Author: Gabe Rosenberg

Middletown, Connecticut and Sayaxche, Guatemala are 3,249 miles apart. Driving between them would take two days and six hours, nonstop. And yet a partnership thrives between Middlesex Hospital and Sayaxche Hospital, and a student group helps traverse the distance.

Students for Sayaxche partners with both hospitals to bring information and supplies to medical professionals working to improve healthcare in the Peten region of northern Guatemala. After the group’s yearlong hiatus, leader Ty Kelly ’14 hopes it can make a difference for both sides of the collaboration.

“It’s our first real reboot,” said Kelly. “Our most recent meeting had 14 or 15 kids who are interested. It’s gone beyond my wildest dreams.”

Kelly is a Neuroscience and Science in Society double major who will take the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) later this year, which is the only reason he won’t travel down to Guatemala as part of the annual pilgrimage of Middlesex clinicians. With this background, he hopes to pursue a future in global public health and medicine, a dream that was confirmed by his time studying abroad in South Africa.

“Cape Town is a wildly fascinating city,” Kelly said. “One side of a road will be in total poverty, and the other side will have so much wealth. South Africa was the public health ground zero, essentially.”

There is certainly a need for public health advocacy in Sayaxche. Kelly explained that much of the student

group’s work involves making instructional videos for healthcare providers in Guatemala. Information about treating trauma patients is especially crucial.

“There’s a need for better techniques to support trauma patients over long distances,” Kelly said. “The Sayaxche hospital is much different than what we might imagine. When [the hospital is] too busy, there are women in labor on cots or on the ground. Small things like mattresses, breathing tubes, and blood pressure pumps make a huge difference.”

Although many Students for Sayaxche members are interested in medicine, some are not. Kelly stressed that the group’s scope goes beyond the medical.

“We want to help on a grander scale than medical supplies,” he said. “As far as traveling goes, we think it’s important to bear witness and treat it as a cultural immersion to see how other cultures perceive hospitals, medicine, health, illness, and sickness.”

Steffani Campbell ’12, who led the group during her time at the University and will attend medical school next year, is interested in both medicine and cultural immersion. She spent seven months after graduation in Guatemala working alongside Middlesex and Sayaxche doctors in clinics and community hospitals.

“I was so appreciative that they were all willing to take me in and let me be involved,” Campbell said. “I had some experience shadowing doctors before, but there I got to be more involved in caring for patients and saw what the scope of practice is for different kinds of doctors.”

However, being a foreigner came with its own challenges, and Campbell was careful not to overstep her cultural bounds.

“The first thing I did was to find out what the lowest level nurse was, buy that uniform, and wear it,” she said. “There’s an assumption that, being from northern America, you know more, but that’s not true—the nurses there knew infinitely more than I did.”

According to Kelly, Students for Sayaxche is centered on learning and action; consequently, fundraising has not been a priority.

“We try to stay away from the group model type,” Kelly said. “Fundraising is important because we need money to ship and buy supplies, but we’re focused on not being an organization of just fundraisers or documentary-showers. We’re an organization of doers, where students who are involved in the partnership learn what it actually means to be a public health advocate instead of just sending a check.”

However, one of the group’s central projects does require money: the spring trip to Guatemala, which Kelly hopes will be a mainstay of the program in years to come. Currently, students must finance their own trips. For those unable to go, Kelly says he feels it is possible to take direct action even thousands of miles away.

“My favorite part has been the doing,” he said. “I’ve been in other groups before where it’s easy to get lost in the woodwork, where you’re not an important part of what you’re doing. Work goes unnoticed. It’s been great for me and others to sink our teeth into a project and tackle it head-on.”

Campbell stressed that learning can and should be its own goal.

“It’s okay that this isn’t Habitat for Humanity, where you have this product being created,” she said. “It’s valuable to gain an understanding of the way other people practice healthcare, especially as someone who’s aspiring to be in that field.”

Moreover, Campbell explained, deep understanding takes time.

