MAY, 2012

ITHACA, NY EDITIONCommon Paths

CONTENTS

From the Editor On June 4th of last year I

packed two suitcases, shoved a bottle of sunscreen in a Ziploc bag and headed to the airport. I would !y into a rickety runway set be-tween sprawling Montana mountains, and I would stay between those beacons for 10 weeks — like it or not.

Moments after I learned my luggage had been lost by the airline, I found the other summer interns for Project Vote Smart, a non-partisan political research retreat housed on the Great Di-vide Ranch, a small campus of beautifully constructed cabins and buildings made to help volunteers rebuild the structure of democracy with factual information about our politicians. We gathered in a white van and began the two-hour drive to the remote ranch; a place where only the o"ce had Internet and cell-phone service was a memory of the outside. In that car, I met my family.

One woman, a Baptist who called Louisiana home, asked a fellow intern if she was possessed by the devil when she mentioned her girlfriend. Another intern, a D.C. native with eyes that gloss when he explains his parents run his family like a business, believes the world should rightfully be run by rich men, and rich men alone. Yet another was

fresh o# a semester in Is-rael with a disdain for those outside his faith. And still an-other said his thick skin came from the taunts of school-children and their parents to an Arab-American after the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. All the same, we all declared the summer to be our best yet.

We called the ability to live with our di#erences — and discuss them openly — the “magic of paradise.” But it was more than that. It was a willingness to hear each out, to keep an open mind and to move on, even when moving on sometimes seemed like selling out your ideas.

Working in Montana taught me that people will understand each other if they know each other’s stories. We all play our speci$c roles in society and we need each other to get by. Further, writ-ers are the tour guides to this new world view.

I hope to dedicate my time to writing about the times when our paths cross and when we’re looking to be a part of something more than our-selves. %us, “Common Paths.” %is magazine is a collection of stories about the people who are working to make the world !ow a bit more smoothly and who have washed ashore in Ithaca, NY. Enjoy.

— Shea O’Meara

Fred WilcoxTHE WRITER

Tenzin ChoesangTHE PEACEMAKER

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9T hough Fred Wilcox,

associate professor of writing, was too

old to be drafted into the Vietnam War and didn’t set foot on Vietnamese soil until long after the dueling nations ceased $re, memories of the war’s victims drive his career. Wilcox’s newest book, “Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Viet-

nam,” is the $rst to complete-ly chronicle the e#ects of the United States’ use of chemical weaponry on the Vietnamese people. With an introduction by anti-war activist Noam Chomsky, “Scorched Earth” comes 50 years after the U.S. began using Agent Orange, a powerful herbicide manu-factured for the Department of Defense. Now, more than

three million people face chronic illnesses traced to the chemical. Published in September by Seven Stories Press, the pub-lication coincides with the re-release of Wilcox’s 1983 book on the subject, “Wait-ing For An Army to Die: %e Tragedy of Agent Orange,” the $rst book to reveal the e#ects of the chemical.

Wilcox’s inspiration to $ght against the injustices of international combat came during a visit to a military hospital in 1967. While living on the streets of New York City, Wilcox learned his cousin was ex-pected to die in St. Albans, a hospital for soldiers wounded during war. He said walking through the ward to meet

THE WRITER

Agent for Change

Writing by

Shea O’Meara

Photography by

Paige Klingerman

Fred Wilcox, associate professor of writing at Ithaca College, recently published a chronicle of the use of Agent Orange.

Sara FitouriTHE TEACHER

Oliva RoweTHE ADVOCATE

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THE PEACEMAKER

Leap of Faith

Writing by

Shea O’Meara

Photography by

Rachel Orlow

A t 14 years old, Tenzin Choesang said what would be his last

words to his parents for more than a decade and set foot on a three-month trek from Tibet to Nepal. “Our area didn’t have any

schools, most students my age didn’t have an opportunity to study,” he said. “I wanted to learn something, but in my area, there was no chance to learn anything, so I decided to escape.” While leaving his family

was di"cult, Choesang said stories of India and a chance to meet the Dalai Lama drove his decision to get away. He came across the Namg-yal Monastery in India, a Bud-dhist center constructed by the second Dalai Lama in Tibet

in the 16th century that was abandoned in 1959 when the Chinese government caused the Dalai Lama and 100,000 monks to !ee Tibet. Later, the refugees reestablished the monastery in India. Choesang began the tradi-

Tenzin Choesang, head monk of the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies, stands in the monastery’s main room.

