Heaven becomes something else — a place where everything you buy becomes a blow to the world you wish you lived in.

B

ruce Alexander ’65 wanted flowers on Broadway. He’d seen them in front of one of New York’s hundreds of specialty greengrocers, and he asked an undergraduate intern to scour the city for similar stores, handing out business cards to all the owners she could find. It was a shrewd strategy from Yale’s vice president for New Haven and state affairs and campus development — and it paid off, when Chung Cho took a card, thought things over, closed his stores in Gotham, and brought his heaven to New Haven.

This turned out to be a brilliant move. The city had recovered from the worst days of the cocaine trade, Broadway offered a safe location with a cheap lease (by Big Apple standards), and there was hardly any competition.

Even today, after twelve years of Gourmet Heaven domination, the only similar stores on campus — J&B Deli, Taft Convenience, College Convenience — suffer from weaker locations, less variety, and ten to fourteen hours each day spent closed. The student body never sleeps, and Gourmet Heaven

is our steadfast companion, through blizzards, hurricanes, and labor issues.

Cho isn’t unfamiliar with controversy.

Last November, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement fined him nearly $6,000 for hiring workers without proper legal documentation. This was a minor blow to his business, but far from an existential threat. What came next was more dangerous.

On Aug. 7, the Department of Labor issued a stop-work order for both of Gourmet Heaven’s New Haven locations — the original Broadway store, dubbed “GHeav” by students, and the Whitney Avenue store near Timothy Dwight College (“TDHeav”), which opened in 2003, two years after the first. Both stores closed for lunch, but opened later once John DeSimone, Cho’s lawyer, told the state he was in the process of collecting the paperwork they had requested. And they’ve stayed open in the 2600 hours since the Department’s initial salvo — but now, their future isn’t so certain.

T

he first Friday protest sprang up in front of Gourmet Heaven on Aug. 23, led by members of ULA and the undergraduate social justice group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán de Yale (MEChA). I counted roughly 20 protestors in a local news video — enough to obscure the store’s produce and flower displays from the street. The Yale Daily News published its first report on the protests two weeks later on Sept. 3, meaning that much of the freshman class has never bought from Gourmet Heaven without knowing something about the violations.

Adin, whose last name has been

feature omitted in this and other stories to protect his identity, spoke to the News for that report, and to The Yale Herald a month later. He earned no more than $400 a week during his time at the store, he said, for 72 hours of work — $5.56 an hour, about two-thirds of Connecticut’s minimum wage. He lived in a basement in a building also owned by Chung Cho, paying $50 per week and sharing the space with five other employees.

After arguing over his salary with Cho, he left the store in December 2012, and eventually made the allegations that led to the Department of Labor’s investigation.

As of Nov. 18, Adin is, unsurprisingly, the only worker to have come forth; he told the News that other employees either were earning more than he had — enough that they preferred to keep their jobs — or feared termination. He was also evicted from the basement soon after leaving his job, and that’s likely what would have happened to the other five employees Cho housed, had they resigned or spoken to reporters.

This power imbalance characterizes low-wage industries throughout New Haven and the rest of the country.

In this city, the Taft Hotel and Café Goodfellas both recently paid tens of thousands of dollars to settle charges that they’d violated some of the same labor laws Gourmet Heaven is now accused of ignoring. In February 2009, a food and commercial workers’ union in New York City — GHeav’s hometown — won a $1.5 million settlement from nine gourmet grocery stores charged with wage theft. A recent Huffington Post piece puts these kinds of stories in devastating perspective: “Low-Wage Workers Are Robbed More Than Banks, Gas Stations, and Convenience Stores Combined.”

I find it difficult to keep this in mind as I walk through campus. Ronnell Higgins would warn us if nearby stores were being robbed; wage theft is almost completely silent.

B

ut even a few dedicated people can make enough noise to keep the silence at bay.

It’s the Day of the Dead, and the ULA/MEChA contingent is gearing up for a change of routine. Megan Fountain ’07, an organizer for ULA, puts together the second of two life-sized skeleton puppets. An older man with a Phantom of the Opera mask joins a middle school student in Jason garb; both hold signs on short wooden poles. Evelyn Nuñez ’15, not in costume, nestles one of her flyers into a stack of oranges.

Before the shouting begins, Nuñez — MEChA’s community action chair — tells me of her work in preparing a detailed report on wage theft in New Haven that will cover other low-wage industries in addition to restaurants.

Dozens of businesses are probably committing violations at any given time, she told me. By surveying hundreds of their workers, she hopes to prompt a change in the way the city handles labor issues.

“There are talks of passing some kind of ordinance in New Haven that would help combat wage theft,” she tells me, “but as of yet there’s no concrete plan.”

The protestors’ plan, however, is rock-solid. “Boy-cott!” bellows the Phantom, projecting his voice with a flair that hints at stage training — or many years’ experience with outdoor protest.

the student at its head declares that the whole team has joined the boycott.

The scene testifies to the passion of Gourmet Heaven’s most ardent foes.

But Café Goodfellas remains open; none of its Yelp reviews even mention the scandal. And the Department of Labor doesn’t often check up on past violators once the case is closed. Will Chung Cho escape from the limelight, or will the boycott force him to behave even after his fines are paid?

In an online poll to which 93 undergraduates responded, 77 respondents had both heard about the violations and bought food from Gourmet Heaven in the past. 15 of those were boycotting the stores, and 31 who still shopped there said they were “buying less often.” This comes out to 57 percent working to resist GHeav’s pull — impressive, but not lethal. The stores are still crowded at mealtimes and on weekend nights; the cashiers still handle a purchase every minute or so.

And the protests might be losing momentum: several students polled said they were finding it difficult to avoid the stores, and one, though admitting it was “not an opinion I’m proud to attach my name to,” said he had completed a one-month boycott and then resumed shopping. “That probably cost them about $100 in business,” he continued.

“But no crime deserves indefinite retribution.”

Ronnell Higgins would warn us if nearby stores were being robbed; wage theft is almost completely silent.

“Gourmet Heaven!” replies the group — sometimes all seven, sometimes one or two, as the spirit moves them. They march in a ragged oval; their numbers have dwindled since August, but the skeletons draw plenty of attention, and Nuñez distributes flyers by the dozen.

GHeav cashiers watch from inside, their expressions unreadable. A group of female athletes stops to chat, and

But $100 times 1000 ex-customers is painful math for Gourmet Heaven.

Whether any given student decides to boycott depends on many factors: willpower, study habits, access to groceries, and even philosophy. Still, if you’d like to hit the owner where it hurts, the simple answer seems to be the one suggested by ULA and MEChA: “don’t buy.” And Bruce Alexander’s

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 13

feature

University Properties office released an October report implying that Yale is prepared to hit even harder: “We will not renew the lease of any tenant not in complete compliance with the labor laws regarding fair treatment of employees.”

F

ines, protests, and the threat of eviction may suffice to keep Gourmet Heaven in line. But what about the rest of New Haven’s restaurants, most of which don’t rent space from Yale? What if it comes out that Alpha Delta or Ivy Noodle stiffs its staff?

“It’s not possible to be completely informed about the practices of every business you visit,” Fountain, the ULA organizer, said, “and it’s generally not worth worrying about the mere possibility that something is wrong.”

But boycotting businesses whose workers have publicly accused them of wrongdoing is simple common sense, she says, and so is supporting practices that make it easier for workers to help themselves. Fountain and Katherine Aragon ’14 (MEChA’s “moderator” and official spokeswoman) both agreed 14 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

that supporting unions, and those who wish to form them, is the best long-term solution to labor violations.

And even if unions at GHeav are a long way off, there’s no reason boycotting has to mean deprivation. Aragon proudly announces that she’s “learned a life without Gourmet Heaven”: Alpha Delta is open late, Durfee’s sells toothpaste on campus, and plenty of places have better sandwiches.

“I’ve told some people I’ll make them sandwiches myself if they need latenight food that badly,” Aragon says. No one’s taken her up on it, but she’s won some students to her side just the same.

T

he outcome of this case will not make or break New Haven’s future policies regarding lowwage workers. It will not inspire a national movement that makes life better for millions of immigrants. These refrains run through my head whenever I stop into GHeav for a bag of soy crisps and a pack of gum, which is at least a dozen times over the past month.

Sometimes I see friends there, and mention the violations. They nod sadly, respond that it’s terrible, yes, but this

is the only game in town, right? New Haven is dead after midnight, and we are not, and neither is GHeav. I tell myself that there is no guarantee workers are treated better elsewhere. That I will not finish my problem set without late-night sustenance. That the good Gourmet Heaven does — sponsoring student groups, providing a public meeting place and public bathrooms, bringing hundreds of people small happy moments each day — somehow compensates for the injustice behind the counter and out of my sight.

I tell myself these things, and sometimes I believe myself, and sometimes I do not. I visit my buttery more often. I buy from Taft Convenience when I can. Rachel is a sweetheart, even if they only stay open until six. I smile more freely at the Gourmet Heaven checkout counter, giving my best wishes to the night shift cashiers.

And then I leave the store, but they do not. And in 18 months I will graduate from Yale, and someone will still be behind those cash registers. Perhaps making $5 an hour. And some of the blame will be mine.

I

will be back,

Nairobi.

by Ivy Nyayieka illustration by Mohan Yin

I

wonder if you miss me, Nairobi. I wonder who massages your back with her feet now that I am not around. I know you cried, as I did, the day before I left you. I remember the raindrops that sought rest on my cheeks.

I got on the plane to America with mud on my shoes. I do not think that any of the rich businessmen who can afford frequent Kenya Airways flights would wear muddy shoes. It was my first plane ride, and the windows stared me down as I walked to my seat.

I stared back. I hoped my eyes reflected the fire of a dream come true. I feared that the windows would see my anxiety about going to a new place, about becoming just another face in the crowd. But I hoped my eyes whispered something to the windows about the fusion of an unlikely past with an unlikely future.

I hoped my eyes told the story of defying convention, like a plane defying gravity.

We have a perfect relationship, Nairobi and I. It is the kind of relationship that says, “Even at my best, I’m better with you.” I told myself that Nairobi yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 15

personal essay

and I needed time and distance to be the best versions of ourselves. For me: a businesswoman, an engineer, or a writer. For Nairobi: a hub of opportunity for young professionals like myself.

The 21st of September was a grim day for Nairobi. That morning, I woke up to a text from Abdul, a Muslim friend from home.

“My aunts are under siege in Westgate,” it said. Westgate is an upscale shopping mall in Nairobi where I spent many afternoons with my friends, reminiscing about high school.

“Haha. Why are you being so dramatic?” I replied. The great downside of lasting peace is that it makes your systems lax, so when anything sneaks up on you and upsets the balance, it hits hard.

Nairobi. Place of cool waters. City under the sun. I had gotten used to peace in Nairobi, my confidence buoyed by the harmonious 2013 elections. Was it a robbery, a terrorist attack? I thought robbers would, hopefully, take what they wanted and leave.

A tweet from a Kenyan media personality read, “R.I.P. Ruhila Adatia.”

It chilled me. Ruhila Adatia is a presenter 16 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

whose voice breathed soul to Kenyan radio.