“One of the things I realized in Guatemala is that when you go into another culture for less than a year or two, you’re going to be a learner first,” she said. “You need to embrace that. I felt guilty that they were investing all of this money in me, and I wasn’t producing anything. There’s the idea of volunteering as appearing in a third-world country and being helpful because you’re from the United States. I had to own the fact that I am the product—it’s not the hospital that gets built, or the 20 babies that are born. I can be an educator now, help in a more mindful way, and be able to contribute in the future.”

In the immediate future, Kelly’s hopes for Students for Sayaxche are modest, but his long-term vision is one of enduring progress.

“I would love it if our work could result in lasting changes for the hospital and the community,” he said. “That would be exciting.”

For Campbell, the future holds other trips to Guatemala.

“I want to go back there before medical school,” she said. “It’s kind of addicting. Medicine there is still about caring for people—so much more than we’re able to do here. Here, it’s a lot of paperwork and watching your back. But there, it’s so much more about the patients. Their model is going to be what keeps me interested in practicing medicine.”

Before Najla Said’s memoir “Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family” was a book, it was a one-woman play called “Palestine.” The memoir reads as though it were being acted: Said’s voice is rich, evocative and cadent, and so are the voices of the many characters that have built her childhood.

But Said’s memoir begins with only her, as a New York City fourth-grader who is terrified of Jews.

Manhattan is not an ideal place in which to be afraid of Jews. Said’s anxiety leaves her paralyzed with fear at a friend’s apartment, and, ironically, close to tears during a meeting with her (Jewish) school psychologist, to whom she has been sent because of her anxiety. Walking by synagogues leaves Said with the vague desire to apologize; for what, she has no idea.

It isn’t that she is scared of Jews, per se. Rather, she is scared of their finding out that she is an Arab. Said is the daughter of a polished Lebanese mother and an absent-minded, intellectual Palestinian father.

For the first decade of her life, Najla Said is embarrassed by her father, Edward Said, an esteemed scholar and author who coined the term “orientalism,” which is also the title of his famous 1978 book.

(“You know,” Najla quips, “like ‘Aladdin.’”)

But as a child, Said doesn’t mind the “Aladdin” designation. She will take anything that allows her to fit in at the Chapin School, a bastion of willowy blonde girls who spend their summers in the Hamptons and do not venture west of Central Park.

Najla Said is not willowy, or blonde, or Upper-East-Side. Because her father teaches comparative literature at Columbia University, Said lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side among professors from around the world and their families. At one point, young Said eats peanuts in her apartment with the famous philosopher Dr. Cornel West. Many of Said’s Chapin friends are forbidden from visiting her apartment; those who do visit come accompanied by drivers.

Najla Said is growing up in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the height of conflict in the Middle East, in a city far removed from the fighting but in a family very much invested in it. Dr. Said is vocal about his criticism of Israel’s occupation, fueling Najla Said’s Jewish anxiety. On her mother’s side of the family there is Beirut, the paradise-turned-warzone. When Said is still in Chapin’s Lower School, Beirut is already synonymous with instability and violence. Said is left to reconcile her happier childhood memories with the civil war that has taken over Lebanon.

At home in New York City, the ground does not shake with bombs, but Said’s legs shake with fear of ostracism. In third grade, Said is summoned for height and weight checks, in which a cheerful nurse calls out the girls’ heights and weights for all to hear. Said’s classmates take this opportunity to bond over common statistics (“You’re 94 pounds? So am I! We’re twins!!!!”), but Said is taller, heavier, and darker than her classmates. The height and weight checks only amplify her differences.

In high school, her father speaks at an assembly. Said’s friends, many of them Jews, gush over her father’s brilliance. Said’s friends are doubly wowed by her father’s ability to “diss” an obnoxious teacher who asks an inane question after the talk. As students swarm her father after the assembly, Said begins to realize that her father is actually sort of cool.

