 Over There
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By Sue Dickman '89
In the middle of May 2000, 10 years after
my own first trip to India, I found
myself sitting under a tree on the grounds of an old British hunting lodge near
the hill station of Mussoorie, in northern India, surrounded by a motley group
of American college students. They were waiting—not always patiently—for
their turns to tell us all what they had learned. As the co-director of a study-abroad
program based in Jaipur, I had first met these students at the Delhi airport
more than three months earlier, when they had been awkward, eager and afraid.
Now that the program was nearly over, their confidence was astonishing. In addition
to classes and homestays, they had done independent study: Some had volunteered
at social-service organizations in Delhi or Jaipur, some had studied Indian music
or traditional crafts, several had done creative writing projects, one had studied
the philosophy of the religious teacher J. Krishnamurthi.
The final presentation was by a young woman who had lived in the holy city of
Benares, right beside the Ganges River, where scores of people came each day
to bathe and to pray and, often, to die. The project she handed in was both thoughtful
and lovely: an essay and sketches, a series of photos, showing the role of circumambulation
in Hindu spirituality and in people’s individual spiritual lives. The impact
on her went well beyond her project, though. When she spoke about what she had
seen in Benares, her voice broke. She had learned not just about Hindu worship
but something about herself she had not known earlier, though she couldn’t
articulate it exactly. “I was surrounded by death,” she finally told
us, “and that changes the way you look at things.”
I had no doubt that that student—as well as some of the others—would
be a different person as a result of her experience. Her semester in India had
taught her many concrete things, things she could be tested on, things she could
write about. But the more significant lessons she and the others had learned
could not be contained within the confines of a spiral notebook. She could not
be the same afterward, nor would she want to be.
Students choose to go abroad for many reasons. Amherst students sometimes go
to get away from the small and occasionally claustrophobic campus community.
In other cases, they go toward something, attracted by another place. But whatever
their intentions and whatever the destination, all of them, like the student
in Benares, are transformed to one degree or another.
Dr. Mark Miller ’83 is a case in point. Miller modestly calls what he does “applied
anthropology,” but his work does not have modest goals. As director of
the Division of International Epidemiology and Population Studies at the Fogarty
International Center, part of the National Institutes of Health, Miller builds
teams of investigators from very different disciplines to solve international
health problems, especially in the developing world. Miller’s career—through
Yale Medical School, the Centers for Disease Control, the United Nations and
now the NIH—has always been interdisciplinary. He credits this to
the semester he spent in Kenya during his junior year at Amherst, an experience
he calls “life-transforming…not only opening my eyes to other worlds
but providing the foundation of much of the
interdisciplinary work in which I am currently engaged.”
Miller attended the St. Lawrence University program in Kenya because he
wanted to be immersed in an entirely different culture where language would not
be a problem. “Amherst is a wonderful place to stay for four years,” he
said recently, “but it’s also insular, and I wanted a small slice
of the real world, as both a contrast and supplement to the educational experience
there.”
His program involved several months of classes in Nairobi—including African
literature, Swahili and a comparative view of sociopolitical systems in East
Africa—along with two weeks of field experience (during which he lived
with the Samburu people) and a one-week rural homestay near Lake Victoria. For
the program’s required month-long internship, Miller chose to work with
Richard Leakey at the Kenya National Museum. Miller describes St. Lawrence’s
program as “very rich,” in its combination of academic classes and
field experience (the field experience, he says, was still academic, though “less
didactic”). After the program ended, Miller stayed on to pursue a second
internship in wildlife-behavior studies with the United
Nations Environment Program. Not only did his five months in Kenya provide him
with material for the senior thesis he wrote for Deborah Gewertz, the G. Henry
Whitcomb 1874 Professor of Anthropology, but it also whetted his appetite for
travel. He has sought out opportunities to work overseas in the years since.
Continued >>
Illustration: Curtis Parker/CORBIS
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