That day, the words, “Good afternoon, I’m Ruhila Adatia,” played over and over in my head. Ruhila’s voice does not bring the vexation that you feel when a presenter’s voice interrupts a lineup of your favorite songs on an idle afternoon. When you hear her refreshing voice, your lips curl upward in a smile. It is hard to imagine listening to the radio without Ruhila chiming in with witty and light-hearted jabs about celebrities’ lives.

I wondered if her words would sound so clear in my head in 2014 or 2015. I thought of her husband, Ketan Sood, who had lost both his wife and his unborn child. Sixty-seven people died in the Westgate attack. Sixtyseven families can no longer hear their loved ones’ voices except in their imaginations.

F

or a tense 48 hours, Nairobi watched as the Westgate Mall attack unfolded. I watched, too, from 7,291 miles away, distracted but still trying to finish a physics problem set. I knew that was what Nairobi would have wanted me to do: hold on,

and learn as much as I could in order to be the best version of myself while I was away.

Grieving for you from a distance felt eerie, Nairobi. At around 2 p.m., I heard someone unlock my room in Vanderbilt Hall. I thought it was one of my roommates until I heard a man say, “There’s nobody here.”

Frightened, I pushed my chair back quietly and slid under my desk. On the day I was accepted to Yale, news of the Newtown gunman broke on Kenyan TV. I remembered that when I told my mum, she had asked, “Huko na mahali utakuwa ni karibu?” Is that close to where you will be?

I heard a few things being moved around, and then I heard the man leaving. I sat confused for a while and heard the door open again.

“Maintenance,” he called out. I must have missed it the first time. Here I was, safe and at a distance, yet still fearful because of what was happening back home.

I cried, but not in the open-thefloodgates kind of way. Tears welled up in my eyes and I wiped them with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. A Kenyan friend who goes to UMass asked me, “What justification do we have to cry when people in Nairobi have reason to be aggrieved?” I had been asking myself this, too. Another friend from home living in the United States posted a picture with the caption “Keep calm and hug a Kenyan.” I smiled because a friend’s comfort was the only thing that could help.

I hoped and prayed for Abdul’s aunts.

I watched on social media as escaped hostages told stories about the terrorists letting Muslims leave. I worried about how this would affect the alreadytense relations between Christians and Muslims. Nairobi, with a Christian majority, had sustained a good rapport between the two religious groups — that is, until the former president, Mwai Kibaki, declared that Kenya would help Somalia fight Al Shabaab, a Muslim extremist group. When terrorist attacks

personal essay ensued against Christians, Nairobi started to see the hijab and the turban differently. Eastleigh, a neighborhood with many Somalis and Muslims, where Abdul grew up, became prone to grenade attacks and clashes, and we had to avoid it for a while.

I hoped that since Muslims were allegedly being released, it would mean that Abdul’s aunts could survive this ordeal.

But I also felt guilty that this made me relieved. It was wrong that religion was being used to sort us.

Already, some of my friends were posting h a t e f u l messages about Muslims on social media.

Somalis were being attacked, too. “Why are ‘we’ giving ‘them’ refuge when ‘they’ will attack ‘us’?” Such statements doubled my sadness. I feared that they would tip me from hopelessness to madness.

In an interview on Jicho Pevu, a Kenyan television program, a survivor with an eye bandage said: “This is not the religion I grew up with, that I’ve known for 35 years.

This is not Islam.” He had been let go after reciting the Shahada, a Muslim prayer. But he emphasized that the attack was not about religion.

Christians were killed. Muslims were killed. Ruhila was Muslim.

At 3 p.m. (10 p.m. Kenyan time), Abdul told me his aunts were safe.

T

he narrow-minded represent a small portion of Kenyan society. Most of the responses after the attack made me feel

extremely proud of Kenya. People posted hopeful messages for those affected by the attack. Messages against hate speech spread, and, on Twitter, #weareone trended, neutralizing the venom that had begun to well up.

Around the world, the support was enormous. Messages of condolence poured in from scores of different countries. Yale held a vigil to pray for Kenya.

If I had not already been sold on the kindness of the Yale community, the vigil w o u l d have made a believer of me.

On that night, dozens of people gathered outside Dwight Hall. Against the backdrop of Old Campus’s towering residence halls, one candle was lit, and then two, and then dozens more. We lit candles for the student whose friend was still trapped in the mall and for all the Kenyans affected. In attendance: the Chaplain’s Office, and friends of the Chaplain’s Office, and the Yale African Students’ Association, and Shades, and faculty heads, and friends, and friends, and friends...

In Nairobi, this concern translated into something beautiful. A hospital started rerouting blood donors to other hospitals because they already had enough blood. Kencom, a major bus station in Nairobi, was brimming with people ready to donate. Children distributed food to people in line.

The Sunday after the attack, there

were reports of Muslims guarding churches so that Christians could pray.

Did I mention that Muslims taught some of the hostages a prayer to say if asked by the terrorists?

Raisah Virani, a 15-year-old Muslim survivor, said in a television interview that a woman had rubbed her back and told her, “Stay calm, dear, you have been shot. Jesus will protect us.” When the attackers said that Muslims could leave the building, Virani refused. “At that moment I was standing up for Kenya, for everybody,” she said.

I am proud of what Kenya, a young country, is making of herself. Having made some bad turns in life, she is growing from a reckless teenager to an adult. Still, she’s not a full adult yet — not in the thunder thighs and childbearing hips kind of way.

I miss you, Nairobi. I promise I will return to massage your back with my feet and charm you with my smile. I will have grown, as will you.

Photo by Graham Holiday

POLTERGEIST You wore your disco pants and had me meet you at the gala where you robbed me of my money with a story about how you lost your wallet. It was only when I ordered your negroni that I realized you had gone into the busy New York night. I chased you down a cross street strung with ceremonial lanterns for the lunar new year where I ate crispy ginger and sticks of dried chicken. When I made it to your place I scanned the building: a glass wall had been put in and you’d switched the pinned-up tee shirts. Then you walked into the kitchen and asked me why I followed you and what was my agenda. Well, what was my agenda? And who was I to you? The pigeons on your window pecked at boxed flowers and you looked just like a ghost when I told you it’d been three years since I’d left you in Montreal with ample warning. Your eyes lit up in fury, ghoul-like: all I could do was ask you in your den if you’d say hi to all of my dead ancestors from my living family.

— Elliah Heifetz

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 17

I

spent October break in a darkened basement of the medical school, peering through a microscope at butterfly scales. Each scale is a few microns thick, fifty across, and twice as many long: big enough to spot with the naked eye, once you know to look. And each one is formed by a single cell. When the young butterfly is still hidden away in its chrysalis, these scale cells are born all over its wings, and as they grow they stretch tall and wide. They squeeze fibers out through their surface, weaving them together to form a trussed and buttressed frame, hanging sacs of brilliant pigments from its vaults and archways. And then the scale cells commit suicide, leaving behind only their featherweight handiwork, so that the rest may fly.

THE BODY POLITIC Reflections on society through the scales of a butterfly’s wing

BY AARON LEWIS

I

look down at my hands sometimes and wonder at them, although they have never made anything so fine or beautiful as those scales, because they are made of and made by many billions of such cells, all working in concert with the same magnanimity.

When we were embryos, our hands first grew as fleshy plates, until millions of cells died there to create the empty space that defines each finger.

This sacrificial rite is recapitulated throughout our bodies: that I can even see my hands is due to some million cells in each eye that blew apart their own nuclei, forming one lens through which light could shine unimpeded. That I live at all is due to the millions of red cells in my blood that cut out their nuclei, becoming hemoglobinous husks to ferry oxygen to those cells that remain.

They didn’t have to die. If taken from the body and grown alone in a dish, these cells and their progenitors would not be so quick to sacrifice themselves. Nor would some of their siblings, even inside the body: cells can abandon the plan, reproduce like mad, and spread beyond their station, burdening their host with the disease we call cancer.

Seeing the pain that these selfish cells cause and knowing their capacity 18 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

for altruism, I am tempted to think badly of them. But in doing so, I would be holding them to a higher standard than the one to which we hold ourselves. In our society, we recognize that the sociopath is not the uncaused cause of the evil he commits, and so we conform our jurisprudence and pharmacology to this fact, allowing insanity as a defense from blame and prescribing psychoactives in place of punishment.

We should also be as inclined to praise our cells as we are to praise people. Though we could write off a cell’s sacrifice as merely a response to external chemical flows, in doing so, we would commit another fallacy.

The actions of self-sacrificing heroes whom our society celebrates are also brought about by outside forces — what Émile Durkheim called “suicidogenic currents,” the influences flowing from the hero’s companions and growing with the strength of their bonds. I would let the reputations of people and their cells rise with the same tide. When Hamlet or Jesus or Prometheus bleeds, I see his sacrifice reflected in his blood, in those cells’

sacrifice for the body.

Each of us is, in this sense, fractal: an individual and a society. We take for granted what to our cells is a monumental achievement. If we were to build a Colossus as many times bigger than ourselves as we are to our cells, it would be tall enough to highfive the Hubble.

A

community with such astronomical reach as our cells’ deserves an anthropology: by what kind of society can such grandeur be achieved, though it demands rampant self-sacrifice? It is a society molded under pressure, surviving and thriving today because it beat out other societies in which cells did not die for the common good.

It has been shaped by evolution’s total war.

But it would be a mistake to think that this society is governed by martial law, a sort of biological Third Reich or Airstrip One. Rather, our evolution resembles more the slow refinement of shared traditions — however grisly or unfair — that are adjusted, tried, and proven to better provide a

crit

common welfare.

Whereas our human traditions reside in our brains, those of our cells reside in their genomes, comprising a shared culture that has supplanted the cells’ former, solitary state of nature to form together a Leviathan. But unlike what Hobbes envisioned, this Leviathan has no monarch at its head: each cell constructs and is equally constructed by the role played by its partners.

In our brains, for example, neurons become neurons after being instructed to do so by the cells surrounding them, which themselves become supporting cells. It is aristocracy in the older sense: rule by the best — but not quite. Every cell, not just one empowered class, serves, and must serve, as best befits its position.

But this leaves each cell’s fate predetermined by its lineage. Though

ordinary cells can be coaxed in the lab to create a new embryo from which all cell types then descend, any given cell in the body will almost certainly stick to a predictable and specialized life trajectory: if a stem cell in the bone divides, its daughters will make bone. Only on rare occasions, such as severe injuries, do cells sometimes change roles, and almost always in ways that evolution has taught will serve the whole organism.

O

nly rarely does a cell have its own genetic idea, a mutation of the genomic norm. We are mosaics of several genetically different parts, each part descended from an embryonic ancestor in which a slight mutation occurred. This

diversity is most obviously manifest when the mutated genes guide skin pigmentation, creating a literal mosaic of dark and light on the body’s surface. Other cases of evolution go beyond creating mere curiosities: rare skin disorders can improve with age as doubly mutated skin cells reverse the harmful mutation and replace their failing compatriots.

But the degree of diversity in our body’s cellular society is, generally, imperceptible; diversity, like liberty, is not our bodies’ strong point.

Only in desperate times will our immune system generate an army of hypermutated killer cells to fight infection, and, when quieter times return, these mutated cells are left to wither away.