Though she’s slowly coming to terms with her identity, she is still standing with one foot in New York and the other one in Palestine. One evening, Said and her brother, Wade, are in the backseat of Dr. Said’s car, cruising the streets of New York around Christmastime, when the song “The First Noel” comes on the radio. Najla sings at the top of her lungs, “Born is the king of IIIIISSSSRRRAAAEEELLL.”

She receives a sharp jab in the ribs from Wade. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Born is the king of Occupied Palestine,’” he instructs her.

Wade Said is the activist, rejecting stereotypes left and right, but Najla Said, at the Trinity School, embraces her “exoticism.” Yes, she capitalizes on the very thing her father is famous for denouncing, and no, he doesn’t know. Her name means “big black eyes like a cow”; she learns in an advanced Latin class that this is high praise, especially in ancient times.

And the boys at Trinity, too, are enthusiastic about her foreign look. Jokes are made that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is resolved each time her lips meet those of a Jewish boy.

At this point, Najla Said is no longer afraid of Jews. She is, however, afraid of something else: her father’s imminent death. He has been diagnosed with leukemia that will kill him, and before he dies, he wants to see Palestine, the home from which he fled in the 1940s.

In the wake of her parents’ announcement of her father’s illness and the Palestine trip, Said makes what she calls “the brilliant decision to stop eating.” She acknowledges that this decision is linked to her father’s diagnosis. Said posits, too, that her anorexia is partly a quest to distinguish herself in a way that she can control: being really skinny is a less sticky identity than being really Palestinian.

Dr. Edward Said’s official birth certificate reads “Jerusalem,” changed from the nonexistent “Palestine,” because he cannot bear to have it read “Israel.” As soon as their plane touches down, the Saids discover that the Palestine of 1992 is nothing like the Palestine that Dr. Said left as a young man. Dr. Said meets with prominent Palestinian leaders in smoky rooms while Najla and Mrs. Said make small talk with their wives.

Said has found Palestine, but she does not know where she fits into it. She feels like a wealthy New Yorker when she visits the unimaginable squalor of Gaza, but in New York she feels “exotic,” a role she is growing increasingly less comfortable playing. As the car glides through Palestine’s destitute streets, Said is gutted, at home nowhere.

“Looking for Palestine” is not about global politics: Said does not take sides or resolve her feelings about international conflict, nor does she dwell on it. Debates such as the current boycott against Israeli universities by the American Studies Association (a subject upon which President Roth and Professor of East Asian Studies Vera Schwartz have opined for the Huffington Post and The Argus) do not interest her. Said is not an intellectual like her father. Rather, she tells stories: most notably, her own, distilling enormous conflict into personal experience.

“I don’t do [my father’s] work,” Said told the Princeton Alumni Weekly (Said graduated from Princeton in 1996). “I’m an actress, I’m not an activist. I hate going to protests….I’m a storyteller.”

And that story is enough.

Kids, this is the story of how I met my major. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t one of those guys who walked into college knowing exactly what I wanted with my life. It took some time to figure out. Three semesters, actually.

Sure, you’ve heard the short version of how I earned my Bachelor’s degree. But this is the long version. Once upon a time, before I was a “dad” or even a “graduate,” I had this whole other life. It was way back in 2012. I was a freshman at Wesleyan University.

I was living in the Butterfields with my first roommate, excited about exploring the full breadth of the liberal arts experience, but then course registration screwed the whole thing up.

Some of my friends already knew where they were headed in life. My roommate that first year had it all planned out: he met his major the second week of school, when he realized how much he loved his FGSS and Economics cross-listed class. I just had no idea. Normally, people tell you to just take what classes might help you with your career, but liberal arts is so go-with-the-flow. Barely anyone has a career path laid out, they tell you. But all the students you meet have something in mind. I swear, everyone I met seemed to be just flaunting their perfect internships and perfect theses and perfect lives.

When it came time for me to apply for an advisor, I just listed all of my interests, everything from anthropology to psychology to, well, anything with –ology at the end. They gave me someone from the English department. Go figure. She told me to get my GenEds out of the way and go from there, but I’m not really into one-semester stands. I was looking for some meaning, and I just couldn’t find it in “The Universe.”

