Emory University Since 1836 Atlanta, Georgia USA

in the worldFall 2007

Cartoons have the power to capture the imagination and call attention to important problems. Following the October visit of His Holiness the Dalai Lama to Emory University as Presidential Distinguished Professor, “Cartooning for Peace”

comes to Emory in November. Emory hosts cartoonists from around the world on campus the week of Nov. 11, 2007, with an extended exhibition of cartoons at the Schatten Gallery (see back page for details).

As we go to press, Emory’s Institute for Developing Nations (IDN) holds its first international conference, “Research Partner-ships and Collaborations for Development: Strengthening Structures of Reciprocity and Responsibility” in Cape Town, South Africa, where Provost Earl Lewis also hosts this year’s Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) advisory board meeting. Inside, you can read more about one student’s experience doing journalism in this remarkable country.

Every year, about 40 percent of Emory undergraduates participate in nearly 100 semester or summer study abroad programs worldwide through Emory College. Study abroad took a more concentrated form with The Halle Institute’s first student study trip to Brussels for five intensive days last spring to see the various components of the European Union at work, as part of a senior seminar. Ana Bedayo reports some of the trip’s highlights. Inside this issue, you’ll also learn more about the research and teaching that members of Emory’s distinguished faculty are doing in England, Israel, and Indonesia. There’s also news from The Halle Institute’s recent faculty study trip to Germany and the fascinating work of the trip’s co-sponsor Atlantik-Brücke in post-Katrina New Orleans.

This issue’s cover story is about a group of Emory faculty, administrators, and staff who traveled on a fact-finding trip to Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank. Sponsored by the Dean of the Chapel and Religious Life, the trip has already generated lively discussions on campus with scholars and humanitarians visiting Emory throughout the year.

Holli A. Semetko Vice Provost for International Affairs Director, Office of International Affairs & The Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning Professor of Political Science

Oct. 13-Nov. 25, 2007 Buddha in Paradise: A Celebration in Himalayan Art at the Carlos Museum

Nov. 2, 2007Violinist Midori performs at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts.

Nov. 11-16, 2007Emory hosts “Cartooning for Peace” with a public exhibition of cartoons at the Schatten Gallery Oct. 27-Dec. 15, 2007.

Feb. 10-12, 2008Conference on “Virtual Worlds, Virtual Institutions, and Virtual Economies”

March 3-5, 2008Conference on “The Wrathful God: Religious Extremism in Comparative Perspective”

March 17-22, 2008Tibet Week

March 30, 2008Shashi Tharoor delivers the 2008 Sheth Lecture in Indian Studies.

Spring 2008Halle Distinguished Fellow Marta Lagos, executive director of Latinbarómetro Corporation, co-sponsored by Emory’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program

UPCOMING EVENTS

Top, from left to right: Dean Susan Henry-Crowe in Jerusalem on the Journeys trip to the Middle East; Holli Semetko (center) with The Halle Institute Student Study Trip group in Brussels; Germany Study Trip participant Marcia Holstad (left) and trip leader Dean Tom Lancaster (right) during a visit to a winery in the Rheingau region.

2 Uncovering the Face of GermanyA faculty study trip reveals a nation in motion.

6 Building Chapters of Literary HistoryA conversation with MARBL Director Steve Enniss reveals why Salman Rushdie chose Emory to house his archives, and more.

8 A Hundred Visions and RevisionsA professor’s journey to uncover the works of T.S. Eliot.

10 Views of InequalityA journalism student shares her experience in South Africa.

12 Building Healthy CommunitiesEmory Global Health Institute hosts first Community Partners Leadership Fellow.

14 A Journey to the Middle EastProvost Earl Lewis and Dean of the Chapel Susan Henry-Crowe reflect on a group trip to Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank.

18 Studying Brazil in IsraelDirector of the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies Jeffrey Lesser on his Fulbright in Israel.

20 Tools for HealingEmory and MedShare work together to provide medical supplies around the globe.

22 Halle Institute Launches First Student Study TripSeven students explore the workings of the EU.

24 Sounds in the ShadowsThe works by a Javanese author and political dissident inspire composer and music professor Steve Everett.

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in the worldEmory University Since 1836 Atlanta, Georgia USA

Office of International Affairs | Box 52, Administration Building, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322 Tel: 404.727.7504 Fax: 404.727.2772 | www.oia.emory.edu

Editorial Board: Holli Semetko, Mari Frith, Alma Freeman, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Amreen Ukani, Julie Darby, Bentley Brown, Rafal Raciborski. Designer: Saba Sungar, blendedimage.com | Cover: Jars of colored sand in Petra, Jordan, brighten the way on a trek to the site’s amphithe-atre. The 2007 Journeys group visited Petra on a recent trip to the region. Photo by Alma Freeman

By Alma Freeman

Over the course of two weeks in June, 13 Emory professors – non-experts in German-related issues and many

of whom traveling to Germany for the first time – visited Freiberg, Dresden, Hamburg, Meissen, Berlin, and Frankfurt on The Claus M. Halle Institute’s seventh Study Trip to Germany.

Representing a diverse range of fields from medi-cine to theology and the arts & sciences, partici-pants met with leaders in government, education, manufacturing, business, culture, and the media. The group’s diverse background, combined with an engaging schedule created by Atlantik-Brücke, guaranteed a broad range of questions and discussions throughout the trip.

REMEMBERING THE PAST, MOVING TOWARDS THE FUTURE

Beginning the trip in former East Germany, our group quickly gained an awareness of a collective energy to revitalize an area struggling to recover from an oppressive history. On our first day, we drove to the town of Hellerau near Dresden. The bus pulled into a gravel side road and parked in front of an ominous building of exposed brick and stucco. Founded by local furniture designer Karl Schmidt, the building was considered the home of indigenous avant-garde art from 1911 to 1914, but was converted into a police station during the German Democratic Republic (GDR) era. The site reopened last year as the European Cen-tre of Arts with its first dance show. An interesting choice was made to leave a few of the propagandistic Soviet police paintings that covered the walls before unification – a delib-erate choice to preserve the memory of the era. Although the Centre seemed to still be settling into itself, it was ap-parent how much the community supported its attempts to become an international destination.

That evening we drove to Dresden for dinner at a restaurant situated along the Elbe River. Although the group was feeling tired by now, we were all delighted to be sitting with a view

of the river to one side and the Semper Opera House and museum square to the other. It was drizzling most of the day, and the cobblestones outside were slick and shiny. Realizing it was the season for white asparagus, most of us ordered the national delicacy – it seemed a sin not to indulge. Around the time our desserts arrived, opera-goers started pouring out of the hall into the square and slowly disappeared. After dinner, we took a small walk around. Many of us had read about the total destruction of Dresden during the fire bombings in the war and it was eerie to be surrounded by buildings recon-structed from burnt rubble.

The next day, we traveled to Ronnenburg to visit the site of the Wismut Exhibition, a historical presentation of Germany’s largest revitalization project and the location of this year’s National Garden Show. After the war, the Russians founded the Wismut Mining Company and from 1946 to 1952, proceeded to mine the land for uranium as fast as possible with no concern for environmental factors or the health of the workers. Land reclamation is now underway to contain the hazards of the entire area – a project that calls for the largest fleet of earthmovers in Europe. When completed, 30 million cubic meters of earth will have been relocated. After walking through a successfully refurbished area now home to a blanket of flowers and trees, we drove to the top of a closed mine still undergoing reclamation. From the bald, grey hill where we stood, we gazed over a landscape scarred from mining. It was a relief to walk back down through the bright gardens and to witness such effort invested into trans-

Uncovering the Face of Germany

The 2007 Halle Study Trip group stands inside an earth mover at the site of the Wismut Exhibition in Ronnenburg. The site served as one of the largest uranium mining sites in the world.

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forming a contaminated landscape with a bleak history into a bright garden of the future.

In Hamburg we met with Torsten-Jörn Klein, president and CEO of Gruner + Jahr International, Europe’s largest maga-zine publishing house. The company’s headquarters inhabit a modern gray building that stretches over an entire block along the harbor. Like many of the modern spaces we had visited, the building seemed a model of efficiency, sustain-ability, and spatial harmony. After the meeting, Klein invited the group to the building cafeteria – an airy room abuzz with staff chatting over lunch. Klein shared his experience growing up in former East Germany where he began his career at the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. He spoke proudly of the recent World Cup celebrations in Germany and of the rare sight of German flags hanging ubiquitously out of car and apartment windows. Klein, one of very few former East Germans serv-ing as president and CEO of a major West German company, explained that although he hated the communist system, “life in East Germany wasn’t that bad – as long as you weren’t clearly opposed to the government you could survive.” How-ever, one always felt like a second-class citizen, a feeling that still resonates for many East Germans today, he said. East Germans were conditioned to be less competitive and analyti-cal than their Western counterparts, which, in the journalism industry, means there are still fewer working journalists who come from the East. Klein expects this to change, however, and noted that although Hamburg is Germany’s second larg-est city, Berlin is emerging as the more cosmopolitan of the two cities. He expects that the publishing industry will soon move to Berlin.