Our cellular society is largely homogeneous, and thriving because of it. Though there are a few known multicellular species of slime mold and fungi that aren’t so strict, they are merely that: mold and fungi. Whereas they allow their cells to split apart and come together as the need arises, our constitution is kept on lock-down from the moment the egg is fertilized, held tight through every division as it reproduces to produce a body’s worth of selfsame descendants.

I

’m troubled by all this rigid uniformity and lack of liberty.

Our bodies are themselves one of the world’s oldest and greatest civilizations, and I would rather their example inspire a vision for our own future, one concordant with values we people hold in common. But we can at least work to keep our society from being subject to the harsh pressures that pushed our cells to such lengths, and, failing that, take solace in the greatness that might thereby be born.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 19

AMERICAN BODIES

After escaping war-torn nations, refugees face a new threat: obesity

AMELIA EARNEST

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adia Ali had never left Baghdad.

One day, Hashim, Nadia’s elder son, group that works to ease the transitions But in 2005, as she watched the came home from primary school with a of refugees newly arrived in New Haven. city skyline fade into the distance, bloody scalp. Crying, he told his mother I was nervous about my first session she knew that she would never go back that his teacher had thrown a book at teaching English. Knocking on the to Iraq. She left behind her childhood him. An administrator subsequently peeling screen door, I ran through my home, her books and photographs, her told Nadia that physical discipline was lesson plan. friends, her aging parents. Her husband, permitted in Egypt.

In his cozy living room, Mohammed Mohammed, left behind his job as a Nadia pulled the boys out of school. immediately peppered me with professor and the nation he had fought The young family began seeking questions about my studies and about for in the Iraq-Iran war. To protect their another future — one in the United New Haven. The fluency of his English two young sons from the escalating States. Relocation, the Alis knew, would caught me by surprise. He had quickly danger of their native city, the couple shelter their family from the violence honed his skills by working three jobs fled to Cairo, Egypt. of car bombs and corporal punishment. to support his family. “If he is this Home videos give a glimpse of the What they didn’t know was that their advanced only a year after moving to Alis’ life in Cairo. One of Nadia’s sons new home in the U.S. would also the US,” I wondered, “what am I doing haltingly recites a prayer from the Quran threaten their health—in a more subtle here?” from memory in a spacious room with but serious way. By changing how they Suddenly, a clattering rang out from crown molding. A vase of fresh flowers moved and ate, how they worked and within the kitchen. Nadia emerged: her sits nearby. Every day, Nadia would relaxed, their new environment would face was pale and round and mascara get out of the house to walk her sons dramatically change the Alis’ bodies and, coated her long, dark eyelashes. Long somewhere or to meet a friend a couple in doing so, their lives. swatches of beautiful cloth fell from blocks away. A market place bustled her headscarf and draped her short, just down the street and, on weekends, first met Nadia in the summer of 2011, round frame. During the two-hour visit, Nadia would return to the apartment in a dingy apartment complex in East Nadia said not one word. Mohammed with her arms full with heavy paper bags Haven, Conn. I had just joined the explained that his wife was silent of rice, meat, and produce.

Yale Refugee Project, a Yale College because she spoke English poorly, and

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20 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

A

regardless, she didn’t have much to say. prepositions to cholesterol and dieting. s refugees integrate their diverse Because Mohammed works jobs at all Nadia decided to start an exercise routine backgrounds and skills into hours, I never saw him again. and stick to a basic nutrition plan. communities, they alter the Nadia’s English, I realized in A few months later, I knocked on the American body. But through its culture, subsequent visits, was much better than door of the Ali household and nobody America, too, alters the bodies of the her husband had said. For the first few answered. Lingering outside, I called vulnerable population it grants residence. months of our weekly visits, we both Nadia on my cell phone. She explained Over their first 15 years of residence tried to stick to the English curriculum. in broken English that she was in the in the U.S., refugee and immigrant But with increasing frequency, Nadia hospital. Short of breath, she had called populations experience a dramatic jump would answer the door looking an ambulance. Her tests came back in the prevalence of obesity: from 8% exhausted, blank worksheets in hand. normal, but my goal of helping Nadia get to 20%. All refugee demographics show While her husband worked and her fit suddenly became more serious a significant increase in average body kids attended school, Nadia spent her Nadia fully understood the mass index in their first year in the US. days in the tiny apartment. Isolated and detriments of her habits and possessed Refugee populations have traditionally depressed, her weight was ballooning the information, resources, and free suffered from a heavy burden of beyond her control. By winter, time to improve them. But she hadn’t. infectious disease relative to the rest of everyday tasks like grocery shopping How could a woman in her mid-thirties the American public. Presently, however, and climbing stairs exhausted her. She who had kept her family together many resettled refugee populations began wincing as she stood up from the through violence and turbulent change, display an ever higher prevalence of couch. At the end of each day, she told lack the willpower to lose weight? In non-communicable diseases, such as me, excruciating pain shot through the the following months, Nadia did not heart disease, obesity, and hypertension. joints of both knees. maintain a single one of her exercise or In a system of perverse incentives, By the end of her first year in the US, diet goals. I couldn’t understand what unhealthy food is often cheaper, more Nadia had added more than 30 lbs. to her was holding her back. convenient, less time-intensive, and nonalready heavy frame. Our conversations perishable, said Marlene Schwartz, PhD, gradually transitioned from clauses and Director of the Rudd Center for Food yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 21

feature Policy & Obesity. Much of the center’s research investigates “obesogenic” environments, settings that structurally promote weight gain.

Current health interventions, however, focus largely on health education. “We see someone with a bad diet and bad health outcomes and we think ‘Oh we need to teach them how to eat,’” said Schwartz. “But education is just not powerful enough to overcome these structural factors. It’s really about changing an entire society, particularly about changing environments that offer food to children from low-income families.”

As Health and Wellness Programming Coordinator for Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) of New Haven— the Alis’ sponsoring resettlement agency — Leslie Koons helps incoming refugees navigate America’s complex medical care system. But low levels of funding and human resource support, Koons explained, limit IRIS’s capacity for health outreach. While Koons’ work addresses refugees’ acute medical needs, topics like nutrition and fitness are relegated to informational handouts, available in multiple languages at IRIS headquarters.

Recognizing the lack of nutrition and physical activity outreach, IRIS and the Yale Refugee Project (YRP) have attempted various education-based interventions to reduce the prevalence of refugee obesity. The YRP offered yoga and dance classes, but the money, time, and transportation necessary to commute to Yale’s campus slashed turnout, and the initiative was canceled in 2010. More recently, weekly walking groups started meeting at IRIS. Last summer, IRIS cancelled the groups because of low rates of attendance. The majority of participants had been similar to Nadia—young mothers from Bagdhad.

Koons explained that participation dropped because many women had to leave IRIS at midday to prepare lunch for their families. Most recently, a graduate student led a series of cooking classes intended to introduce new, healthy ingredients to refugees. Top enrollment, 22 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

according to Koons, hovered around five attendees.

R

eturning to New Haven in August 2012 after the summer break, I found that Nadia, who stands no taller than 5’2”, now weighed over 260 lbs.

After spending three months wearing a headscarf and long sleeves in a muggy, cramped apartment, Nadia was tired of feeling sweaty and sluggish. She wanted the weight gone and wanted me to help.

For one year, I tried to find a way for Nadia to exercise. The easiest and most inexpensive option, I thought, was to run outside. Nadia quickly rejected the idea. Speaking little English and living in a homogenously white area, Nadia already drew glances. At Wal-Mart around Halloween one year, a little boy had pointed up at Nadia’s cream hijab headscarf. “Mom, mom!” he had said, “It’s a ghost!” More recently, in a parking lot, a man had pointed at her and shouted angrily. Only one word rang out to her clearly: “Terrorist!”

Finding a way to work out inside proved equally difficult. Nooreen Reza, a former health liaison for YRP and current volunteer, has also tried to facilitate physical activity in her family of Afghani refugees, “If a woman wants to exercise and is more conservative,” Reza said, “it is hard for her to do that in a mixed gender space.” The number of single-sex, bargain-priced gyms within walking distance of Nadia’s apartment complex? Zero.

In Iraq and Egypt, exercise did not require planning. Walking was an everyday necessity. “Here in America, I do not walk,” Nadia said bluntly. Living off of a four-lane highway, Nadia needed the family’s vehicle — and her husband’s help — to go anywhere in America.

“I haven’t come across any women who had exercise regimens back home,” said Koons, the IRIS Health Coordinator.

“Back in their home countries,” Reza said, “if a woman wanted to go running outside, maybe she couldn’t—because she culturally wasn’t able to or because

it wasn’t actually safe to be outside.”

Lacking these habits had made it hard for woman like Nadia to exercise in an already unfamiliar environment.

I noticed other ways that Nadia’s gender affected her health. Women in refugee families often remain in the home and miss out on the social connections and cultural integration their husbands enjoy on the job. Nadia’s isolation left her listless and depressed.

With little to do other than surf the internet or watch TV, Nadia used snacks and mealtimes to lift her spirits and break up the long daytime hours.

The 24-inch flatscreen TV, turned on with the sound at high volume, is a permanent fixture in the Alis’ apartment.

Walking through the front door for a visit, I would see Nadia and her sons snuggling on the couch, their faces basking in the TV’s glow.

After failing to cultivate the potential jock in Nadia, I took careful inventory of the Alis’ kitchen pantry. First, breakfast: 2 boxes Count Chocula, 1 off-brand Cookie Crisp, and 1 alarmingly orange box of puffed cereal.

On to lunch and dinner. I opened the fridge. The hinges creaked under the weight of three bottles of cola lining the door. A leaning tower of single wrapped American cheese slices teetered onto a jumble of Saran-wrapped Hamburger Helper. In the back, in quiet homage to diets of another time and place, sat a platter slathered with thick waves of Nadia’s homemade hummus.

While Nadia had entered the US already slightly overweight, Hashim (12) and Hassan (11) were almost gangly when they first arrived in the US, blank slates for American culture’s marking.

Hassan put on weight quickly. Aware of his body’s changes, he poked fun at his own body, as well as those of his mother and brother. “I am in shape!”

Hassan proclaimed to me during my last visit to their home. “See!” he shouted, dramatically tracing his finger around the periphery of his body “I’m in a shape!”

By the spring of my second year

feature working with the Alis, Hashim was 5’1’’ and 147 lbs. and classified as morbidly obese. Because he had mastered English and Arabic, Hashim coordinated his family’s everyday business with the outside world. His bilingualism and quiet acceptance of its accompanying familial responsibilities gave Hashim the sense of a wise, old man trapped inside of a huge twelve-year-old’s body.

“I eat when I’m bored,” Hashim told me. “I eat to make the time pass,” he said.

O

n a sunny day in September 2013, I pulled into the Xpect Discounts parking lot in East Haven to meet Nadia. The past few months had been eventful for the Ali family. Pinched for money, the family was searching for a smaller apartment and Nadia had just gotten a job stocking shelves in the night shift at Wal-Mart.

I found Nadia in frozen foods. Giving her a hug, I peered over her shoulder at the contents of her cart.

2 Betty Crocker chocolate chip muffin mixes 2 packages of Jumbo franks 1 carton of eggs cool whip chickpeas hot cocoa Save for the chickpeas, I couldn’t imagine this selection had much in common with what she used to bring home in Iraq.