But I figured that four months wasn’t too much of a commitment, even if I wasn’t totally devoted to the classes I was taking. I tried out a humanities class, but there’s only so much poetry you can read before it stops being romantic. Not to mention that the conversations got so convoluted, I wasn’t even sure we were still speaking the same language. SBS didn’t work for me, either. It was too political, and the patriarchy just bums me out. Oh, and there was a brief fling with “Intro to Programming,” but that didn’t last long at all. After the first problem set, BDNSM just hurts too much.

There I was, nearing the end of my first semester, and I still had no idea what type of major I was after. I felt like I couldn’t just keep taking intros and survey courses, and my advisor was beginning to get nervous. “You never call, you never email,” she said. “When will you finally just settle for a nice Jewish and Israeli Studies certificate and write me a thesis?”

So we made an appointment to sit down one afternoon with WesMaps. And that’s where I found her.

I didn’t know her last name at the time, but her first name was “Temporality.” And it was the most beautiful thing I ever heard. She was interdisciplinary, and that was new and exciting. I ranked her at number one and left the rest to fate.

But fate is a cruel mistress. My course registration results came back a week later, and she was nowhere around. I was devastated. I had seen my future with her. After her, how could I settle with “International Politics” and “Intro to Experimental Music”? Everything else just felt so shallow. And I was only given one day of adjustment before the school threw me back into the field. What I wanted was a period of mourning, but you can’t cry over filled classes.

I got myself together. I tried to make the best of Drop/Add. I sat in class after class to see if it was right for me, but how do you figure out if a subject is the one after only an hour and a half? Let me tell you, kids, it’s an impossible task.

I reached a new low. After a week of shifting my schedule around, considering a reduced course load, and flirting with pass/fail, I found myself sitting at my desk, alone, on a Friday night. My friends were all happy with their four selections. My roommate had even added a fifth on top of it all, just so he could fulfill his requirements sooner. And there I was, refreshing WesMaps every other minute. I don’t know what I expected: the perfect class to be created out of thin air? I almost accepted that I might spend another semester with no focus, no passion, no true academic love.

Out of sheer despair, I clicked on “Temporality” one last time. That’s when I saw it: an open spot.

I couldn’t believe it at first, but I gathered myself together and clicked “add.” I emailed my advisor. I emailed the professor. I went to the very next class. And I fell in love all over again.

Over the next two semesters, all I knew is that I wanted to spend the rest of my college life with “Temporality.” I devoted myself to every class in which she appeared. My friends all found her fascinating. Even my advisor approved.

The spring of my sophomore year, I finally declared. I would build my academics around her in the way nobody had ever done before. I proposed to be a University Major.

The next two years were a whirlwind. I shaped my major without even caring about how I would use it after graduation. I wrote my thesis and submitted it for honors. I even taught a student forum. We were so happy together, “Temporality” and I. We still are.

And that, kids, is how I met my major.

Millie Dent ’15 is a participant in this fall’s Cities in the 21st Century program, part of the International Honors Program within the School For International Training (SIT). The program’s goal is to examine the natural and intentional forces affecting city development across the world, focusing on issues of urban identity, ecological sustainability, and political action.

I have learned to thrive on the uncomfortable, the awkward, the embarrassing, and the unforgettable experiences I have each day while abroad. I accept the day as it comes with no expectations, and I am usually blown away by the results.

The program is multi-country: we started out in New Orleans for two weeks, spent five weeks in São Paulo, and then headed to Cape Town for a month. We split our time there, spending two weeks in a Muslim community and then two weeks in a township.

I have had many awkward experiences, especially since we are living with homestay families in each city we visit. The second day of our homestay in São Paulo, I managed to flood the bathroom. I did not realize the drain was closed during my shower. I stepped out into about an inch of water. I ran and woke up my host mom, who unfortunately spoke little English, so I just said, “Baniero! Baniero!” Luckily she understood. After we had mopped the bathroom, I tried to mime how I had managed to do so much damage. She just stared at me. Stupid Americans. I still cringe at the memory.