GERMANY: AN IMMIGRATION COUNTRY?

Our first meeting in Berlin was with former Commissioner for Foreigners of the Senate of Berlin Barbara John, who shared her experience with immigration in Germany. “The main difference between Germany and the U.S.,” she argued, “is that Germany holds a stronger national identity which makes it difficult to accept people from other countries.”

“Our leadership needs to stress that Germany is not an im-migration country – the best leadership is one that doesn’t send mixed messages,” she said. She recognized that in order to remain a global competitor, Germany needs its immigrants – not so that it can present a multicultural face to the world – but rather so that it can meet labor market needs. As more qualified people move overseas, John explained, there is a growing fear among Germans that the country is steadily losing its most skilled workers.

Matthias Rößler, member of the State Parliament, Free State of Saxony, echoed this sentiment at a lunch meeting in Dresden. “Immigrants who come to Germany are not in-tegrated. … Integration of Hispanics in America is easier because they are Christian and their culture is more similar.” Although Saxony is often dubbed “Silicon Saxony” as the home of a major chip making facility, the unemployment rate hovers at 18 percent, while the widening dearth of skilled workers in the area remains a major challenge.

A visit to BildungsWerk, a vocational training center in the Turkish neighborhood of Kreuzberg, Berlin, provided a sharp P

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contrast to the experience so far: nearly 75 percent of the 750 students at the center are of foreign descent. Our group toured classrooms filled with students from all over the world, including Kosovo, Vietnam, Nigeria, Turkey, and Poland. We visited rooms in which students practiced floral arranging, mechanics, cookery, hairstyling, and sewing.

Özcan Mutlu, an elected member of the Berlin state-local parliament and the education spokesperson for Berlin’s Green party, met us for lunch at the center’s restaurant – a place that also serves as a training site for students inter-ested in the food service industry. He asserted that it is a refusal to accept Germany as an immigration country that has denied immigrants the opportunity to manage immigra-tion or promote successful integration. Mutlu gave up his Turkish citizenship in order to become a German citizen.

Currently there are 2.5 million Turks in Germany, the largest of the immigrant communities, who contribute 35 billion

Atlantik-Brücke Builds Bridges to New Orleans

Although Atlantik-Brücke may be best known in Germany

for its Young Leaders network and for its ongoing

support of a variety of study trips, the organization’s com-

mitment to strengthening transatlantic relations hardly

stops there.

This summer Atlantik-Brücke celebrated the opening

of the Atlantik-Brücke Community Resource Center at

the Lusher Charter School in New Orleans. The center

marks an important step towards the reconstruc-

tion of New Orleans after the devastation caused by

Hurricane Katrina and serves as a lasting reminder of

German-American friendship.

A total of $1.1 million in donations was raised by

Atlantik-Brücke, primarily in Germany, to support the

renovation and transformation of the Lusher Charter

School gymnasium facility into a community center.

The center now provides a place for children and young

people from the entire district to come together and

participate in a broad range of free-time activities.

The financing of the community center is the culmina-

tion of the German relief project “Bridge of Hope,”

established by Atlantik-Brücke’s Executive Vice-Chair

Beate Lindemann in the days after the hurricane. At

that time, Atlantik-Brücke assisted in the immediate

resettlement of about 50 families from New Orleans

to Bismarck, North Dakota, and in close cooperation

with community services, gave the displaced families

financial support where gaps in government aid existed.

Atlantik-Brücke was founded in 1952 as a private,

nonpartisan, and nonprofit organization aimed at

building bridges between postwar Germany and the

United States. Among its members are over 500 leading

figures from politics, business, the media, and academia

in Germany.

The group toured the old town of Meissen (above), home of the factory where Europe’s first porcelain was produced.

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euros per year to the nation’s economy. Although two thirds of the Turks in Germany have lived there for more than 25 years, many encounter great difficulty in obtaining work per-mits. According to Mutlu, one must have two years of legal residency before one can apply for a work permit and even then, he continued, a German is usually given first dibs on a job vacancy. As a result of such policies, many immigrants remain unemployed, despite their willingness to work.

PROMOTING TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS

The Berlin leg of the trip came to an end with a dinner spon-sored by Atlantik-Brücke that brought together Emory alum-ni and associates living in Germany, as well as special guest and Halle Distinguished Fellow Wolfgang Huber, Bishop of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg. Guest speaker Rudolf Adam, president of the Federal Academy for Security Studies, gave a historical perspective on the crisis in the Mid-dle East and offered possible scenarios for the future. In the discussion that followed, the Germans and Americans around

the table realized how differently the recent war in Lebanon was framed by the news media in the two countries.

In addition to an understanding of Germany that was deeply enriched through the trip, said trip participant Gerri Lamb, Wesley Woods Chair of Gerontological Nursing, were the relationships that formed with other travel partners and col-leagues over dinner, walking around a museum, or sitting on the bus. “I valued the opportunity to get to know faculty at my own university whose paths I probably would never have crossed,” she said.

To read more about the trip, as well as The Halle Institute’s relationship with Atlantik-Brücke, visit www.halleinstitute.emory.edu/sub-study.htm.a

Alma Freeman is the communications specialist for the Office of International Affairs.

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Top left: A guide presents photos of the Dresden Frauenkirche after it was destroyed in the bombing of the city during World War II. After an extensive reconstruction period, the church reopened in 2005. Right:The Hamburg headquarters of Europe’s largest magazine publishing house Gruner + Jahr. Bottom left: Participants review photos in the newsroom of Germany’s best-selling newspaper, BILD.

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By Alma Freeman

Building Chapters of Literary History

Since his arrival at Emory 15 years ago, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) Director Steve Enniss has helped to expand the library to

become one of the fastest-growing literary archives in the country. Over the last decade, Enniss oversaw such major acquisitions as the Danowski Poetry Library and the archives of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, of the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, and of the novelist Salman Rushdie. Enniss recently spoke to Emory in the World about the library’s growth, the challenges that it faces, how his career turned when he met Ted Hughes, and more.

How did you begin your career as a librarian?

I have always had a love of libraries and from a young age I was a habitual accumulator and collector of all kinds of curiosities and oddities. I received my master’s degree in li-brary science from Emory and while I was finishing my PhD in English from the University of Georgia, Head of Special Collections Linda Mathews invited me back for what was initially going to be a part-time position as a manuscript librarian. While my colleagues in graduate school were throwing themselves on the job market with horrific results, I had this invitation to come back to Emory – to a strong in-stitution with a lot of things happening – and to a position that combined my interest in libraries and literature.

What do you consider to be a turning point in your career?

The acquisition of the papers of the late Poet Laureate of Britain Ted Hughes (1930-1998) raised the library’s collec-tions to a new level of international stature and visibility. Hughes was one of the major poetic voices of his generation, a poet in that long line of laureates that included William Wordsworth and Alfred Tennyson. It was that acquisition

that led quite directly to the acquisition of the largest part of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney’s papers in 2004.

How did you meet Ted Hughes?

English Professor Ron Schuchard had been teaching Ted Hughes’ poetry for many years and Ron makes heavy use of primary materials in his classes. Through his persistence, the library had collected a few pieces over time. In 1996, I received a call from Hughes’ agent and at the time, he was offering a single manuscript of his poems and wanted an ex-travagant amount for it. It was at the end of the fiscal year and so I said something that at the time may have sounded flippant. I told the dealer that building an archive one manu-script at a time was a rather slow way of building a research collection and if he ever had anything more substantial to let me know. In fact, a year later he called again acting as the agent for the entire archive. I went over in 1996 and 1997 to see Hughes – he was still living at the time in the same thatched house that he and Sylvia Plath had picked out together in Devon. As he explained to me, “Devon was a hard place to get out of.”

The library earned worldwide media coverage when the acquisition of novelist Salman Rushdie’s archive was announced last fall. How do you think this has affected Emory’s perception internationally?

When Rushdie was asked “why Emory?” he replied, “because they asked.” Certainly there was more to it, but he is correct that Emory asked. There is an attitude of boldness here at Emory and a well-developed sense of possibilities. Collections like the Rushdie papers or those of Ted Hughes or those of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney have a way of leaving a mark on an institution. These collections are permanent additions to the intellectual landscape of the

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University and for generations to come students and scholars will travel from around the world to do research here that simply cannot be done anywhere else. It is no exaggeration to say that entire chapters of the literary history of our time will be written at Emory. As part of the Rushdie archives, we received several defunct computers that he had worked on throughout his career. We are currently exploring the hard drives and the early indications are that they will serve as an extraordinary record of Rushdie’s day-to-day work habits and communications. For example, we will have a trail of emails that convey what else Rushdie may have been do-ing during the day while he was writing a part of, say, The Satanic Verses or Midnight’s Children. Some people wring their hands and think that the days of archive manuscripts are over, but in fact it’s quite the opposite – the future is very bright for a rich archive of some of our best writers.