After filling the cart, we moved into checkout line. Nearly at the register, Nadia noticed a bakery display. She darted from her spot and grabbed two four-packs of chocolate chip muffins.

“Why so many muffins?” I asked, pointing from the mixes to the tins.

“These are cooked,” Nadia said. Then, gesturing towards the foil pouches, “These take work.”

“But Nadia,” I said, “Why do you need chocolate chip muffins and chocolate chip muffin mix?”

“Oh, Amelia, please,” she stared at me reproachfully, “I like to eat them with my coffee!”

The cashier chimed in, “It’s ok, hon,”

she said to Nadia. “You deserve it!”

Standing on an elevated platform, the cashier—who was herself overweight— threw me a nasty glance from behind her barricade of cigarettes, lottery tickets, and king-sized candy bars.

Raw heat blossomed across my cheeks. As my own voice echoed back to me, I could hear how patronizing I sounded.

“This just in!” my words seemed to say.

“Baked goods make you gain weight!”

Nadia was a resilient wrangler of two rambunctious boys, a former nextdoor neighbor to war itself, a plucky champion for her family willing to abandon the known for a faint glimmer of a better unknown.

And I had been trying to teach her Muffins 101.

Nadia knew what food was healthy and what food was not. She understood that exercise would improve her life. I thought about the pains — physical and emotional — that had characterized Nadia’s life as a refugee since her arrival in the US. Aching knees, powerlessness, crippling lack of self-esteem. “You deserve it, hon,” the cashier had said.

“No,” I thought, “Nadia did not ‘deserve it.’” She deserved better, but no simple formula was going to make that happen.

Nutrition education is becoming less relevant as a strategy to reduce obesity.

The idea that instruction alone can solve the obesity epidemic reflects an ugly and ill-conceived correlation: overweight = undereducated.

Self-control is a finite resource. While some people use willpower to resist that second cookie or run that extra mile, others expend their daily allotment by forcing themselves to work the graveyard shift and still get dinner on the table.

Though perhaps their marks are more visible on America’s newest and most vulnerable, the accepted structures that comprise the space in which Americans live, travel, eat, and sleep modify our behaviors and, consequently, our bodies.

I recently visited the Alis’ new home.

Just a couple minutes off of the highway, their one-floor apartment was still full of moving boxes. I learned that Hassan was registered to play recreational basketball in the spring and that Nadia had made some new friends at work.

In the center of the table sat a wooden bowl teeming with fruit. A full bunch of bananas crested the top of the pile, appearing posed, as if for a still life painting. I heard an oven timer ding.

Briefly disappearing into the kitchen, Nadia came back through the doorway with a wide smile and a plate of muffins, still steaming from the oven.

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EXCLUSIVE OFFER: UPGRADE TODAY

by Natey Weinstein illustrations by Annelisa Leinbach

fiction

W

hat picture? Daddy sent you a picture message this morning?

Must have gotten one of his friends in line there to take a picture of him. Yep, that was one of our beach chairs, which he brought to camp out at the AT&T Store at the Riverside Mall and wait for the new phone release. Missed work so he could sit in a mall parking lot in a chaise lounge with an umbrella.

Adam, can you see me? Hello? Hi, honey. Can you tell this is the new phone Daddy got me for my birthday?

I can never get reception in the living room.

He must have sent you the picture message right before that old lady almost punched him. He didn’t tell you about that?

He was wishing me a happy birthday.

Videocalled me at work while he was waiting, probably more out of boredom than anything else. Had to interrupt my conversation with my secretary to tell me how old I am.

Yep, we’re here sitting in the armchairs in the living room. Daddy’s right here. See him? Say hi.

Herman, you’re the one who’s almost 61. Who’ll be laughing then?

While Daddy was calling me, he turned the camera around so I could see the AT&T Store, as if I’d be glad to see it. I said to him, “If you get me another stupid, never-work, ungapatchka phone … ” Well, what is this, the fiftieth time they’ve pulled this trick? And your doofus father falls for it every time. AT&T sent him an email yesterday: exclusive offer, upgrade today, get two new phones. Not for free. Of course not for free! That’s our big privilege: we get to pay them more money! Upgrade today!

That’s all “upgrade” means anymore.

“Pay us more money for another pieceof-crap phone that’s worse than the last one.” They don’t even give us a good deal on it, but why should they? They email him telling him to buy a new phone and he buys it. Doesn’t take a genius to make money with that scheme. They change the color and the shape and call it new.

I lost track of the whole thing when

they launched the 13j. I think everyone did except for Daddy. What was the big revolution with the 13j?

Exactly. That’s the big feature. Who on Earth needs a phone that can beat you at Jeopardy? The 13j, the 14q, then what?

They all sound the same to me. 14q, 15w, 16p.u., 17peek-a-boo, 18didgeridoo.

What’s the one you have, Adam?

Right. Senses danger. Just like Lassie.

Well, I told your father I didn’t want anything fancy. I just wanted a simple phone. I said, “What ever happened to phones that just have internet, video, voice recognition, and GPS navigation?”

That’s all I need. No thermal nightvision, no Jeopardy, no Lassie, and especially none of that crap they put into this new one they just came out with.

Companionate love, or whatever they called it. What’s the new model, Herman? The 20L. Your father knows me well enough not to buy me the 20L. The new model is for him. He gets a present for my birthday. I asked him if he wanted me to bake him a cake for my birthday, too.

Ends up getting me the stripped-down version, the Retro, that they released just a few weeks ago. Retro for now, at least.

The 20L will be retro by Tuesday.

Anyway, the altercation with the old lady.

He’s waiting in line for the store to open. And, you know, this is the best phone they’ve ever designed! That’s why there were five whole people lined up outside the AT&T Store. Only five losers dumb enough.

In fairness to him, the blue-haired old lady in the sequined white sweatshirt was the one who cut the line. Daddy says some little piece to her, “Do you really have to cut me — there are only five people here.” Always has to say something. The security guard had to restrain her before she punched him right out. Yep, lotta crazy people at the AT&T Store. Your father number one.

Adam, all I can say is, you’re lucky you got out of this household before you lost your mind, too. But enough about

us. How is your trip? Have you been drinking enough water? What did you do today?

That sounds like fun. We took you to the Liberty Bell once when you were little, but you probably don’t remember.

Ugh, my hair is a mess.

That’s good. We had just gotten back from dinner when you called.

Yep, Daddy brought me out to a lovely birthday dinner at the fish restaurant.

Captain Pike’s Fish Restaurant.

It was a fish restaurant. We had fish. I had the salmon, Daddy had the haddock.

Ok, be safe on the roads.

Bye.

H

i. Hello?

How are you? You’re in Chicago already?

That’s good. Ugh! The minute you call, Daddy needs more toilet paper.

Texted me from the bathroom. Adam, I’m going to put the thing on mute for a second. COULD YOU GIVE ME ONE SECOND, HERMAN?! ADAM JUST CALLED! That wasn’t mute? Ugh. Peeyoo. Just gotta go up the stairs. One second, sorry, Adam. We’re thinking of taking the carpet off the stairs. I think the hardwood might look nicer, don’t you? Just gotta go to the closet. Yeah, you hear him talking in there? That’s how he talks with his phone now. “I wuv woo.”

“No, I wuv woo.” “No, I weally weally wuv woo!” It’s nauseating. Muting you again. HERMAN, I’M TRYING TO TALK TO YOUR SON! UGH. Which one is the mute button?

Not sure exactly how all that loveydovey started. I guess right out of the box, the 20L — her name’s Ilsa; all the phones have Scandinavian names — Ilsa started teasing him and making him laugh.

ALL RIGHT, HERE YOU GO! So Ilsa made a great first impression, then it went through the tutorial about all its technical specs. All very coy, very cute. I heard it whisper, “Check out my upgraded voice.”

Daddy said they improved its whispering capability. Good. Maybe that

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 25

fiction way I don’t have to hear what the dumb thing has to say.

I know. Ilsa would tell him all about its processor speed, then he’d tell it something he read on one of the tech blogs. Ilsa suggested tech blogs he’d never even heard of! It knows how to Google things discreetly and pass them off as knowledge. And it listens.

Oh yeah, goes into the bathroom with him and everything. I think it’s safe to say I will never have that level of devotion. Maybe the next model will wipe his precious little tushie.

Sometimes I even hear him complaining to it about Christine. We haven’t told you about Christine? She’s this woman at Daddy’s office who has made it very clear that she wants his job.

He hates her.

But how are you? How’s Chicago?

Are you excited for your new job? Daddy and I are excited! He just showed me an article about Calixter, how they’re the biggest tech startup since Google! When do you start again? When are you getting to San Francisco?

You look a little tired. What did you do today?

That’s too bad. Is it supposed to clear up any time soon? How is the driving?

I’m watching Bachelors On Ice in the

28 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

living room, enjoying a glass of wine. The showerhead in our bathroom is leaking and the window in your old room won’t close, so we need someone to fix that stuff. But otherwise everything’s fine.

Ok. Talk to you later. Bye.

U

gh, the minute you call, I have to put you on mute because he can’t find the money. I DON’T KNOW, HERMAN, DIDN’T YOU LEAVE IT ON THE COUNTER? DID WE LOSE IT? HERE IT IS. It’s the money Daddy got from selling his old phone today. You’ll never believe the guy he sold it to.

He always sells the old ones! You don’t remember? He sold the one before this one to Giorgio, the guy who owns that Mediterranean restaurant.

This time your father decided to look on the internet. Nutcase. Of course, he looks at me like I’m nuts. Uses the 20L to do the search, genius move, Ilsa starts having a fit. Who can blame it? It said, “You think you can just buy and sell phones like it’s nothing?” Daddy says, “I’m not selling you!” No difference. He was asking it to participate in its own execution.

Buyer gets to our house, name is Ed or Jed, or something. He’s standing in our front hall. And he’s got, oh, I don’t know how many tattoos. Maybe eight hundred? Beard, sunglasses, long, dirty hair, earrings, baggy clothing. You get the idea. He says he does home repair, so your father has to get into this whole conversation with him about whether he can fix up our showerhead.

Well, could be very cheap. We’d have to do a background check.

Offhand he told us he wrestled a cougar while he was rock climbing in Colorado. Had this low voice, like: “Eff this, eff that, eff this.” I don’t know if he swore quite that much but you get the idea. “Effin cougar, eff, eff, eff.”

Jed says, “So we have a deal?” Shakes our hands, and leaves. Not kidding.

Afterwards, Ilsa really lets your father have it.

I know. Why can’t the thing just accept

its fate? Terrible reception and can’t accept its fate. Daddy says it’s because it’s much easier to love something that’s imperfect. Seems like an easy excuse for manufacturing a piece of crap.

I thought that, too. But it turns out that if you transfer the memory to a new device, that’s just a copy. “Ilsa” is stuck in the physical phone.

I don’t know. “Ilsa.” “Ilsa” can’t be transferred from phone to phone. The memory can … but not it.

Anyway, you’re all settled? The apartment’s ok?

Ugh. That’s annoying. But how are the people who work there?

Oh good. And do you like San Francisco?

Just busy with work. So many clients coming in, half my day is spent answering emails. Ok. Bye.

I

’ve got news. Grampa Jack proposed to his girlfriend today.