Fred Wilcox holds a child suffering from chemical warfare in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.PHOTO COURTESY OF FRED WILCOX

his cousin was like walking into a Walt Whitman creation. Soldiers were tied to beds with ropes and cloth and screamed in agony. After listening to the stories of the mentally ill veterans in the ward and being asked not to join the war e#ort by his cousin, a soldier of 19 years, Wilcox became an anti-war activist. “At that point, I made up my mind and decided that as long as I lived I was never going to stop talking about the Vietnam War,” he said. “I was never

going to stop trying to get the United States to admit what it did. %is book is the outcome of that vow that I made.” Wilcox said he wrote the book to raise awareness about the e#ects of Agent Orange on soldiers from both sides of the con!ict and to show the damage war has on the environment and public health. %e real solution, he said, is to understand the lasting implications of releasing biological weapons into the air. “Look at Vietnam and look at the pictures in my book, because by not looking at these people you’re in denial about your country and the peril you face,” he said. For his $rst book, Wilcox traveled around the U.S. to speak with doc-tors and veterans to gather research. To complete “Scorched Earth,” which focuses on the Vietnamese people rather than mostly American veterans, he spent time in Vietnamese towns and children’s hospitals. His son Brendan Wilcox, a profes-sional photographer and writer, joined him in Vietnam to take the pictures featured in the novel. Brendan said he wanted to be a part of the project, but seeing the deformed and sickly children in Vietnamese hospi-tals often made him physically ill, and he sometimes missed interviews because he

had trouble dealing with the su#ering. “One of the hardest things for me was a photograph of this kid who looks like a skeleton,” he said. “He’s laying on his bed and he was the same age as me. All I could think was this kid could never leave the house. He’ll never have a girlfriend, he’ll never have kids, he’ll never do anything.” He said he continued working on the project because he believed in the cause and thought it could help people under-stand the lasting e#ects of war. “We have this view that we’re these great liberators, that we go to places and we liberate them and we’re done,” he said. “But it’s much more than that.” Je# Cohen, associate professor of journalism and director of the Park Center for Independent Media, was asked to review “Scorched Earth” for Seven Stories Press. He said the book is a crucial addition to the discussion of Agent Orange.

“People should react by saying to the government in Washington, ‘What are we doing to make up for what we did to the Vietnamese?’” he said. Seven Stories Press is known for its literature on human rights and social and economic justice. Assistant Editor Gabriel Espinal worked with Wilcox to complete the novel. Espinal said this book can help bring more attention to the issue. “Before I read ‘Scorched Earth’ I had images of sick people, but I didn’t have a very concrete idea of what that sick-ness entailed or that it was ongoing,” he said. Wilcox said this book isn’t the end of his research on the effects of chemical warfare because of people like his friend William Crapsur, a veteran who was crippled by exposure to Agent Orange. “I’ve met these people who refuse to give up,” he said. “They inspired me to keep going.”

“Look at Vietnam and look at the pictures in my book, because by not looking at these people you’re in denial about your country and the peril you face ”

— FRED WILCOX

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The Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist, a Buddhist retreat, on Aurora Street in Ithaca. COURTESY OF THE NAMGYAL MONASTERY

THE ADVOCATE

In Loving Memory

Writing by

Shea O’Meara

Photography by

Rachel Orlow

In April of her junior year of high school, Olivia Rowe brought

a plastic bag into a hallway bathroom and tied it over her head to stop her breathing.

She thought she wanted to kill herself. “I had my hand on the stall, so if I passed out the door would open,” she said. “I real-ized I didn’t really want to die.”

After nearly 20 minutes of waiting in the stall, she left to seek help. Rowe had emailed her high school guidance counselor for help earlier that year, but felt

her therapy program wasn’t helping her overcome her de-pression quickly enough. She continued to battle depres-sion and began cutting herself after watching an episode of

Ithaca College junior Olivia Rowe works to help prevent youth suicide through new youth-based outreach programs.