The Rushdie acquisition deviates from Emory’s pattern since 1988 of collecting poetry. In what ways does this fit into the University’s mission, and what impact will this have on future collections?

One will always be most successful building a research collection in alignment with the University’s ongoing and evolving story. The original impetus for the library’s literary collections was the appointment of Richard Ellmann, a re-nowned W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde scholar and Emory’s very first Woodruff Professor. The teachings of Ron Schuchard and his leadership as director of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature have served as a roadmap to the literary terrain documented by the Emory archive. Rushdie is certainly a feature of that landscape, and his papers also fit very nicely in the University’s commitment to internationalization. One of the most compelling issues of our day is this global conflict between East and West and no

one has had a more privileged vantage point of that conflict than Salman Rushdie. The acquisition of the Rushdie papers could well have the same liberating function for Emory’s re-search collections that his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children had for modern literature.

What have been some of the biggest challenges in collecting and building the library since you arrived in 1992?

The biggest challenge over the last decade, continuing to the present, remains the space that MARBL occupies. We are growing so fast that we need a larger space to properly display Emory’s most valuable and important research col-lections in a state-of-the-art facility capable of leveraging this University investment for maximum impact and value. a

Alma Freeman is the communications specialist for the Office of International Affairs.

Steve Enniss (center) visits with author Salman Rushdie (right) and Emory Professor Ronald Schuchard during a book signing at MARBL. Photo by University Photography

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By Rebekah Fitzsimmons

In 1987, Emory Professor Ronald Schuchard received this letter from the widow of Nobel Prize Laureate T.S. Eliot. Over the next six years, Schuchard worked on the Clark

Lectures that Eliot delivered at Trinity College in Cambridge and on the Turnbull Lectures Eliot gave at Johns Hopkins University. In 1993, Schuchard published The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, a collection of these previously unpub-lished lectures.

Schuchard, Goodrich C. White Professor of English at Emory, boasts a long and distinguished career as a professor and researcher. In addition to The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, he is co-editor with John Kelly of The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Vols. 3-5. Schuchard regularly rubs elbows with contemporary writers like Seamus Heaney and Salman Rushdie and was instrumental to the founda- tion of Emory’s Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, which will host Umberto Eco in 2008 as its 20th-anniversary speaker.

In 2005, Mrs. Eliot asked Schuchard to work on a project again involving her husband’s literary legacy: a complete collection of Eliot’s prose to be published by Faber and Faber and by Johns Hopkins University Press. “I would see [Mrs. Eliot] yearly from 1987 when I was working on all of this material,” said Schuchard. “We became friends and gradu-ally the trust and the friendship led to this project, which is the highlight of my academic career.”

Throughout his life Eliot remained a prolific writer, but many of his essays and addresses remain unpublished. “[Eliot] col-lected about 88 essays in several volumes, but we have over 700 prose items that are uncollected,” Schuchard explained. This project is significant not only for its size and scope, but also because the Eliot estate has maintained restricted access to this content since the poet’s death.

The collection, which Schuchard estimates will fill eight volumes of approximately 1,000 pages each, will be divid-ed into chronological sections that reflect periods in Eliot’s professional life. The first part, the major section of each volume, will contain the works that Eliot witnessed in print during his lifetime. The second section of each volume will contain unpublished works of great scholarly interest and value. “These volumes will offer many important essays and addresses that scholars and students will be very grateful to have,” said Schuchard.

In 2006, Schuchard was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which is designed to support from six to 12 months of study on a particular project. Schuchard spent the majority of his Guggenheim year engaged in a literary scavenger hunt, traveling to repositories of Eliot’s papers, including Harvard’s Houghton Library, Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the University of London, the University of Cambridge, King’s College London, and the University of Oxford, among others. Schuchard also spent a large amount of time at Eliot’s publishing house Faber and Faber and at the flat of Mrs. Eliot, going though her husband’s personal correspondence and files.

This year-long search resulted in the discovery of many works by Eliot that no one knew existed. Schuchard admitted that he had not anticipated finding so much new material. “I thought I would find mostly contextual material for all the essays that are in the bibliography,” he said, holding a well-worn copy of Eliot’s official bibliography published in 1969. “You can see all the hundreds of items that are here, 681 prose items in the bibliography alone. We will add 200 to that,” he continued.

Schuchard describes an instance in which he discovered a 1938

“Dear Professor Schuchard,

I remember that in 1975 you wrote me a

thoughtful letter after reading my husband’s

Clark Lectures, and I have always been in-

terested in what you have had to say about

his work over the years. ... I am now writing

to ask if you would like to edit the Clark

and Turnball Lectures. I do not know what

your present commitments are, apart from

the Yeats letters, but if you are willing and

able to undertake this task, I should like it

done as soon as conveniently possible.

Yours very sincerely, Valerie Eliot”

A Hundred Visions and Revisions:A Professor’s Journey to Uncover the Works of T.S. Eliot

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letter from a headmaster, thanking Eliot for the wonderful address that he had given. Schuchard searched online for the school in Cornwall and sent a copy of the letter to the pres-ent headmaster, inquiring “Would there be any record of T.S. Eliot coming to your school in 1938 and talking?” About a week later, the headmaster sent him a copy of the school’s magazine that had published Eliot’s lecture, never published anywhere else. “Instances like that – that happen through serendipity – by sending off a letter and with no expectation of anything, just trying it, an essay was recovered,” he said.

Now the work of organizing, editing, and annotating each piece will begin. While Schuchard recognizes that there may still be undiscovered pieces, he takes comfort in the knowledge that the paper version of the collection will not be the final word on the subject. “When the print edition has been out, it will be available online and it will be searchable,” Schuchard said. “The hunt for new pieces is still going on and will go on as other individuals find new things in nooks and crannies.”

A digital database of all of the pieces, created by the Woodruff Library’s Beck Center at Emory, will be made available to Schuchard’s co-editors immediately. He explains that a proj-ect of this size would have been difficult to complete before the advent of the digital age. “This project would have taken 20 years to complete 20 years ago. Now the project can prob-ably be done in five.”

For Schuchard, this year of research was full of joy and sur-prises. “I discovered aspects of his biography of which I had no notion. The sheer range of his generosity – he would give addresses to benefit church groups, a society called Cecil Houses to benefit destitute women in London, societies for the blind, and to raise money for turning books into Braille. He did all that! He was in the world and of the world and very much in demand.”

Like Eliot, Schuchard’s generosity extends well beyond the academic. Over the past five years, Schuchard has worked to set up an educational memorial to George Brumley, an Emory pediatrician who perished with his entire family in a plane crash in Kenya. Schuchard has brought Emory administrators,

staff, and students to Kenya to assist in refurbishing a school by donating recycled lab equipment, textbooks, and extra copies of encyclopedias. The IT department staff has assist-ed by installing surplus Emory computers, making the Meru school one of the few schools outside of Nairobi with Internet access. “For everyone who has been [to Kenya] it has been a life changing experience,” said Schuchard. “You can’t change Africa or the whole nation [of Kenya], but you can take an area and make a big difference.” a

Rebekah Fitzsimmons is a 2006 Emory College graduate and currently serves as the conferences coordinator for the Office of International Affairs.

Ron Schuchard sits in T.S. Eliot’s corner chair in the East Coker pub in Somerset, England, where Eliot wrote one of the Four Quartets.

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“Leave any bags or wallets you have at the office, get out if they catch your American accent, and try not to get yourself killed,” weren’t instruc-

tions I’d ever been given in any journalism class at Emory before, and certainly wasn’t what I was expecting to hear on the first day of a summer journalism internship at a dai-ly newspaper in Cape Town, South Africa. Said with a wry smile that revealed she was only half-kidding, the news editor of the Cape Times sent one of our intern colleagues to cover an anti-drug rally and gave us our first informal introduc-tion to covering the news in Cape Town. Although I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, this wasn’t at all how I pictured our introduction to the newsroom. Like most Americans who have never visited Africa before, my perceptions had been shaped mostly from PBS documentaries, some summer reading novels, and the Angelina Jolie adoption trail. However, this was about to change.

This summer kicked off a pilot collaboration of the nine-year- old Interdisciplinary Internship in South Africa program and Global Health initiative. Twenty students, the largest in the program’s history, participated in the trip from June 16 to July 22.