We didn’t even know he had a girlfriend! He proposed at dinner.

Well, it’s a funny story. We go to pick him up at his house for dinner — it’s still got all the decorations Grandma used to put up. The welcome mat, the flowerpots, the seashells. But as we’re sitting on his couch, I notice a black tote bag that has the word “Sassy” printed in pink lettering all over it.

I know! Well, he doesn’t always read the writing on the things he buys.

Remember the shirt he thought said “Enjoy Coca-Cola” that actually said “Enjoy vagina?”

Oh, it’s a clinical term, Adam! It was deceptive with the font, though.

That’s when he at least bought new clothing. Now Grampa refuses to buy new things. He says, “Don’t buy me any new pants. I don’t have enough time left to make it worth it.”

I buy him pants and he gets mad at me, refuses to wear them. He still needs new pants sometimes! You can’t arbitrarily decide you have enough pants for the rest of your life! Sometimes they rip!

Walks around in these old, ratty jeans.

Anyway, we’re about to go out for

fiction dinner when he asks, “Is it ok if Deborah comes?” “Who’s Deborah?” Tells us he spotted a pretty woman screaming at the cashier at the Pottery Barn in the Riverside Mall. Thought the cashier overcharged her for the “Sassy” bag.

Grampa asked her out. Now they’re engaged.

So before dinner, Deborah walks over while we’re sitting in the living room watching the Golf Channel.

Grampa lets her in, I see blue hair and a sequined white sweatshirt. Deborah’s the woman who punched Daddy. Daddy almost threw up, but she seemed to have forgotten about the whole thing. Didn’t recognize your father at all.

Get in the car to go to dinner at this new restaurant. Ilsa gives us the turnby-turn directions a little indignantly, because it’s still mad about the whole incident with Jed. As soon as Deborah sees the new phone, she asks Daddy where he got it. He lies and says he bought it at a different store on Parker Avenue. Then, Daddy goes into this whole long spiel trying to convince Grampa to let us buy the 20L for him, too. Your father doesn’t understand that not everyone is in a perpetual midlife crisis. What does Grampa need from a 20L? Get to the restaurant, waiting to put our name in, a woman cuts in front of Daddy. He says, very indignantly, “Do you really need to cut me?” That jogs Deborah’s memory. You can only imagine the arguing, the screaming, oh, it was a disaster.

Anyway, after Deborah complains to the waiter about the food (her complaining gets Grampa a free steak), Grampa gets down on one knee and proposes. Maybe he’ll at least buy a new pair of pants for the wedding.

But how is work?

Just ok?

Well, you’ve only been there a month.

It’ll get better. Or maybe it’s not your thing. You don’t have to like it. What’s it like there?

Sounds very stimulating.

Alright. Bye.

H

i, hi.

Oh, God, Adam. A bird flew into the house while Jed was fixing the window in your old room. He went to the bathroom for one minute and it flew into your room, down the stairs, around the living room and the dining room, and landed on the piano and then on one of my lamps. I was afraid it was going to poop on my couch.

Jed identified it as a grackle. “Yep, that’s just your Common Grackle. Can tell by its graduated tail.”

Then, he caught it! He said, “Get me a net.” I found an old toy butterfly net in your closet. He took it, chased the bird back upstairs and got it in the net.

He said, “This’ll be some good eating tonight.” He was kidding, thank God! He set it free outside.

I said, “How’d you know how to do that?”

He said, “Once you’ve wrestled a cougar, you can do anything.”

Swear words omitted. He asked me about my family. That was nice of him.

I told him about you, bragged a little bit about how you’re working for Calixter.

Just a little bit! I have to brag to someone!

The people at the office are sick of it by now.

He told me about his family, how he gave Daddy’s old phone to his daughter.

He’s raising her as a single parent. The mother was a white-water rafting instructor he met while he was living in Colorado, but she was a loon and she’s not allowed to contact them anymore. I know, very sad situation. Now he really wants to buy his daughter the 20L so that maybe she’ll have some companionship.

I’m not sure a phone can replace a mother — don’t get any ideas. Anyway, he might be able to buy the 20L from us.

I don’t know if you saw: they’re releasing the 20LM in a few days.

Right now Daddy’s away on a business trip to Cleveland. Christine’s there, too, and he says she’s really annoying him, asking stupid questions about the particulars of his job. Says his boss wants him to be more hands on about teaching Christine, even though he has no desire

to teach her anything. This might be his last trip with them because he wants to leave before they force him out. They’re obnoxious, anyway.

Ever since the 20LM came out, the 20L is looking a little bit obsolete.

Especially the remote charging feature — he used to use it to keep the phone in his pajama pocket as he slept. Now he keeps it on the far side of the nightstand, and the remote charger seems like a waste. Also, whenever he sends me a text, the autocorrect changes certain words to frowny faces. Ilsa whispers to me while Daddy’s sleeping. (The 20L has that upgraded whispering function, you know?)

Oh, all sorts of things. Let’s see if I can remember. Last night, Ilsa whispered, “Soon as someone younger and better comes along, he’s just about ready to drop me in the toilet!” I tried to calm it down, but it just kept going, about how it isn’t an accident that so many phones get dropped in toilets. What was I supposed to say? Much better to be married to him than to be his phone, I guess. Then Christine from work called him. These people and their work — what is so urgent that can’t wait ‘til the morning?

She has to call at midnight?

Grampa’s good.

I talked to him a bit about Deborah.

He said she’s “rough around the edges,” but I guess he likes that about her. Called her “feisty.” Also, he said, at his age, he couldn’t be too picky — running out of time. I told him he still has time. I asked him if he’d let Deborah buy him new pants. He said yes. I’m convinced for now.

Oh, and Jed was there when I got off the phone with Grampa. Jed said, “It’s natural for you to feel squeamish. But look at it this way: it’s a testament to the power and versatility of love.” Then he spat in the sink and clunked up the stairs in his work boots.

O

k, here he is! It’s Adam. Hi, Adam. We’re all having dinner in the dining room to celebrate the engagement! We thought we’d call

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 27

fiction you. Here’s Grampa. Dad, hold it so he can see you. You can see your face in the bottom-right square. Just start talking.

Herman, he can’t see himself in the little square on the screen. Is there a way to make his face bigger on this piece-ofcrap device?

Well, Adam’s very busy out there. Yes, he still has your phone number, Dad. Have you been watching the Red Sox, Adam? Grampa thinks they’re terrible. I do, too.

And this is Deborah. I know you haven’t met yet, but you’ll meet soon.

Say hi, Deborah!

This is our friend, Jed. He helps us fix things up around the house! Jed, Adam, Adam, Jed. Here’s Daddy.

Yep. Your father made the dinner.

We’re having barbeque chicken. Yep, it was good, Herman. No, it wasn’t dry.

We’re calling on Daddy’s phone. Can’t beat this video quality, right? Piece of crap. Oh, Herman, you’re getting a call. Another call from Christine? I’m hanging up. Not during dinner time. She can call back later.

Oh, let’s all take a picture. I’ll go upstairs to get a nicer camera! Want to remember this moment. Oh, let me show you the stairs, Adam. You see them? Jed took off the carpet. Don’t they look nice —

I

’m fine. Just had a little fall. Maybe the hardwood stairs weren’t such a good change. I bumped my head and hurt my hip.

I should be out of the hospital soon.

I was holding Daddy’s 20L when I fell. It sent out distress calls to all the phones in the area — all-points bulletin: I’m a klutz.

We think the phone survived the initial impact from being dropped down the stairs, but someone must have stepped on it as they were coming to help me. When Daddy found it later that night, it was completely broken. Maybe it was Jed and his work boots. Did I tell you what Jed said at dinner, about how you can’t transfer the data from the 20L?

28 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

He said, “The hardware is fragile and ephemeral. But the love is eternal.” Then he took a big bite out of a drumstick.

Realized this today: these phones store all the video conversations?!

Delete them please.

No, Adam, pictures are different. I’m serious. Please delete them. Spare me the indignity — my hair a disheveled mess for all eternity.

I’ll have to figure out a way to check to make sure you did it.

Daddy had a busy morning. Well, for one thing, he bought me flowers.

See them over there on the table? But before that, he had another beach day at the AT&T Store so he could buy a whole batch of the new phones.

Didn’t miss work. He left the

company. Now maybe Christine will stop bothering him.

AT&T finally gave us a discount for being frequent customers, offered us a buy-one-get-one -free sort of deal.

We gave one to Jed (to give to his daughter). Maybe we’ll give one to Deborah, too … Definitely plan on slipping one into the pocket of the new tuxedo pants Grampa’s going to get for his wedding. Yours is in the mail.

And I’m calling from my new one.

Can you tell the difference? It’s named Torvald — they all have Scandinavian names.

Of course it’s a piece of crap. But I like it just fine.

Ok. Talk to you soon. Bye.

The Uncollected Works of Filomena Zarra PROFILE AND INSIDE PHOTO BY MIA THOMPSON OPENING PHOTO BY JENNIFER LU

T

he works of Filomena Zarra are tucked into closets and drawers and cabinets, hidden deep within glitter-strewn construction paper sheaves of the more minor masterpieces of her students. Sandy Malmquist, the director of the daycare center where “Filly” has worked for 32 years, often encourages her to publish these stories. Filly says she might someday, but for now she writes them by hand, slowly tracing out sentences in her chameleon script. The letters morph as the meanings change, sometimes shifting into cursive in the middle of a word, three different kinds of r’s on a single page, four different h’s, the last one looping up and over itself and three other letters, the tails of the y’s and g’s curving into cutlass hooks or twisting

into themselves or plunging straight down before bouncing into emphatic rainbow arcs.

W

hen Filomena Zarra was born, in St. Raphael’s Hospital in New Haven in 1962, the Holy See had just declared that Saint Filomena, patron saint of babies and children, was not really a saint. Her works were widely venerated but poorly documented (as the fourth-century works of 13-year-old virgins martyred

by Diocletian tended to be). Despite this, Gerardo and Natalina Zarra named their first child Filomena.

The Catholic Church had more influence on Filomena’s last name: when Gerardo, a Zarra from the village of Teora in the Campania region of

southern Italy, fell in love with Natalina, a Zarra from the nearby village of Conza, the Church traced their ancestry back seven generations looking for blood ties close enough to prevent marriage.

In Campania, Zarra bloodlines had lengthened and divided for so long that they probably could’ve gone back even farther without finding any. Gerardo had four siblings, and Natalina had nine.

By the time Filly was born, nearly all of them had left Campania to move to the United States. Before long, she had two brothers and forty-two first cousins, most of them New Haven Zarras.

They grew up together in the Italian neighborhood under the watchful eyes of older Zarras. They spoke to outsiders so rarely that Filly didn’t become fluent in English until she started kindergarten.

yaledailynews.com/magazine | Yale Daily News Magazine | 29

profile Filly was ten when her third brother, Nicky, was born. She’s 50 now. Grey roots creep into her long waves of dark red hair, and comfortable sandals peek out from under her skirt. When she talks about Nicky, as she sits in a sandbox on a bright November morning, she rubs her

gathered eggs every morning, dressed in his favorite outfit: a Yankees uniform.

He wore it to Little League games, where he cheered on the older Zarras.