tional path to becoming a monk: long days of studying scripture and philosophy that began in the morning and ended at 9 p.m., unless a monk was behind in his studies. In that case a day could last until 10:30 p.m. “When we joined the monastery we had more than 40 or 50 students, so every day was competition,” he said. “I really put in too much e#ort. Sometimes I woke up around 2 o’clock in the morning to start class and memorize scriptures,” he said. After more than two years and two months of intense study, Choesang gradu-ated from the monastery. He wrote his parents a letter to tell them he had become a monk in India; they had lived without communication for more than 10 years. Without a modern postal service, it took that letter about seven months to reach his parents, who were still living in Tibet. “When they got my letter they said it was like a dream,” he said. “My father is really sensitive, very emotional. He was crying. My mother is very tough. She never cried.” Choesang became a teacher at the mon-astery in India. He said most monks don’t have outside connections Tibetans who live in the country are very poor, so the monas-tery didn’t have television or radio. “Most of us had a di"cult time,” Choe-sang said. “We don’t have any parents or relatives; we just focus on our studies.” Before he traveled to the United States, Choesang learned to speak English from a New Zealand native who worked at the monastery. She refused to teach the monks to write in English because, Choesang said, “maybe the monks would write love letters.” Two years ago, the board of directors in India told him it was his time to travel to the Ithaca branch of the monastery to teach Buddhist philosophy and guide the monastery’s members to lead a better life. Choesang is learning to write in English, but promises no love letters are in his future. Now, Choesang is the head monk of the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies, the North American seat and per-sonal monastery of the Dalai Lama, located on North Aurora Street in Ithaca. At the center, he begins each day with an hour of Buddhist practice, leads meditation at Cornell University and then works with the residents who have sought his spiritual advice. A monk’s life isn’t easy, but he says it’s worth it. “I help people generate more compas-

sion [and] lead a happy life,” he said. “Ngawang Dhondup, administrator of the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca, organizes the teaching schedules for the monastery and plans the monks’ days. He left Tibet with his family in 1959 to escape a likely death at the hands of the Chinese government to become a refugee in India. His family left with other Tibetans to preserve the Tibetan culture and traditions. Tibetans living near Ithaca gather at the monastery to keep their home culture alive. “Right now Tibet is being occupied by the Chinese,” he said. “Inside Tibet people are not allowed to speak; there are no hu-man rights. %ere is no religious freedom. We heard three days back, more than 32 people have been shot by Chinese police.” %e monastery serves as a place for people to come together to express their desires for Tibetan independence. “It is the responsibility of the Tibetan people, who are staying in a free country, to voice their rights so that the world’s people — especially the United States’ people — can know what is being done by the Chinese government.” Choesang meets with other local spiritual leaders to help $nd a connection between the faiths. He said promoting religious harmony in Ithaca and working

with people outside the Buddhist commu-nity is important because it is one of the Dalai Lama’s messages. “If we look closely, there are no big di#erences between Buddhists, Christians and Muslims. We’re the same,” Choesang said. “Every religion tells people how to lead a good life, how to care for other hu-man beings.” Amy Spenciner, a student at the mon-astery, said $nding the Buddhist com-munity and monks at Namgyal helped her overcome the stress and emotional distress caused by her career as a social worker specializing in emotionally troubled youth. “I got kind of a sense of peacefulness, but the way Buddhism works is that you really work with your mind and your thoughts,” she said. “It felt very non-judg-mental being here, and it felt like what I was looking for.” Dhondup said the mission of the monastery is to educate rather than change peoples’ opinions, and everyone is welcome. “To study at the monastery, one should not be a Buddhist,” he said. “It’s not important to change your religion. What is good is to study Buddhism and be good to you friends, your community and your neighbors.”

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Olivia Rowe and Brittany Helton pose together the summer before she passed away.PHOTO BY RACHEL ORLOW

Degrassi, a popular teen drama, which featured a character who struggled with cutting. Now a junior at Ithaca College, Rowe continued to struggle with cutting during her $rst years as a col-lege student. Rowe said she thinks people tend to cut themselves for two reasons: Either they have emotional pain they need to get out, or they are trying to distract themselves by thinking about physical pain instead. For her, deciding to cut came from a desire to do both. “%ere was one point freshman year [at IC] that I ran laps around my building because I had all this anxious energy,” she said. “I tore up magazines to try to get it out, and nothing worked. I had always known that cutting was harmful, but I didn’t care.” Rowe said leaving her troubles at home to go to college and having the freedom to act on her own helped her realize that she wasn’t trapped in her di"cult day-to-day life. “%e thing that I got stuck with in high school was that I never really saw the better part of life,” she said. “%at’s where people who contemplate suicide get stuck, because they don’t think things get better and that they’re always going to live like that.” Now, Rowe works with the Suicide Prevention and Crisis Service of Ithaca to raise awareness about suicide and preven-tion in the community. “People who are considering suicide often feel very much