The Emory Journalism Program has been taking students to Cape Town for month-long internships since 1998. The

interdisciplinary internship program allows students to choose between interning in the news media or working for non-governmental organizations, schools, or commu-nity centers. Global health students attended a course on South African health issues, taught by Peter Brown, a medi-cal anthropologist, and tutored students at Cape Town community centers.

As journalism interns, we had the opportunity to cover local news in Cape Town – from video game releases to tuberculosis outbreaks. Our identities quickly betrayed by our American accents, we were handed off to public relations people eager to get us off the phone. Albeit humbling, the experience revealed how news priorities are handled in a foreign newsroom and offered a glimpse into the infrastructure of South African politics. With a circulation targeted towards the white South African population, the Cape Times newsroom was com-posed nearly entirely of white reporters and editors. While here, we were given almost complete freedom with what we wanted to write if we had a convincing pitch – an enticing opportunity for most journalism interns.

Although the internship consumed much of our time, we were given ample opportunities to explore on our own and discover the beauty of Cape Town. After a few days, I found that the sharp contrast here between the city’s overwhelming

Views of InequalityBy Emily Millen

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physical beauty and its disparate social situation made the expe-rience even more poignant. As we found out, stories of triumph over adversity in Africa are about as ubiquitous as postcards of Table Mountain. The most striking moment for me was with a black cab driver named Henry. After fleeing the violence in Rwanda nearly 12 years ago, Henry came to Cape Town looking to start over in the newly desegregated South Africa. However, as a result of the increasing crime rates and de facto segregation that has gripped many parts of the city in the post-apartheid era, Henry wanted to move again. “If you ask anyone in the town-ships, they will tell you that they still wish there was apartheid,” he argued. “When there was apartheid it was safe. Most people want to trade freedom for safety.” In a country only 13 years removed from apartheid, it was a sobering reminder of the many challenges that the nation still faces.

On one planned weekend excursion, our group spent a night at a home-stay in Khayelitsha – a township in the Cape Flats. As the pre-apartheid Group Areas Act restricted most black and colored citizens from living inside the city of Cape Town, Khayelitsha was established in 1985 to house an expanding population. After apartheid ended in 1994, the townships began offering township tours – mainly to white, affluent European tourists in a program format that felt a bit like “poverty in a fishbowl” for citizens of the first world. We were a little ap-prehensive about staying overnight in a township that so closely resembled the scenes of poverty and crime we had seen on the PBS documentaries. After spending the morning living out the postcard scenes from Cape Town on a hike up Table Mountain, our group filed off the commuter van, decked out in North Face fleeces with L.L. Bean duffel bags. Fortunately, our apprehen-sions were quickly alleviated with a serenade of “molos” and “welcomes” from our host families.

My host was a single mother with an 18-month-old son and a 7-year-old nephew that she took care of in her two-bedroom flat. She spoke about what it was like working as a teacher in the township, how her neighbors were as good as family, and how one of the American students she hosted liked to spend late nights drinking at the shebeens in the neighborhood. Her nephew filled in for man-of-the-house. He cooked, cleaned, and babysat for hours while his aunt was at work. As I watched in amazement as the child performed household tasks that some of my friends back at Emory struggle with, I recalled the child I babysat last summer who wasn’t allowed to be at the playground unsuper-vised or had to be pleaded with to adhere to a bedtime. While we plodded through conversations that were sometimes hindered by language and cultural barriers, my host continued to smile as we spoke, reassuring me that I belonged.

When I got back to the United States, I started thinking about what it means to be an American and an Emory student. We’re lucky – lucky to visit places as beautiful as Cape Town, lucky to grow up in a country with such a high standard of living, and lucky to have glimpsed the reality of life in Africa. For myself, and the other students that were on the program, Africa is more than just a celebrity charity case or the Gap’s PRODUCT (RED). It’s a scarred country that’s still finding its identity, and a country that we were lucky to experience.a

Emily Millen is a junior from West Virginia majoring in journalism and political science.

Top: Journalism interns Robin Chanin (left) and Jean Tinkham. Center: A group of journalism and global health students spent a month on an interdisciplinary internship program in Cape Town, South Africa. Bottom: A blanket of clouds envelopes Cape Town’s Table Mountain. Photo by Tanya Turan

EMORY in the world 11EMORY in the world 11

In spring 2007, Benjamin Chigozie Mbakwem spent three months on the Emory campus as the first Com-munity Partners Leadership (CPL) Fellow at the Rol-

lins School of Public Health (RSPH). Emory and Atlanta were a far cry from the 37-year-old’s native Imo State in southeastern Nigeria. However, Emory proved to be an ideal place to learn new skills and impart knowledge he has ac-cumulated during his 15 years of experience in public health and development work in his home country.

Mbakwem is the founder and program director of Community & Youth Development Initiatives (CYDI), a non-governmental organization (NGO) focused on providing comprehensive HIV-prevention and support services to communities in Nigeria. The third child of an Oxford-and Cambridge-trained physician father and a successful busi-ness and community leader mother, Mbakwem has been interested in public health and development work since he was in secondary school, when he first saw international aid workers implementing outreach programs in his town and the surrounding areas of Imo State. His interest transformed into a professional goal during his final year at college while learning about diseases such as guinea worm, river blindness, bilharzia, and Loa Loa in an applied parasitology class.

“It was scary learning how these worms were wreaking so much havoc in people’s lives. Although my father was a med-ical doctor, I had never heard him talk about these diseases,” Mbakwem said. “I asked my lecturer what was being done about these problems, and he told me that some international development organizations were working in remote commu-

nities trying to address them. I realized that while we had access to health care facilities in the city, these communities were completely neglected.”

Since earning his bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1992 from the University of Port Harcourt in Rivers State, Nigeria, Mbakwem has dedicated himself to improving the health and living conditions of his fellow Nigerians. He spent a year in the epidemiological unit of the Ministry of Health in Nigeria’s Kwara State under the National Youth Service Scheme, Nigeria’s compulsory community service program for university graduates. He then worked several years for Africare, a U.S.-based NGO dedicated to improving the quality of life of Africans by cooperating directly with local African communities. While at Africare, Mbakwem focused his efforts on combating river blindness in Nigeria, which has the highest incidence of the debilitating disease in the world.

In 2001, Mbakwem received a prestigious Ashoka Fellowship, which recognizes and provides resources to entrepreneurs who develop innovative solutions to social problems. The fellowship allowed him to return to Imo State and found CYDI, where he has focused his efforts on stemming the HIV epidemic and the opportunistic infections that accompany it in his home region. Mbakwem is responsible for the overall management of CYDI and serves as secretary of its board of trustees. However, he is quick to recognize the contributions of his co-workers. “I could not do anything without the great team of people that I work with. I was so happy to see that, even during my three-month fellowship at Emory, the orga-nization thrived and grew,” Mbakwem said.

Building Healthy CommunitiesBy Rebecca Baggett

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Mbakwem’s Fellowship: A True Learning Partnership

Kate Winskell, a professor at RSPH, developed the CPL Fellows Program, which is funded by the Emory Global Health Institute. The program helps to build the capacity of small- and medium-sized NGOs by providing training to organizational leaders seeking to fill specific knowledge gaps. She helps design the curriculum for individual fellows and serves as a mentor during their time at Emory. During the first phase of the CPL Fellows Program, community leaders associated with Scenarios from Africa (SfA), an HIV/AIDS prevention communications strategy that Winskell and her husband have co-managed since 1997, comprised the applicant pool.

Winskell first met Mbakwem in 2002 when he began working with SfA. Since 2005, Mbakwem has been the SfA national coordinator in Nigeria and has coordinated the submission of close to 2,000 stories written by young Nigerians to SfA competitions. “Benjamin is the epitome of a community lead-er – an example of modesty, humility, and selflessness. He dedicates his every working hour to increasing the capacity of local people and organizations in southeastern Nigeria to respond to the HIV epidemic,” said Winskell.

During his fellowship at Emory, Mbakwem took training courses in applied epidemiology, monitoring and evaluation, HIV counseling, and grant writing, and received personal tutoring in web site and database design and management. He also gave several talks to Emory students about his work in Nigeria. “It was with great joy that I met with these students during my spare time to consult with them about their indi-

vidual research projects and help them develop feasible and effective health interventions in the communities they work in at home and abroad,” said Mbakwem.

It was this give-and-take that really made Mbakwem’s fellow-ship an enriching experience for both him and Emory. “We taught each other,” said RSPH Professor Stanley Foster, who worked with Mbakwem. “Benjamin’s sharing of his work showed how a value-driven, dedicated community organiza-tion could effectively use small amounts of money to make a difference in the community.”