He dreamed of going to a Yankees game, but his immune system wasn’t strong enough to travel to Yankee Stadium. So

The circular movements of her hands make her skirt ripple over her knees and into the sandbox like a psychedelic waterfall. palms against her thighs in small, steady circles. “We just had a special bond,” she says. “Because I was ten when he was born, I feel like I was his second mom.” When naptime starts later today, some kids won’t be able to fall asleep.

Filly will sit between their cots and rub their backs with the same small, steady circles.

Filly’s father wanted to create his own piece of Campania countryside in rural Connecticut. When she was in middle school, he finally saved up enough money to buy farmland in Cheshire and begin building a house. Just after the foundation was laid, three-year-old Nicky was diagnosed with leukemia.

More and more of Gerardo’s earnings from his job laying ceramic tile were used to pay hospital bills. Natalina went back to work at a pocketbook factory in New Haven to make ends meet.

Money was scarce. But the Zarras were a construction family, and building was what they did, so the Zarra brothers of Teora and the Zarra brothers of Conza spent the summer working in the Cheshire countryside. By September, the house was built.

Gerardo and Natalina still live in that house, and the whole family gathers there on most Sundays. Filly loves the photographs of Nicky from the first years they lived in the house: a young boy chasing chickens, or holding rabbits, which he trained to come to him when he made rabbit noises. Nicky 30 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

Filly went for him, bringing back a ball signed by outfielder Lou Piniella and stories that Nicky asked to hear again and again.

I

n 1885, the townsmen of New Haven protested against the organization of the first local daycare, on the grounds that the town already had two orphan asylums. The townsmen’s callousness can be partly excused by their unfamiliarity with the institution of childcare. In 1878, there were only three daycare centers in the United States.

There were 700 in 1916. And during World War II, the Lanham Act established thousands more, to allow women with young children to work in the defense industry. Still, care outside the home for children under the age of five was largely considered a service for the poor.

By the time Filly entered the daycare workforce in 1980, 9-to-5 child care had become a way of life for millions of Americans: both for the women who had always used it — women who had no other choice — and for the women who could have stayed home, but chose to work. To some, day care was still a patchwork solution. But to others, it was an opportunity to expand education into early childhood, a head start in the increasingly competitive race to college and a crucial element in the building of a more perfect society where children would be raised by both men and

women, both family and community.

While daycare activists like Sandy (Filly’s boss and longtime friend) cared about women’s rights, children’s rights were their primary concern.

Not entirely unlike the New Haven townsmen of 1885, they refused to think of daycare as simply a space where the children of working women went during the day. Sandy wanted to question the traditional ways of caring for children—to reimagine child care from the child’s perspective. “Our goal,” she wrote in 1979, “is to work with kids to help them create themselves.”

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t Creating Kids Childcare Center, a shelf of binders contains the accreditation guidelines of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Assembling the binders was a good exercise for the people who work at Creating Kids, Sandy tells me, not because they had to make any changes in order to comply with the guidelines, but because it gave them a structure for identifying the things they had always done. According to criterion 2/E.05, children must be “provided needed assistance in writing the words and messages they are trying to communicate.” In the Creating Kids binders, 2/E.05 is accompanied by a note Filly wrote: “When children want to write a word or message, we either write the word for them to use as a model or tell them how to spell it — depending on where they are developmentally.” With Filly’s handwriting as a model, there is little risk that the children will acquire narrow ideas about the possibilities of letters. An f can be an f, or it can be seven other kinds of f.

At 9 a.m., as the last parents say goodbye, Filly writes out Charlie’s story by hand. Charlie and the other four-year-olds who sit at Filly’s round table in the Big Kid classroom — Emily, Hannah, Kiyu, Leni, Leo, and Tomi — can’t read, and Charlie can’t write much more than his name. He writes it in an examination blue book, the same kind Yale students fill with frantic scribbles

profile — each line less legible than the last — in gothic lecture halls just a few blocks away. Charlie uses the whole page. He starts writing his name in unwieldy capital letters, and when he runs out of space at I, he compensates for the lack of an E by filling the stem of the I with short horizontal marks. Filly calls this “creative spelling.” When Filly appends the adjective “creative” to something, it usually falls into the category of things she doesn’t want to change. After all, this is day care. There will plenty of time for learning rules in kindergarten, or first grade, or college.

Under his name, Charlie traces a ship torn from a toy catalog and drowns it in blue, brown, and yellow scribbles. Her pen poised, Filly asks him to tell the ship’s story. Stories don’t come quickly to Charlie, a quiet boy with tousled brown hair and big dark eyes, so she asks him about the ship: Who is in it? Where is it going? When will it get there? She reminds him of the rhyming books they have read and acted out this week, Nursery Rhyme Week, and suggests that he think of words that rhyme with ship.

Charlie’s story, as transcribed by Filly, ends up like this: This is a big ship It doesn’t flip It doesn’t tip It doesn’t do anything Except go in the water And float!

It is a BOAT! By telling their own stories, Filly’s students learn to navigate a boundary that age will make far less navigable.

“Four, five, six years old, they’re just getting used to it — what’s real, what’s not real,” she says. “Are witches real?

Are monsters real?” She can help them understand that witches and monsters are make-believe, but that sometimes the things they fear are real. One of Filly’s first students was terrified of the

wind. “Why?” Filly asked. “Because Mommy read ‘The Three Little Pigs’ and it blew my house down,” replied the student. “I said ‘Oh, the wind can’t blow your house down!’” remembers Filly. “I mean, of course it can, but he doesn’t need to know about hurricanes at that age. So I rewrote that.” Her version is called “The Three Little Pigs Fly a Kite.”

That was thirty-two years ago. Perhaps somewhere in the world, a middle-aged man is less scared of the wind because of it.

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icky died when he was seven, as winter melted into spring. Filly graduated from high school, Class of 1980. After a long summer, she started in the fall as a freshman at Quinnipiac University. While walking through a residence hall one afternoon, she noticed Sandy standing in a half-renovated dorm room. She liked Sandy’s hippie earth-mother look, so she asked, “What are you doing?” Sandy was creating a lab site for the Day Care and Child Development concentration, part of the Psychology major. Filly was a psych major, so she decided to try working there. “There’s something about kids, you know what I mean?” she says. The circular movements of her hands make her skirt ripple over her knees and into the sandbox like a psychedelic waterfall.

“I think it kind of filled a void for me.”

She worked there for all four years of college. On some weekends, the daycare workers took the train into New York for protests and peace rallies. “The whole day care was just very involved in having a better world,” Filly remembers.

“I mean, that’s our job, to take care of these kids, and also try to do our best to make a safe future for them.”

On other weekends, Filly and a few fellow daycare Deadheads would travel to see the band. While Filly looks tall in a crowd of preschoolers with an average height of three feet, she would disappear in the lankier crowds swaying to “Touch of Grey,” happy to hear and feel the music without seeing the stage.

In 1993, around the time she attended

her hundredth Grateful Dead show, a reporter wrote, “The Dead design their shows and their music to be ambiguous and open-ended … A Deadhead gets to join in on an experiment that may or may not be going anywhere in particular, and such an opportunity is rare in American life.”

Day care at Quinnipiac was a similar kind of experiment. Under the guidance of Sandy and psychology professor Bert Garskof, who co-wrote the Day Care and Child Development concentration’s handbook, A Theory and Practice of Radical Intentional Child Care, teachers and students asked questions like, “How can people raised in the repressive modality know any better and how can we not pass on ourselves to the kids we work with?”

When Filly graduated, Sandy hired her. But in 1994, Quinnipiac sold the lab site to a for-profit day care. Sandy doesn’t believe in for-profit day cares, so she left to start Creating Kids, and Filly followed her. In 1999, Creating Kids moved into its current location, the Connecticut Children’s Museum. To decorate the entrance, Filly’s class made drawings that were turned into slides and projected onto the white walls.

Artists then painted over the patches of projected light, following the contours of every crayon scrawl.

“The kids that year were so great,” Filly says, admiring a green figure dancing on the wall. “I remember the girl who drew this one.” Like all of Filly’s students, those kids left after turning five. Filly doesn’t see herself leaving anytime soon. “As long as I’m healthy, I just wanna keep doing this,” she says.

“T

his is Mia,” Filly tells Kiyu on my first morning at Creating Kids. “Remember how I told you she was coming? To write a story about us?” A few minutes later, I scribble in my notebook: Occupations Week, Hairdresser day Filly had the kids pick what occupations Kiyu afro, Leo redhead, Leni & Hannah

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profile best friends, Charlie loner, Emily ballet, Tomi prehipster Kiyu tugs at my sleeve: “Aren’t you done with your story yet?” he says.

“Finish your story so you can play with me.”

Kiyu wants to play with blocks, which are stacked under the tank of Rocco the Turtle. Filly tells us Rocco’s story: he’s 14, the same age as Filly’s only child, Annie Zarra Aldrich. It’s easy for Filly to remember this because she was several months pregnant and bobbing in a canoe when her husband reached overboard and scooped Rocco out of a bale of turtles and into her coffee cup. I hold Kiyu over the tank and he pretends to be a canoe. Then Leo wants a turn, and the other kids run over, and everyone wants a turn, and then another turn, and another. After a while, I say that my arms are too tired to keep picking them up. They solve this problem by making it my turn to be picked up. Fourteen little hands push at my legs. “Be careful!” yells Kiyu as I topple over. “Don’t make Mia hit her head!” They all laugh and pile on top of me. “We can’t pick you up,” says Tomi.

“But we can make you fall down.”

Filly doesn’t like telling kids what to do, but “everyone gets a turn” is an inviolable principle. If someone isn’t getting a turn, she’ll ask questions until the kids figure out how to fix the situation. One of her students at Quinnipiac was a four-year-old named Robert who used a wheelchair. When the class went exploring in the campus forest, she asked the other students how they could make sure Robert got a turn to explore. They ran ahead, gathering smooth pieces of wood to place ramps on uneven sections of trail. Over the years, Filly tells me, she has learned that the best solutions to kid problems come from the kids themselves. You just have to ask.

Filly’s daughter spent the first five years of her life at Creating Kids, where her best friend was a blind girl called 32 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

Bree. Whenever Annie and Bree played hide-and-seek with their friends, the seeker would close her eyes and the hiders would make animal sounds.

Growling or hissing or mooing, the hiders would lead the seeker to unseen hiding places. Now animal sounds are one of Filly’s favorite teaching tools.

At the start of Nocturnal Animals Week, Filly records the kids imitating nocturnal animals — chirping like crickets, hooting like owls, croaking like frogs. That Thursday, the kids wear pajamas. Filly hangs up nocturnal animal pictures, turns off the lights, and hits the play button on the boom box.

Flashlights in hand, the kids run wild.

Crisscrossing beams of light reveal the creature-covered walls in fleeting flashes; as Filly turns the volume up, gasps and shrieks and giggles blend into the tape of chirps and hoots and croaks; the kids are as delighted by the reverberations of their recorded voices as by the glossy pictures of googly-eyed critters. This delight is familiar to Filly — it takes her back to the seventies, when she would record Nicky singing along to disco songs on the radio in spite of her mother’s protests that a little boy shouldn’t sing about shaking his booty. “I used to tape him,” Filly tells me. “And he would listen to himself.” I can almost hear the cassette tape reels spooling and unspooling a young boy’s voice around him, bouncing campy lyrics off the newly-painted walls of a Cheshire farmhouse, turning in small, steady circles.