Although I could tell embarrassing story after embarrassing story, I have also had my world turned upside down. Seeing a favela first-hand, I first felt embarrassment. I have read about informal settlements, studied them, and learned about NGOs working in them, but part of me never accepted their existence. I felt utterly stupid walking around, wearing a pair of TOMs, Urban Outfitters jeans, and carrying my green Orvis backpack. Kids stared at us. I stared at the ground, watching untreated sewage flow down an open sewer in the street.

After the initial shock, I became more comfortable on site visits to the favelas. By the end of our month in São Paulo, four classmates and I had come up with a project to improve sewage, electricity, and water in a favela about an hour outside of the city center called CB12. We shared the project with city officials who were planning changes in the community.

One of my best experiences in the city was meeting Djan, a leader in the pixadore movement. By day, pixadores live regular lives with typical jobs, but at night they scale buildings and sign their names at the top of each one they climb. Each has hir own written language that ze uses on each building, so nobody, including other pixadores, knows who has marked a particular building.

They do not sign for glory or fame. Their main purpose is to draw attention to the problems of non-upper-class areas that the government is ignoring. Their painting would not be considered pretty, and they do not want their designs to be associated with those of graffiti artists. Pixadores paint only in black and will not stop until the government begins to address unemployment, lack of formal housing, food insecurity, sanitation, and the rest of the major issues plaguing the city.

Living in the Bo Kaap, a Muslim community in Cape Town, I experienced major culture shock. I would wake up to the call to prayer every day at 4 a.m. and hear my host family leave the house to pray at the mosque.

We did not have classes on Eid, the Muslim New Year, so my homestay brother took me to see the annual sheep slaughter. I was a little panicked, but once I learned the tradition behind it and that the meat was delivered to poor communities around the city, I recognized the benevolence of the community and its attitude toward those in need.

Our second homestay was in Langa, a township about a 25-minute taxi ride from the city center. Some days we had breakfast; other days we had fiber bars. We rotated between hot and cold showers, never knowing when the hot water might work. We were not allowed to leave the house after dark due to safety issues. As much of a change as it was, it has been my favorite homestay so far. Members of the family I lived with always invited me on walks around the neighborhood or to a weekend braai (barbecue), constantly asking me questions and making me feel welcome in their home. I became football buddies with my six-year-old brother, Kanyeso. He taught me how to finish a pack of gum in just one morning, and I taught him how to play Hacky Sack. He would creep into my room while I was doing homework, pleading to play because he was bored. I taught him some boxing moves and he would practice while I wrote my papers.

Although Apartheid officially ended in 1994, it is still very prevalent today. Racism runs rampant throughout the city, and the inequality was clear once I stepped outside of the city center. We walked through cardboard shack communities and saw the public bathrooms that the government is supposed to maintain looted of the actual toilets, which thieves sell. Doors are ripped off of the restrooms, making it dangerous for people to use them at night, so people have to keep buckets in their homes.

The major issue facing the city is housing. The government is slowly working to provide 800,000 people with houses, but they only have the funding to aid 8,000 a year. Housing is a right guaranteed in the South African Constitution, but the government is failing the people. Food security is also promised in the Constitution, but many people are starving and others lack the funds for healthy food, causing an obesity epidemic around the country. Furthermore, South Africa has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in the world. Once you dig deeper into Cape Town, past the usual tourist attractions of wine tours and Table Mountain, you discover the heartbreaking reality of the city.

Currently we are en route to Hanoi, where we will spend our five final weeks of the program. Nobody knows what to expect, but if it’s anything like Brazil or South Africa, we are in for another wild ride. This program has pushed me to my physical and emotional limits, opening my eyes to a world of issues I had given little thought to before.

One thing I know for sure is that I am only getting a surface view of urban issues facing these cities, and that there is a wealth of information I still have yet to understand or come in contact with. I came into the program expecting answers, but I am going to come away with even more questions, as well as the drive and passion to pursue these issues in the future.