Back Home

One of Mbakwem’s earliest inspirations in the fight against HIV/AIDS was Franco, a Makossa singer from the Congo who died of AIDS in 1989. “[Franco] wrote a song about what he felt the responsibility of artists, young people, the govern-ment, and the international community was in responding to and raising awareness about HIV/AIDS. Because of this, he is one of my heroes,” Mbakwem said.

After a cure for HIV/AIDS is found, Mbakwem says he would like to play drums in a Makossa band. Until then, he will keep leading CYDI’s efforts to make the lives of his countrymen better. a

For more information, visit www.globalhealth.emory.edu

Rebecca Baggett is the communications and program manager of the Emory Global Health Institute.

“Benjamin’s sharing of his work showed how a value-driven, dedicated community organization could effectively use small amounts of money to

make a difference in the community.”

From left to right: Benjamin Mbakwem’s non-governmental organization assists a community in Imo State, Nigeria, with a project involving a palm oil processing mill; HIV/AIDS mentoring session for students participating in the 2005 Scenarios from Africa contest at a secondary boys school in Imo State; Mbakwem with Kate Winskell, the developer of the CPL program, in front of the RSPH building. Photo by Bryan Meltz

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A Journey to the Middle East

Understanding conflict can be as much about obser-vation as it can be about research. This summer, a group of 18 Emory administrators, faculty, staff, and

alumni traveled on a Journeys program to Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank in an effort to more deeply comprehend the nature of the ongoing conflict in the region. The Journeys program, an inter-religious project sponsored by Dean of the Chapel and Religious Life Susan Henry-Crowe, sends groups every year to regions experiencing conflict or oppression. Over the course of 11 days, the participants explored histori-cal sites such as Jerusalem’s Old Town, Bethlehem, Jericho, the Dead Sea, Petra, and the ancient capital of Amman, and met with a broad range of individuals from a former Israeli soldier and a Christian-Palestinian farmer to a devout Jewish settler and an owner of a Palestinian beer brewery.

As the group members come together to explore ways in which they can share their experiences with a broader com-munity, Emory in the World speaks with trip participants Provost Earl Lewis and Dean Susan Henry-Crowe about some of their favorite moments from the trip and their plans for the future.

While previous Journeys trip destinations have included con-flict-riddled regions such as South Africa, Bosnia, and North-ern Ireland, this is the first Journeys trip to the Middle East. How did the trip come to fruition this year?

Susan Henry-Crowe (SHC): Since the Journeys program be-gan, I have wanted to do a trip to the Middle East because it’s such an interesting region in terms of the three major re-ligions. I went to the Middle East in 2003 to begin thinking about how we might put together a trip. It was at the height

of the second intifada, so it was really clear that we weren’t going to consider going at that time. Every year thereafter we pondered the question: Could this be the year that we go to the Middle East? With the range of events that took place over the last year, coupled with an increase in interest, it fi-nally seemed like an opportune time to put the trip together.

Earl Lewis (EL): Last summer’s war between elements in Lebanon and Israel sparked some concern that aspects of that war would potentially play themselves out on this cam-pus. In response, I convened a group of faculty and staff to advise the University as to what programming we may want to develop. In the midst of all that, former President Jimmy Carter published his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which reflected on the larger challenge of peace in the Middle East. Before we knew it, this small planning group started to play a much larger role in executing a whole series of pro-grams across campus.

In response to the conflict surrounding his book, President Carter once said to me during a private conversation, “People don’t have to believe me [about the situation in the Middle East] – they could just go and look for themselves.” At times like this, it’s nice to be the provost [laughs] because you can take an in-vitation like that and perhaps do something with it. Soon, the concept of sponsoring a trip to the Middle East went from Su-san’s idea to my asking her how we could make it happen.

Previous trips were called Journeys of Reconciliation. Why is this trip referred to as simply Journeys?

SHC: The language of reconciliation evolved from a particular moment of history during the Year of Reconciliation in

By Alma Freeman

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1997. The term “reconciliation” has always been a little edgy because it evokes the obvious question: Who is reconciling what with whom? But it has had enough appeal that we have kept it. But in this case, it was really clear that the trip to the Middle East was not about reconciliation, but rather, it was about fact finding and learning.

EL: And so, the trip became Journeys as a chance to highlight the immersion experience of a group of 18 non-experts who, in a way, were given the chance to become students again. Everyone learned intensely but each person came to discover the place differently.

One of the stated goals of the program is to engage the Emory community in a broader understanding of a region of the world that struggles with deep conflict. In the case of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the words one elects to use to de-scribe issues can be particularly divisive. What are some chal-lenges that you could face in accomplishing this goal?

EL: Like any sensitive issue, a number of people have very strong views. Since returning and even before departing, I have been struck, however, by the fact that the people who have an interest in the future of this region have all want-ed to contribute in some way or another to the goals of the trip. There weren’t people who said they wanted to divorce themselves from what we were doing. Instead, a number of individuals helped put us in touch with contacts in the re-gion. Can I anticipate that more polarized perspectives might

materialize over the course of the year? Yes – that’s the nature of a university!

SHC: It was very important to me that the discussion not be limited to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict because the complications of this region stretch much farther than that. The issue of that conflict is huge, certainly. But many other events such as the war in Lebanon or the invasion of Iraq

all interface with each other. That’s why I thought it was important that we also visit Jordan to see something other than the West Bank and Israel. On the trip we met with individuals from a broad range of backgrounds, includ-ing Israelis, Christian Palestinians, Muslim Palestinians, Bedouins, and Jordanians. Of the official meetings that we had, 30 percent of the individuals were Israeli, 30 percent Palestinian Christian, 18 percent Muslim Palestinian, nine percent Bedouin, and 12 percent Jordanian. Of course that doesn’t include the diverse range of incredible people we met casually on our journey.

EL: As we look for ways to share our experience, I would not want to distort the curriculum in a way that makes this particular issue more important than other areas in the world. We could easily focus on Sudan or even Rwanda. It’s an im-portant balance to maintain because tragically, it’s not the only place in the world that is struggling.

On these trips you arrive with humility and you come away with an even larger sense of humility. It is unlikely that a group of 18 from Emory will be able to change the course of the world. What we can do is offer witness and our own experience. People are worried if you say certain things that it will complicate fundraising. I disagree. If people aren’t go-ing to support you, they will find any reason to not do so. But if folks really want to support you, and believe in what you are doing, they will accept that. Although they may not agree with all the decisions that an institution makes, they will

believe in the integrity of that institution and that in the end their investment will be worth something.

SHC: Of course we won’t change the history of the world, but we can change the kind of discourse that happens. It hap-pened in our group of 18 and if it can happen in a group that is as diverse as ours, then it can happen with 50 people, and if it can happen with 50 people it can happen with 200.

Provost Earl Lewis (left) with trip participant Mark McLeod at the site of Tent of Nations, a Palestinian-run project that seeks to bring youth of various cultures together to build bridges of understanding, reconciliation, and peace.

Susan Henry-Crowe listens as Peter Nasser, a Christian Palestinian and Emory College alum, talks about his plans to open a Western-style restaurant in downtown Ramallah in the West Bank.

EMORY in the world 1�

What were some of your impressions of the region?

EL: When Susan and I arrived at the airport in Amman, Jordan, the Iraqis had just won the Asian Cup and there were throngs of Iraqis on the street celebrating in their cars, honking horns, and waving flags. Our driver, a Palestinian Jordanian, spent 30 minutes explaining to us how you could tell the difference between an Iraqi and a Jordanian [there are currently over 700,000 Iraqi refugees living in Jordan]. As he interrupted to point out the different license plates, he told a story about how he tried to acquire an apartment from an Iraqi family not long ago and they refused because they were reserving the place for Iraqis. At that moment, I realized that you don’t even have to scratch the surface to see that the enormous effects of the conflicts in the Middle East are playing out in Jordan as well.

SHC: I was very impressed with the determination to pro-mote peace and human dignity shared by many of the people we met. For example, we met with a young Jewish woman who left America 18 years ago for Israel to dedicate herself to documenting and educating the Israeli public about human rights violations in the region through the Jerusalem-based organization B’Tselem.

How has your perception of the region changed since your return?

EL: When I lived in Michigan where there is a large Arab-American population, I had a young Palestinian woman who worked with me whose family had first moved to Kentucky. She told me stories about life in Kentucky, and how her fam-ily was referred to there as “sand n_ _ _ _ _s.” She explained that her family fell somewhere in between the white and black community. Her story sticks with me. I realized that this no-tion of distinguishing one from the other was the piece that I tried to understand while on the trip. When I returned, I real-ized that the dynamics that I was trying to understand from her story weren’t the dynamics of Israeli/Palestinian relations, but the dynamics of American racial notions in that region. In some areas, the only way to distinguish one from the other is to tag them – whether it be the stamping of numbers or the tagging of individuals through identity cards or colored license plates – it’s still a process of “othering” and the process of “othering” is intensely observed in this region.