Bree is fifteen now; when she visited a few lunchtimes ago, Filly got up from the round table to hug her. She pointed out the place where Bree used to sit (where Kiyu was sitting), and told the kids that Bree is in high school now, a track star and cheerleader. After Bree left, Filly ran her fingers over the translucent adhesive strip of Braille dots on the page of the book she was reading aloud. She asked the kids if they remembered what Braille was, and explained how, even though Bree can’t see with her eyes, she can read with her fingers, and play hide-

and-seek with her ears.

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he day is almost over, and Charlie is making something out of wooden blocks. I ask him what it is. He says, “A machine.” I ask him if I can take a picture of it. He says, “No.” I ask him why. He says, “It’s not really a machine, it’s a statue of a machine.”

My camera, a heavy DSLR with a gaping lens, is a real machine; all the kids, even Charlie, want a turn taking pictures. I have a twinge of anxiety about letting four-year-olds use a $600 camera, but it vanishes quickly. They are intent and unsmiling, so absorbed in the task of pressing the shutter button, so aware of the fragility of the camera that they don’t press hard enough until I place my finger over theirs.

Later, Filly tells me how much they loved it, and that the first thing they told their parents at pick-up time was how they got to take pictures with Mia’s real camera. That night, as I scroll through the crooked photos of elbows and toy ponies and patches of carpet, I imagine the untaken photograph of Charlie’s statue buried in a closet, slipped into the curling pages of his nautical blue book.

Like the best of Filly’s work, it will remain uncollected, all evidence of it lost and saved somewhere on Charlie’s journeys between reality and pretend.

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four-year-old has been alive for 35,063 to 43,829 hours. Nine hours are about .022816% of a four-year-old’s life. In a 21-year-old’s life, .022816% is 43 hours. In a 50-year-old’s life, .022816% is 101 hours.

At Creating Kids, a daycare day is nine hours long. For Charlie, Emily, Hannah, Kiyu, Leni, Leo, and Tomi, these hours are different from how they are for Filly and me. As the percentage of my life spent at Creating Kids nears .022816% — 43 hours, accumulated in one to five hour increments over the past several weeks — the days I spend other places have started feeling shorter.

Daycare hours always feel long — there is something contagious about

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how we experience time, and nine hours are almost .21% of the six months that Ava, the youngest child at Creating Kids, has been alive — but when my shift ends at one, and Kiyu hugs my leg and won’t let go until I promise to stay until he falls asleep, an even longer kind of time starts. From all the nights I’ve waited for myself to fall asleep, I know that this is a kind of time that might not have an end. I sit next to Kiyu’s cot in the dark, and look over at Filly, who is slowly weaving between the rows of almost-sleeping children. I rub Kiyu’s back in small, steady circles. I think about Nicky and listen for the rhythm of sleep in Kiyu’s asthmatic breath. “Don’t leave until I fall asleep,” he whispers again. “You promise?” I promise.

The next fifteen minutes feel longer than any night, as long as a lifetime of promises I might now trust myself to make, promises of lifetimes that will be made to strange little people I have yet to meet. As I stumble out of the room of sleeping children, the nerves of my left foot numbed by my uncertain attempt

at holding a perfect motherly pose, Kiyu sits up and waves me back. “I was just pretending to be asleep,” he whispers.

“I didn’t even try to fall asleep for real because I wanted to say bye to you.”

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ostscript, 17 December 2012 A few hours before my flight home, I unbuild stacks of borrowed books until my apartment’s wide white windowsills are empty, cleared of all the things I meant to learn. At Sterling Library, I drop book after book through the return slot until there’s one left, a red volume with gold lettering: A Theory and Practice of Radical Intentional Child Care. The bag is so light now that I keep checking to make sure that it isn’t empty. When I get to Creating Kids, I punch in the four-digit door code. It doesn’t work. My wrist shakes. But it was just one crazy guy and he’s dead, I think. Three days have passed since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Why would they change the code? Trying once more, I press harder, and it flashes green. I find

Sandy in her office. “Just returning this,” I say, handing her the book.

In Filly’s classroom, Kiyu grabs my hands and starts bouncing. “Are you trying to be as tall as me?” I ask him.

“You’ll have to jump higher.” I put my empty book bag down, and lift him up.

“Someday you’ll be this tall, ” I say. Then Leo wants to know how tall he will be, and then everyone does.

I think of the twenty kids from Newtown who will never be this tall.

“You’ll be this tall,” I say over and over as I raise them to the unlikely heights of NBA players. “You’ll be this tall,” I say to Tomi as I lift her up until her mop of dark curls is at my nose, about as tall as she will probably be. Her face falls.

“Oh wait,” I say. “That’s not right.” I tilt my head as if I’m listening for the voice that tells me how tall people will be, squinting up at the fake plastic wisteria vines draped around the glow-in-thedark stars, at the real bundles of basil, sage, and thyme tied over the doorway.

I lift her up, as high as my arms can go, higher.

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LOOKING FOR An African Studies graduate student investigates the program’s decline and Yale’s new focus on Africa.

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BY SCOTT ROSS opening photo by Henry Ehrenberg inside photos by Kathryn Crandall illustration by Annelisa Leinbach

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y welcome to Yale was quieter than I expected. On orientation day in August 2012, I took my seat among the seven other first-year African Studies Master’s students in a small classroom on the first floor of Luce Hall. We could hear chatter and laughter coming from other department meetings upstairs, but the atmosphere in our room was subdued. We introduced ourselves and waited for the meeting to begin. The eight of us came from all over — the West Coast, the East Coast, China, Ethiopia — but we had all come to Yale for the same reason: to learn about Africa.

I had just graduated from Arizona State University, where I’d fallen in love with Africa after getting involved with campus advocacy efforts to raise awareness about the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group in Uganda and Congo. I’d fundraised to rebuild schools in the region, met with elected officials to discuss U.S. involvement, and devoted hours and hours to learning about the conflict.

After graduating, I was ready to deepen my understanding of the region. I couldn’t wait to study under Yale’s Africanist scholars, whose names had grown familiar to me after four years of work on Africa: people like political scientist Christopher Blattman, who studied war-affected youth in Uganda and whose blog I kept

bookmarked, and anthropologist Mike McGovern, the director of the African Studies Master’s of Arts (M.A.) program, who specialized in some of my own interests — insurgency, violence, and the state.

But on orientation day, my fellow students and I — the biggest cohort of African Studies graduate students since 2004 — learned that over the summer, McGovern had left for a job at the University of Michigan. Blattman and another political scientist who worked on Africa, Ato Onoma, had also left Yale.

At the end of the day the eight of us trickled out the glass doors, murmuring about the changes in the department and our excitement about the journey we were embarking on. There was so much to plan — what courses to take, how to begin my research — that I wasn’t too worried about a few faculty members leaving. At the time, I didn’t know I should be.

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nn Biersteker was the next to go.

Biersteker, a linguistics professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the African Studies major, left last spring after over 25 years at Yale. (I would later learn that her contract had not been renewed.) Rumors of other imminent departures flew. Kamari Clarke, a tenured anthropologist I’d spoken to before coming to Yale, had already stepped

cover down as Chair of the Council on African Studies by the time I arrived, citing the University’s neglect of the program. This fall, Clarke moved to the University of Pennsylvania.

The Council on African Studies is part of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. It houses the undergraduate major and the M.A. program, as well as the Program on African Languages. Since it is a council and not a full department, it does not hire its own faculty. Professors from other departments who study Africa choose to affiliate themselves with the Council.

The hiring of Africanists is determined entirely by other departments, based on need and interest in the field.

The Council’s lack of influence in hiring decisions is part of the reason why, when the two Africanist political scientists and the two anthropologists left Yale, they were replaced by only one junior faculty member in each department. But while the Political Science and Anthropology departments were responsible for the decisions not to fill the two other positions, the losses were a hard hit for the Council on African Studies. “There is a net loss of two people,” said McGovern in a recent conversation about changes to the Council. “And the level of staffing for courses and intellectual community around African subjects at Yale was already far too low.

It became a lunchtime routine for African Studies majors and M.A. students to commiserate about sparse course selections and the lack of potential thesis advisors. We wondered what was making so many Africanists leave Yale.

While every university experiences a natural ebb and flow of faculty, it seemed like more than pure coincidence that all of the professors involved in administering the Council — the heart of African Studies at Yale — were among the five who had left.

McGovern declined to comment on his personal reasons for leaving Yale, as did the other professors I contacted in my search for answers about African Studies. But all of them were eager to 36 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

talk about Yale’s relationship with Africa.

From their comments, a trend began to emerge.

“I think the University treated African Studies and Africanist scholarship abysmally,” Biersteker told me. She pointed to recent firings and downsizing in the Council, like the elimination of an associate director position and the termination of two African languages.

Much of the downsizing was triggered by drastic cuts in federal funding during the recession, but Biersteker thought the University could have done more to make up for the loss in federal funds.

Clarke, the anthropologist who left this fall, told me that during her four years as Chair of the Council, she had tried to direct resources towards Africanist scholarship, but found that financial support was hard to come by.

She said that the Yale administration was supportive of her ideas but was ultimately unwilling to commit to hiring more faculty or creating a larger role for African Studies at Yale. “The economic recession contributed to the dismally low administrative support for rebuilding African Studies,” she said in an email.

Meanwhile, the continent of Africa was becoming a site of growing industry, innovative technology, diverse and vibrant arts, and increasing importance on the global stage — all of which demanded the attention of the University. It worried me to see the most active members of Yale’s Africanist community leaving for greener pastures.

African Studies was declining — and rapidly.

O

n September 24, 2013, I got an email from Helinna Ayalew GRD ’14, a fellow African Studies M.A. student. “Did anyone go to this?” the subject line read. The email, which Ayalew sent to me and other students in our program, contained a link to an event she had just seen on Facebook: “Appealing to Africa: Revealing Yale’s New Africa Initiative.” It had ended two hours earlier.

We later found out that the event was a lunch conversation between Ian

Shapiro, director of the MacMillan Center, and students from a new South Africa-focused undergraduate organization called With Love from the World. Shapiro had contacted the students for feedback on a new Yale campaign focusing on Africa. He wanted their help in identifying ways to recruit more African students to Yale.

But none of the students in the African Studies program had been notified about the lunch. “I remember reading it and being very confused,” Ayalew recalls.

“I didn’t understand why no one had told us, and why it was the first time I had heard about the Africa Initiative.”

When I asked Shapiro about the event later, hoping for more information about Yale’s new focus on Africa, he seemed surprised that I’d even heard about it.

At this point, I had been speaking with professors and fellow students for a year about Yale’s declining African Studies program. But for some reason, I found myself totally in the dark about this socalled “Africa Initiative.”

Two weeks later, on Oct. 8, Linda Lorimer LAW ’77, Yale’s Vice President of Global and Strategic Initiatives, held a town hall meeting with African students to talk about the University’s new focus on Africa. About 30 undergraduate and graduate students from 13 different countries filled the room, in the Office of International Students and Scholars (OISS). African Studies major Akinyi Ochieng ’15 and I sat in the front — determined not to miss another meeting about Africa. We were the only two in attendance who hadn’t been invited.