SHC: After listening to a number of our speakers, I was struck by the profound implications of fundamentalism that I witnessed on this trip. This was my fourth trip to the area, and the dangers of fundamentalism were more evident now than I had ever seen.

What is your most memorable moment from the trip?

EL: One afternoon, I was on the bus talking to our Palestinian driver, Muhammad. As we drove around Jerusalem and the

West Bank for days he had been observing us, but we didn’t have the chance to really talk to him. During a spare hour, he told me that he left during the second intifada for northern Virginia in the United States where he lived for five years. He decided to come back because he believed that he could scratch out a future in the West Bank. Although he has a good job, he is still constantly reminded that he is Palestinian. I asked him: Why do Palestinians take part in the building of the wall? He looked at me and started laughing and said, “You know, when [Yasser] Arafat was in power, a dollar would come and 10 cents would go to the people and 90 cents would go to the government of Arafat. Now, a dollar comes in and 50 cents goes to the people, but 50 cents still goes to the government. I have money to pay for food for my children because I have my job, but the majority of people don’t, so they end up de-ciding whom to work for. … If we don’t do the labor, even if what results from that labor makes our lives more difficult, the Israelis will easily import people from other countries to fill our places.” There was a moment when I realized, for all the lectures I have attended, it was Muhammad who taught me something critical about the region. My only regret is that I had to jump in a cab, and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye

to him. I would have never known that he had spent time in the U.S. It was a brief moment of human connection that somehow sneaks into a trip like this when it’s not planned.

SHC: One of the most memorable moments for me was listening to Rania [Arnaout], a young, educated Palestinian woman whose husband lives in the Al-Arroub refugee camp outside of Hebron, tell her story of the moment she decided to wear a headscarf. After experiencing struggle and hardship, she began to devote herself to God. The least she could do in return, she explained, was wear the scarf. Although she carries an Israeli ID card, she is prohibited from living with her husband because she must reside in Jerusalem in order to keep her card and her husband is not allowed to travel outside of the West Bank. Now she commutes from East Jerusalem to the refugee camp every weekend with their children.

EL: That was an incredible moment. And, her husband sup-ported her decision to wear the scarf. I thought it was fasci-nating, however, that he framed the discussion in terms of her hair, as in, she has such beautiful hair, why would she ever want to cover it up?

SHC: It was one of those great teaching moments about the role of men and women, one of those moments where you are sure the roles aren’t equal, but in reality, the relationship hap-pens to be very equal. a

Alma Freeman is the communications specialist for the Office of International Affairs.

“On these trips you arrive with humility and you come away with an even larger sense of humility. It is unlikely that a group of 18 from

Emory will be able to change the course of the world. What we can do is offer witness and our own experience.”

EMORY in the world1�

Top left: The Journeys group in front of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem. Top right: Rania Arnaout shares a story about her decision to wear a headscarf during a visit to Al-Arroub refugee camp near Hebron. Right: A child looks on during a bar mitzvah ceremony at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Bottom: A boy tags along during a tour of Al-Arroub.

EMORY in the world 1�EMORY in the world 1�

“You’re going to Tel Aviv … to study Brazil?” This question, accompanied by raised eye-brows and a tone of disbelief, was the most

common response to the news that I had been awarded the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at Tel Aviv University.

As it turned out, Israel was a wonderful place to study not only Brazilian ethnic identity but also many other aspects of Latin American history. My Fulbright seminar on “The Pacific Rim in the Atlantic World” examined Diasporas in Latin America and was as much a learning experience for me as it was for the students. Our course was a code-switch-er’s delight, with English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew moving through our conversations, sometimes comfortably but often awkwardly. The discussions went from historical moments in Latin America to contemporary moments in the Middle East.

My favorite teaching moment of the year came early in the semester during a discussion in which one student said to another, “Let me interrupt you to say that I will let you finish before I attack you [verbally].” My initial reaction was one of surprise (should I lecture the students on appropriate behavior?) but I soon realized that intense debate and coun-

ter-argumentation was one of the real pleasures of teaching in Israel. I will miss the ferocity of this kind of give-and-take. Emory students, by contrast, politely raise their hands and wait quietly for their colleagues to finish their statements. The intensity of the discussion in the Tel Aviv University classroom, often punctuated by roars of laughter, demon-strated that different cultures go about teaching and learn-ing in different ways. For example, I learned as a graduate student in the United States that it is important to compli-ment students following their comments, as though the act of speaking in the classroom setting was worthy of praise. In Israel, my use of that technique led to a funny moment. After I had told a number of students how good, interesting, or fascinating their comments were, one of them stopped the class and shouted, “Jeff, stop telling us that our points are good, even when they are bad.” From that point on, every student’s comments began with “I want to comment on so and so’s excellent point” while the rest of the class burst out laughing (at me).

The joy of classroom teaching was matched by an endlessly fascinating world around me. Simply going to an archive was an experience. Once, after learning that my documents had been given security clearance at a particular archive, I arrived two hours later to find that the archivists were on

STUDYING BRAZIL IN ISRAEL By Jeffrey Lesser

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strike. It hardly seemed worth complaining. Instead a friend and I went to the Arab quar-ter of Jerusalem’s Old City to eat “the best hummus in Israel” at one of the perhaps 200 locations in the country that compete over this gastro-nomic claim.

With the Fulbright award I continued my research pro-gram as well as my teaching. I focused on Brazilian-Israeli relations, especially the 1975 United Nations (UN) vote (since overturned) that equat-ed Zionism with racism. Studying Brazil in Israel re-inforced my belief that Area Studies provides the deep cul-tural knowledge necessary to analyze diplomatic events. My project sought to interpret the cultural and political meanings behind the Brazilian decision, at a time when the country was directed by a brutal military dictatorship, to vote in favor of the UN resolution. Many leaders of democratic countries interpreted Brazil’s vote as a sign of high levels of anti-Semitism within the regime. Yet examining documentation from the Israeli Foreign Ministry disclosed a different picture. For Israeli diplomats, Brazil was engaging in an expected realpolitik that guaranteed it would not be boycotted by those nations that provided the oil it needed to run its industries. Who would have expected that a relatively accepting interpretation of Brazil’s vote equating Zionism with racism would be found in Israel?

I also had the opportunity to work with Emory’s study abroad program in Israel, which was reestablished just as I arrived. Together with Martin Wein, the program’s coordinator and a graduate of Emory’s Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies master’s program, we ran a monthly series of out-of-classroom experiences for our students that augmented what they were learning at Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University overseas programs. We examined urban architecture and its relation to the Kibbutz movement, the implications of Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus movement, and Arab-Jewish relations. One meeting, which included Institute for Jewish Studies Associate Professor Benjamin Hary, was on “Linguistic Landscaping,” about the ways in which written language in public spaces becomes a forum for identity discussion.

This held particular fascination for me because one of the first things I had noticed after arriving in Israel were bum-per stickers and graffiti with the unintelligible (at the time) words, “Na, Nach, Nachma, Nachman M’Uman.”My inter-est was further piqued after my 14-year-old sons returned from a baseball practice chanting a hip-hop version of the phrase that is believed to help bring spiritual fulfillment by some of the followers of the 18th-century Chassidic Rabbi

Nachman of Breslov (also known as Nachman from Uman – the Ukranian town where he is buried). Rabbi Nachman’s followers are known for their annual Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) pilgrimages to the gravesite in Uman and for driv-ing vans with large loudspeakers from which they emerge to dance in public places.

Walking with our Emory group through Tel Aviv, discuss-ing everything from street signs to posters for dance parties, I began to understand better why “Nachmanim” melded traditional religiosity with modern forms such as loud music and bumper stickers. a

Formerly the director of Emory’s Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Jeffrey Lesser is currently the director of the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute for Jewish Studies and the president of the Conference on Latin American History.

Top: The slogan “Na, Nach, Nachma, Nachman M’Uman” is seen throughout Israel. Bottom: Director of the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Insti-tute for Jewish Studies Jeffrey Lesser. Photo by Jon Rou

EMORY in the world 1�

“Do you have money for the sutures?” a hospital worker asked the man who had brought his wife in for surgery. Like many hospi-

tals in Uganda, here supplies were scarce. Only two sets of sutures remained. To buy more, the hospital need-ed money. The man raced back to his village to sell a goat, but when he returned, he learned his wife had died. Originally heard on National Public Radio in January 2007

Sutures in every size, class, and composition lay at the sterile fingertips of Emory Healthcare surgeons. Boxes are so abun-dant in the United States that we order them by the hundreds – and casually discard them when a new product is released. “As one of the country’s top medical facilities, we are always acquiring the most cutting-edge technology and latest product to stay at the forefront of ad-vancing medicine,” said Chris Johnson, assistant director of Emory Healthcare’s materials management department. “As better equipment and supplies become available, we have no use for the others.”

Stringent and changing health care guidelines also cause excess medical supplies to become waste in hospital store-rooms. Eventually, these “useless” supplies end up in incin-erators and landfills throughout the United States.

MedShare International provides an alternative – medical recy-cling. The organization collects useable surplus medical supplies from hospitals around the country and re-sorts and distributes them to under-equipped hospitals and clinics around the globe. Not only has MedShare saved more than 755,200 cubic feet of landfill space, they have ultimately saved thousands of lives.

In Uganda, as in most undeveloped countries, even the most basic medical supplies are in serious demand. “MedShare is about bridging the gap between our surplus and their need,” said MedShare CEO and co-founder A.B. Short. Currently serving 89 countries with continual expansion, MedShare has sent $41 million worth of medical supplies to needy re-gions of the world since 1998.

“Emory has been with us from the beginning,” said Short. Before officially founding MedShare, Short and co-founder Bob Freeman consulted with Jim Curran, dean of the Rollins

School of Public Health (RSPH) and Bill Foege, Presidential Distinguished Scholar and Pro-fessor Emeritus in the Hubert Department of Global Health at RSPH.

Short credits Foege, currently a fellow with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program, with giving Med-Share its most critical piece of advice. “Bill [Foege] simply pointed out that current non-profits collecting surplus were missing something. These organizations assumed developing countries needed anything and everything without ever having a conversation with the receiving end about what they really need,” recalled Short. “If we could connect with those needy hospitals and clinics, we could really make a difference.”

And so MedShare connects. With reliance on triangular part-nerships, MedShare continually develops relationships with corporations and other international non-profits that main-tain staff overseas. Partners serve as liaisons between Med-Share and recipient facilities and help shepherd MedShare containers to their remote destinations.

Tools for Healing

“It’s good to know the supplies we are handling will

help save lives.”

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Recipient facilities must apply and be approved to receive do-nations, which are supported by either sending medical teams to help or by directly shipping a 40-foot container loaded with supplies, based on specific needs. “Emory has consulted with us, volunteered for us, sponsored us, and has had [supplies] in just about every single container we have shipped,” said Short.

Since MedShare’s inception, Emory Healthcare has collected and donated more than 30,000 pounds of unused and surplus medical equipment and supplies. In early 2007, Emory Healthcare heightened awareness of the Med-Share relationship and empha-sized support. “Just knowing our work force and culture, I knew we could do more with this out-reach,” said Emory Healthcare President and CEO John Fox.

As a result of the employees’ enthusiasm and Fox’s commit-ment, Emory Healthcare has had a 300-percent increase in col-lections. “It gives Emory Healthcare staff an opportunity to work on something meaningful together,” Fox said.

Emory Healthcare employees filled Saturday volunteer sign-up slots so quickly some volunteers had to take a rain check to participate. Daniel Martin, a surgical technician from Emory University Hospital, has been a regular at MedShare’s Deca-tur warehouse. He is able to offer his clinical expertise to help sort specialized surgical equipment. “MedShare staff make you feel like what you’re doing is important – not just busy work,” he said.

Martin said his volunteer work is meaningful as he gains bet-ter insight into the struggles of those who lack resources. “It’s good to know the supplies we are handling will help save lives,” he said. Through Volunteer Emory, students like pre-med senior Tony Longhini are also donating time and exper-tise. Longhini gave every Friday afternoon of his junior year to the organization as he chauffeured handfuls of Emory stu-dents on the Volunteer Emory bus, then spent hours catego-rizing and boxing supplies for shipment.

“Students get as much as they give,” said Melody Porter, di-rector of Volunteer Emory. “The MedShare experience helps students learn about surgery and about how medical supplies and equipment are used. And it gives students an opportunity to get outside of themselves and do something meaningful.”

A team of 12 Emory medical students got an opportunity to travel to a remote rural area in Haiti’s Central Plateau region. Before their journey, they visited MedShare to participate in a sorting session and to “shop” for items they would take to

Haiti. Led by former Emory University Hospital emergency physician Jason Prystowsky, Emory student physicians treat-ed more than 2,000 people, some of whom waited more than

eight hours in extreme heat to receive care. Prystowsky hoped the young professionals would “develop a lifelong commitment to serve those sick and injured humans whose voice might not otherwise be heard.” As Emory Healthcare pledged to increase support of MedShare’s mission, they agreed to sponsor the cost to ship a container.

According to the Federal Ministry of Health, a woman dies every 10 minutes in Nigeria as a result of pregnancy and pregnancy-related factors. In Nigeria, which has the second highest maternal death during childbirth rate in the world, emergency obstetric care is largely unavailable, so mothers die as a result of complications like bleeding and eclampsia.

“We deliver an average of 1,200 babies annually, but we have no means of monitoring pregnant women,” said Gershom Ejeckham, a physician at Enugu State Hospital. “It’s amazing we survive at all here,” he said.

Emory Healthcare shipped a personalized container to Nigeria in July stocked with medical supplies to help reduce the number of maternal and infant deaths. a

Rashel Stephenson is a freelance writer and has worked in the Emory Healthcare community for 12 years.

Emory student volunteers Tuan Nguyen (left) and Evan Tiderington help organize medical equipment.

Photo © CURE International

EMORY in the world 21

Trip participant Ana Bedayo shares with Emory in the World her Study Trip experience in Brussels.

In preparation for the trip, Dr. Semetko guided everyone in the class to design projects analyzing U.S. perceptions of the EU through different mediums. A team of four students, Todd Brehm, Holly Cato, Glenn Goncharow, and LeTiffany Obozele, conducted content analysis of the EU in print media through the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and Newsweek, respectively. Brett Zuckerman examined the visibility of EU citizens in the American film industry while Laurent Stemmler utilized Le Monde and the New York Times to compare and contrast French and American newsprint coverage of the EU. I designed a study to identify books and publications concerning the EU and the European Commission based on an analysis of holdings at the Library of Congress. Finally, we had a class with former EU Counter-Terrorism Coordinator Gijs de Vries during our last meeting before the trip, as he was visiting Emory as a Halle Distinguished Fellow.

We departed Atlanta on April 17 and landed in Brussels early in the morning. After checking into our hotel, we re-viewed our itinerary with Dr. Semetko over coffee. We then toured the city and had dinner with Dr. Julia Stamm, a cor-porate science officer with the COST office, who scheduled our meetings.

The next few days were full of meetings with various EU officials at their respective offices. A legislative assistant (equivalent to a senator’s chief of staff) to German Member of the European Parliament Vural Öger gave us a private tour of the European Parliament building while explaining the intricacies of the functions of the Parliament. During a lunch hosted by Dr. Martin Grabert, director of the COST office,

As Europe celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome, The Halle Institute sponsored its first Student Study

Trip to Europe. Seven students in a senior seminar course on Political Communication in Compara-tive and International Contexts went to Brussels for five days in April 2007 to learn more about the European Union (EU).

Member of the European Commission Janez Potonik, European Commissioner for Research, invited an international research team led by Professor Martin Holland, director of the National Centre for Research on Europe at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and Emory Professor Holli Semetko, to meet with director generals and debate how the EU is perceived from abroad. The event was organized by the European Science Foundation’s office on European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), whose Director Dr. Martin Grabert welcomed the Emory seniors and whose COST Officer Dr. Julia Stamm accom-panied them to meetings. The students participated in a conference at the COST offices in Brussels where the team of researchers from New Zealand, Asia, and the U.S. discussed external perceptions of the EU.

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we learned about the organization and areas of cross-national scientific research in the EU.

We also visited the offices of the European Commission. Alain Servantie, head of the Unit for Information and Communica-tion under the Directorate General for Enlargement, discussed the formation of the EU and the current issue of Turkey’s bid to enter. “Human rights was a key factor in its denial,” he ex-plained. “A country cannot enter the EU if it allows the death penalty.” And with this he smiled and admitted, “Under this condition, the U.S. would not be allowed to enter the EU either, hypothetically speaking, of course.”

Andrew Fielding, senior official in the Directorate General of Communication information, explained his position and divulged some of the obstacles his office currently faces. “Communication implies accountability … and accountability implies interaction with your public,” he began. This meeting peaked my interest because I worked on a direct mail campaign during an internship. In the U.S., political campaigns have be-come increasingly professionalized, resulting in the advent of political consultants and media-savvy politicians. However, political campaigning in Europe is still making this transition. Fielding pointed out that the European Commission has only recently developed a proper “communication culture” that “systematically takes into account public information and consultation needs in all departments and at all levels, from the planning stage to delivery.” He added that the Commis-sion had put its plans into action, having recently published a Europe-wide consultation White Paper on how to com-municate more effectively. During the question and answer session I asked why the EU and its organizations did not utilize direct mail to communicate with their constituents as their American counterparts have. Fielding explained that due to the logistical and budgetary constraints faced by the EU, this method of communication had not yet been used.