This meeting had not been advertised to African Studies students, either.

Lorimer explained the goals for the Africa Initiative: more courses, more visitors to speak and teach, more conferences, more alumni networks, and, most importantly, more students from Africa. She spent most of the time talking about this last topic. But afterwards, as Lorimer fielded questions, students in the audience voiced other concerns: there aren’t enough professors; there aren’t enough classes; there aren’t enough languages. What

cover would the Africa Initiative do to address these issues?

I shared these concerns. But after a year of frustrating conversations about African Studies at Yale, my classmates and I were hopeful about the new initiative. The University finally seemed to be taking action on Africa.

Still, something bugged me about these early meetings. Noticeably missing from the conversation were students who study Africa — students in the Council on African Studies have yet to be approached by those planning the Africa Initiative. I wanted to find out why. I wanted a full picture of what the “Africa Initiative” was, and how it would affect African Studies at Yale.

So, with one year left in a program that had lost five valuable professors in less than two years, I set out to learn about what, exactly, Yale was doing to focus on Africa.

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arly responses to the Africa Initiative were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Just four days after Lorimer’s town hall meeting, Liberian alumnus Ethelbert Cooper ’74 donated $1 million to Yale to provide scholarships for African students. In the weeks that followed the conversations with Shapiro and Lorimer, several students started to plan a program to help African students prepare for higher education in the U.S. “The primary goal of the program will be to encourage driven African high school students … to consider applying to U.S. colleges,” said Nicola Soekoe ’16 in an email. Soekoe, who is from South Africa, is a founder of the new program and a member of With Love from the World.

Yale could certainly benefit from a recruitment drive in Africa. According to OISS, in 2012 there were 97 enrolled undergraduate and graduate students from Africa, while 1154 came from Asia, 515 from Europe, and 130 from Latin America. African students make up just 4 percent of international students, while East Asia alone comprises 32 percent.

But recruiting more students from Africa does little to address concerns

about the future of Yale’s African Studies program. What about class offerings, faculty positions, and the availability of African languages?

With these issues in mind, I was intrigued to hear about a series of meetings that had taken place last spring between President Peter Salovey, Provost Ben Polak, Shapiro, and Chris Udry, the current Chair of the Council on African Studies. The result of these meetings became widely known in Salovey’s Oct. 13 inaugural address: “This is the moment to bring scholarship and teaching about Africa at Yale into sharper focus,” Salovey said to the crowd gathered in Woolsey Hall. “We can foster new directions in research on Africa, identify new partnerships with those on the continent, and strengthen our recruitment efforts, all while emphasizing teaching and learning,” Salovey said.

It appeared that change was quietly taking place in Yale’s ties to Africa. The next time I met with Shapiro, on Nov. 12, I learned that he had just returned from a trip to Ethiopia with a group of Yale professors. They had been promoting the beginnings of what he said was officially called the “Yale Africa Project.”

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he Yale Africa Project, Shapiro explained, was the term Yale was now using to refer to what had previously called the “Africa Initiative.”

From what I had learned thus far, recruiting seemed to be the most visible part of Yale’s new focus on Africa. I was assured by several administrators that the initiative included other aspects, too, but the details about these components were vague. I wasn’t satisfied, so I decided to continue my search to understand Yale’s plans for Africa by returning to the relationship’s beginnings.

Yale’s link to Africa is nearly as old as the University itself. In the 18th century, African language classes were offered to Divinity School students to prepare them for work as missionaries. More recently, during the Cold War, the government funded language and area studies to help inform U.S. foreign policy.

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African Studies students say that knowing the local language leads to better research. Kevin Winn GRD ’14 found that speaking Swahili when he was in Tanzania helped him gain the trust of the people in his village. During my own research in the Congo this summer, while halfway through a twoday bus ride on a muddy jungle road, I found that Swahili was the only way to make sense of where I was and figure out how to make a phone call.

Africa has more than 2000 languages; there are hundreds spoken in Nigeria alone. The University of Florida offers seven African languages, and the University of Pennsylvania offers 12.

At Yale, students can choose from four African languages for credit: Swahili, Yoruba, Zulu, and Arabic. Igbo, a language spoken in Nigeria, used to be offered but was recently cancelled due to budgetary constraints. Plans to teach Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia, were also abandoned.

When Ifeanyi Awachie ’14 heard that Igbo was cancelled after she had completed one year, she tried multiple times to study it through the Directed Independent Language Study (DILS) program, but was repeatedly denied, for budget reasons.

Further doubt was cast on Yale’s commitment to African language instruction when, without explanation,

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some senior lecturers in African languages had their contracts reduced from five-year-contracts to three-year contracts. Biersteker, who taught Swahili for over 25 years, wasn’t offered a contract at all, and there aren’t plans to replace her.

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his is a really exciting time to be an Africanist,” says Chris Udry, the current chair of the Council on African Studies. While he’s known on campus for his wardrobe of colorful African prints, today he sits in the sparsely decorated African Studies faculty office dressed in a plain gray shirt.

His excitement about the Africa Project makes up for the bare surroundings.

Udry is excited about a future faculty position that will develop new ways to teach African languages. But, Udry clarified, the position is only a parttime teaching position, concentrating on development of language pedagogy more than teaching itself.

The more I learn about African languages at Yale, the more I hear about budgets. That’s because language acquisition is central to how Yale funds African Studies (and how colleges fund area studies in general). Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965 was drafted to strengthen “uncommonly taught languages” by funding universities that taught them. The federal government deemed these universities “National Resource Centers” for language instruction (NRCs) and provided Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships to students. More than half of Yale’s current M.A. students, including myself, are receiving money from FLAS. The current Title VI grant ends soon.

But Udry’s not sure whether Yale will win another award next year, or if the 38 | Vol. XLI, No. 3 | December 2013

Council will even apply. He explains that Yale’s small Africanist faculty, along with its lack of teacher training and community outreach services, may hurt the University’s chances for funding. If Yale loses FLAS fellowships for African Studies students, the Council will have to find new ways to attract applicants who may be turned away by Yale’s high costs.

The Africa Project seeks to recruit more African students to Yale, but soon there may not be funding for students interested in studying Africa. Udry said that he and Shapiro have talked about seeking funding for African Studies graduate students, but nothing is currently planned.

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fter so many meetings with administrators, I had begun to lose track of what was happening to African Studies students. Five professors had left in less than two years. I saw the effects of the faculty shortage all around me in my classmates’ struggles.

“This year, especially, I feel as if Yale has let me down for my major,” says African Studies major Annie Mullen ’15. She wants to work in development, but the course listings often limit her to political science classes that focus on conflict or corruption. She often has to petition for other classes to be counted toward her major.

“The lack of courses has been crippling,” says Helinna Ayalew, the M.A. student who sent the email about Shapiro’s lunch. Born in the U.S. to Ethiopian immigrants, Ayalew and her family moved back to Ethiopia when she was ten years old. After college, she worked in international institutions in Ethiopia’s capital city. She came to Yale “to read solely about Africa for two years” before going to law school. Ayalew’s thesis examines why certain groups choose to rebel against the state while others don’t. McGovern, the professor who moved to Michigan, has worked on two books related to Ayalew’s research — but he is no longer at Yale.

Without the guidance of Africanist professors, graduate students can only receive help on the theoretical aspects

of their research. They often forego indepth analysis within an African context.

“Many of us are forced to work very independently,” Denise Lim GRD ’14 said. “You just hope to survive.”

In his inaugural address, President Salovey said that Yale would move forward with Africa “while emphasizing teaching and learning.” But Christopher Miller, who teaches Francophone African literature, says that, without faculty rebuilding, “I do not see how this initiative can improve our current curriculum on Africa.” Miller says that improving African Studies should be the center of any new efforts.

New visiting professorships will likely be part of the Africa Project, but these positions are in no way equal to tenuretrack positions, which McGovern calls “the gold standard of a university’s new or renewed commitment to a field of study.” He cautions that creating nontenure-track positions should not be interpreted as true support from the University.

Udry explained that part of his job as Chair of the Council is to encourage other departments to focus on Africa. But when asked if new hiring would happen soon, Udry responded: “That is one thing that is not part of this initiative.”

I

n informal meetings about the Africa Project, both Shapiro and Lorimer referred to Yale’s India Initiative as their model. In November 2008, at a gathering in New Delhi, former President Richard Levin unveiled a new campaign before a gathering of India’s leaders. “Yale’s India Initiative will create new faculty positions and new curriculum across the arts and sciences,” he announced. He added, “Yale has committed $30 million of its own unrestricted endowment resources to this enterprise.” Yale’s South Asian Studies major had only been created one year earlier.

By 2012, the India Initiative had established four chairs; hired a dozen new faculty members; started initiatives like the Himalaya Initiative; created research partnerships in India; and provided leadership training for India’s

cover government, business, education, and nonprofit sectors. The Initiative also created the largest program of visiting faculty and post-doctoral fellows in South Asian Studies in the country. If this was a model for the Africa Project, it seemed like a successful one. But there were key differences between the two initiatives.

When the India Initiative first kicked off, George Joseph, then-assistant secretary for international affairs, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the recession wouldn’t affect Yale’s plans. “Although there is a crisis going on, we’re not going to shift away from our institutional priorities,” he said.But in conversations about African Studies, the recession looms, cited as the source of cuts. When I ask Shapiro about the funding for the Africa Project, he tells me that it will come from donors and foundations — the University won’t be contributing anything from its endowment. It’s hard to ignore the wide gap between what the India Initiative included and what the Africa Project seems to prioritize.

A

t universities across the country, area studies programs are fading.

Last year, the federal government cut 43.6 percent of funding to all NRCs, marking the end of Igbo and Amharic at Yale. The cut was only the most recent in a chain of farewells: in 2010, each area studies council at Yale lost its outreach coordinator, the staff member responsible for community outreach and assistance to students and professors.

The cultural understanding that comes from area studies can’t be replicated by simply studying a discipline like political science or history. Moreover, studying a region lets students in the field see the limits of their disciplines. Laura Seay GRD ’00, a political scientist and alumna of the African Studies program, studies development interventions in Africa. “As a political scientist, I conduct surveys, run regressions, and attempt to determine causality,” Seay said, “but because I was an Africanist before I became a political scientist, I have also developed a research specialty in figuring out why interventions

sometimes don’t work.”

Seay recently finished a project to determine why Nigerian pregnant women weren’t going to health clinics.

Her team found that transportation costs, cultural norms, and a curse by a traditional medical practitioner were all deterrents. To figure this out, she used a method she learned not from her political science Ph.D. program, but from her two years at Yale.

As the Africa Project continues to unfold, I’ll be anxiously awaiting each step of the process. I’m applying to Ph.D. programs in anthropology now, with plans to focus on Africa. As I work on applications, my friends ask me whether or not I’ll apply to Yale.

I like what I’ve been able to do here, I tell them; I just wish I could do more.

I’ve learned a lot in my classes; I just wish they fit my interests better. I’ve had great experiences with my professors; I just wish there were more of them.

Maybe the Africa Project will be able to make these things happen. But I don’t know for sure. As far as I can tell, no one does.

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