The highlight of the trip was witnessing our professor present her findings at the conference at the COST office before fellow researchers and distinguished members of the European community. Dr. Semetko introduced each of her students by name.

The study trip also exposed us to unfamiliar aspects of European culture. We not only learned about the EU but also experienced pieces of everyday life. One of our group activi-ties was a concert at La Monnaie, the Royal Opera House. In our spare time we visited museums, explored local grocery and clothing shops, and treated ourselves to Belgian choco-late. I will always carry with me a fond memory of feasting on escargots with Belgians at Place Ste-Catherine, but the im-age I most frequently recall is of our entire delegation out-side of Chez Leon, a restaurant off Grand-Place. We had just finished a spectacular meal of mussels after our first day of meetings with European Commission officials and our smiles said it all, for we looked the way we felt.

The Halle Institute was established to foster learning through people-to-people interactions. I should like to think that our student delegation lived up to this purpose. This class began as a senior seminar composed of seven students. Through our shared experiences I leave it with six great friends, another inspiring mentor, and memories I will take with me wherever I go. a

Ana Bedayo graduated in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. She began working for the Hillary for President Exploratory Committee in August.

Halle Student Study Trip group (front row, left to right) LeTiffany Obozele, Ana Bedayo and Holly Cato (back row, left to right) Todd Brehm, Brett Zuckerman, Glen Goncharow and Laurent Stemmler

Top: Bedayo (front) with Goncharow and Zuckerman during a tour of the European Parliament building. Bottom: Located in the Grand-Place, the House of the Dukes of Brabant is made up of seven guildhouses each with a different name.

EMORY in the world 2�

Sounds in the ShadowsBy Steve Everett

In 1969, Indonesian President Suharto imprisoned Javanese author and political dissident Pramoedya Ananta Toer for over 10 years, but never charged him

with any crime. Toer was one of an estimated 250,000 individuals who were either imprisoned or simply disappeared after Suharto’s 1965 coup d’état that overthrew Indonesia’s founding president, Sukarno. Toer, along with other left-wing literary and intellectual figures, was put into isolation in a penal colony on Buru Island where he was allowed contact with other prisoners for only one hour each week. Remark-ably, Toer composed four novels and several smaller works during this time without the use of pen or paper. In the final years of his imprisonment, he wrote them down with the help of a sympathetic guard who smuggled in an old typewriter and gave the manuscripts to a Catholic church in Buru.

During the 1960s and 70s, Toer became an international symbol for resistance to totalitarian repression. French phi-losopher Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to send him a typewriter at one point. Salman Rushdie remembers attending protest rallies in London in the 1970s demanding Toer’s release. Ultimately, the human rights initiatives of the Jimmy Carter ad-ministration helped pressure Suharto to release these political prisoners in 1979. Toer was then placed under house arrest in Jakarta and all of his writings were officially banned in Indonesia – though he had still never been charged with a crime. The Suharto regime fell in 1998 and Toer was able to travel abroad in 1999. He died on April 30, 2006.

In 1996, I read Toer’s four novels, the Buru Quartet, prior to a research trip to Java and Bali to study gamelan music, dance, and puppetry in order to start a Javanese gamelan ensemble at Emory. Carrying Toer’s books with me to Java was not prudent

since being caught with them could result in arrest. As a com-poser, I found Toer’s Nobel Prize-nominated novels and his historical narrative style quite intriguing and thought they were an ideal text for a music drama setting. A Dutch art his-torian I had met in Java offered to arrange a possible meeting with Toer to discuss his novels. Of course this had to be kept quite secret since Indonesians (including my gamelan teachers) were encouraged to report any anti-government activity. For several mornings, I walked for 30 minutes to the nearest pay phone, attempting to contact a publisher in Jakarta who could assist in arranging the meeting, all the while keeping my activi-ties secret. I was told to never use Toer’s name over the phone since government wire-tapping was quite common.

Two weeks later, I flew to Jakarta and was driven to Toer’s house. There I discovered a resolute and still defiant critic of the Suharto regime. He was quite pleased that I was interested in using his writings for a music composition but suggested that I consider an unpublished play – Ki Ageng Mangir – which he wrote while at Buru that was structured as a Javanese shadow play and contained a gamelan ensemble and dancer as central charac-ters. Ki Ageng Mangir retells a famous Central Javanese event of 1590, during the early days of the Islamic Mataram king-dom set at the royal court of Yogyakarta. I had a sense that this 16th-century narrative had similari-ties to contemporary po-litical situations and that

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principal characters seemed analogous to personalities in the current Suharto government. After translating the work from Indonesian to English with the help of Emory Provost Billy Frye’s daughter Alice, I met with Toer again in 1997 to discuss my observations. When asked if the characters and historical setting of the play were actually references to contemporary Java, Toer smiled, nodded his head and said, “you understand my work … of course all of Javanese history is cyclical, just like gamelan music.”

I continued research on the Mangir story and the early Mataram kingdom in 1997 at the Royal Tropical Institute and Film Museum in Amsterdam, which contain extensive archives on In-donesian history. While a research fellow at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, and at the Liguria Foundation in Bogliasco, Italy, in 1998 and 1999, I com-posed a two-hour music drama entitled Ki Ageng Mangir (KAM). The work was modeled on Javanese shadow puppet plays and includes a Javanese puppeteer who narrates and sings the text, Western and Javanese musical instruments, and interactive computer- controlled video and audio.

In designing this composition, ancient sekaten gamelan instru-ments in Surakarta, Java, were recorded and digitally analyzed in 1998 during a research trip sponsored by the Asian Cultural Council. These sacred Islamic instruments were used in the courts during the early Mataram kingdom. The spectral qual-ity of the instruments served as models for the harmonies used in the music drama. Original shadow puppets were designed in Central Java for this production as well. KAM has been performed at Emory on two occasions: in 2001 at the Year of Reconciliation Symposium and in 2005 at the 50th International Conference of the Society of Ethno-musicology. Selections from KAM have been performed in 10 countries, including Ladrang Kampung for flute, gamelan, and interactive electronics, which has recently been recorded on CD by Gamelan Asmårådånå in Singapore and will next

be performed at Georgia Institute of Technology on No-vember 12, 2007, by resident chamber ensemble, Sonic Generator.

Originally, my primary fascination in compos-ing music was with the design of innovative new

sounds and the creative potential offered by new technologies. Composition projects such

as KAM have strengthened my awareness of the creative process as an essentially humanis-

tic endeavor, often requiring additional cultural,

political, and individual sensibilities. My meetings with Toer encouraged me to

seriously consider whether artists and intellectuals in general have a social responsibility. Toer once said, “It is impossible to separate politics from literature or any other part of human life, because everyone is touched by political power.” This is true for music as well as for literature, I suspect. a

Steve Everett is a composer and professor in Emory’s Department of Music where he teaches composition and computer music. He serves as the director of Emory’s Music-Audio Research Center and the Emory Gamelan Ensemble.

Top: Students watch an outdoor shadow puppet performance accompanied by Emory’s Gamelan Ensemble, directed by Steve Everett. Left: Everett with Javanese author and political dissident Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Bottom: Javanese shadow puppets (Wayang Kulit) were used during the outdoor performance.

EMORY in the world 2�

U N I V E R S I T YOffice of International Affairs | Box 52, Administration BuildingEmory University | Atlanta, Georgia 30322 USA

From November 11 through November 16, prominent cartoonists from France, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Palestine, Turkey, and the U.S. will be on Emory’s campus to participate in a number of panel discussions on topics such as global health, politics, gender, and religion. Each cartoonist will also participate in class visits hosted by Emory professors. Inaugurated in 2006 at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York and co-sponsored by The Claus M. Halle Institute, “Cartooning for Peace” was conceived by French cartoonist Plantu of Paris-based newspaper Le Monde to explore how the medium of cartoons can promote peace. The event will be accompanied by an expanded version of the “Cartooning for Peace” exhibition that was unveiled at the UN and has since been shown in Geneva, Paris, and Brussels. Featuring over 100 cartoons and drawings by the visiting cartoonists, the collection will be on display at the Schatten Gallery in Emory’s Woodruff Library from October 27, 2007 through December 15, 2007. The exhibition will also include new cartoons on important global health issues as a result of the enormous concentration of expertise at Emory University and Atlanta in this field. We are grateful to Dr. Raymond Schinazi who is providing support for the exhibition.

For more details, visit www.halleinstitute.emory.edu