alone,” she said. “If you know of other people in that situation, or there are other people around who have gone through that same thing, it helps.” According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, every 14.2 min-utes someone in the United States dies by suicide. In 2009 about 36,909 people took their own lives, 4,371 of those dead were between the ages of 15 and 24 years old. But for Rowe, her own suicide attempt isn’t her only connection to the issue. On Aug. 4, 2010, Rowe received a phone call from the sister of her best friend, Brittany Helton, telling her that 19-year-old Brit-tany had killed herself. At the time, Rowe had been waiting for Helton to text her back so the friends could spend the day together. “I didn’t know my friend had struggled with anything I had struggled with at all,” she said. “She would make anyone happy, which I found out later was one of the reasons why she didn’t tell anyone — be-cause she felt too much pressure to act the way everyone had always seen her and to be the one who was always full of life and the one who makes everything better.” Christie Helton, Helton’s adoptive mother, said Rowe and her daughter were like the Olsen twins growing up, “funny and carefree.” Helton was a dean’s list stu-dent in college with a family and group of friends who loved her. Helton did not $t the stereotype of a suicidal teen, Christie Helton said. “It doesn’t just happen to kids who come from a broken home or kids that come from ‘lower class society,’ as they call it, or kids with drug problems,” Christie Helton said. After their daughter’s death, her parents founded the Brittany Helton Memorial Foundation, an organization that promotes awareness about suicide and honors Hel-ton’s life. “College kids and high school students relate to younger people,” Christie Helton said. “With the work she’s doing we’re able to utilize her to get through to the kids, telling her own story and telling Brittany’s story.” Rowe said the shock of losing her friend and standing by as Brittany’s family and friends mourned their loss helped her overcome her own thoughts of suicide. “Watching everyone go through that pain and thinking, ‘How could she have

done this?’ just turned me around,” she said. Rowe recently developed the proj-ect “Unspoken Stories: %e Tragedy of Suicide,” a series of photographs posted on Facebook that shows her struggle with los-ing her best friend to suicide. She said she and her colleagues at the Ithaca prevention center were inspired by a series of Tum-blr blogs that told stories of people who thought they had no voice to express their personal hardships through photo strips of them holding signs. She said the project is part of an ef-fort to make resources more accessible to young people that includes an expanded social media presence and online chat forums. “People don’t really call on the phone anymore and talk to people,” she said. “So how many are really going to want to call the crisis line? Lidia Bernik, associate project direc-tor of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, said the lifeline has 152 crisis centers across the United States and works to connect people considering suicide to local resources. Part of this mission is a partnership with Facebook that makes it possible for users to report content they

think represents signs of suicide. Facebook administrators evaluate a reported post and send the user information about the lifeline if the content is shown to warrant that action. Currently, the lifeline is run-ning a pilot program that o#ers profes-sional assistance to people by online chat “We feel that there is certainly a role for technology in assisting folks in need,” Bernik said. “It’s just become a very normal means of communication. %ere is some evidence to suggest that people feel more comfortable disclosing sensitive information via electronic means.” %ough talking about Helton makes some of her friends uncomfortable, Rowe said it’s important that her friend’s memory be preserved and used to prevent other people from making the same pain-ful decisions. “[My friends] don’t talk about her that much because they’re like, ‘It makes us sad to even talk about the good things,’” she said. “But it’s helpful, and I think she should be remembered.” To learn more about Rowe’s work with suicide prevention, visit facebook.com/pages/Suicide-Prevention-and-Crisis-Services/361595137186509.

Olivia Rowe created a Facebook album of photos to tell her story and reach out to young people who struggle with suicide.

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PHOTO BY RACHEL ORLOW

THE TEACHER

Lessons from the West Bank

Writing by

Shea O’Meara

Photography by

Rachel Orlow

Palestinian girls make cards for their mothers at with a Teach for Palestine school. PHOTO COURTESTY OF SARA FITOURI

As then-junior Sara Fi-touri stood in front of a class of Palestinian

girls, a sudden explosion shook the windows and made her ears rattle. %e students continued their work. For them, it was normal. Fitouri spent the spring of her junior year in Nablus, Pal-estine, as a volunteer for Teach for Palestine, an organization

that provides free English language and sports lessons to Palestinian youth. In that time, she learned to ignore the sound bombs hitting the streets. She was o#ered a job with the organization through friends she met visiting Nablus, but wasn’t sure she could do it. As a child in Colorado, she was taught to believe Palestinians were her brothers and sisters

by her father, a Muslim born in Libya. But turning away from the traditional path of an American student — getting a diploma, then a job or a higher degree — was di"cult because it wasn’t what was expected of her. “I wasn’t going to have another opportunity to do this,” she said. “Even though it meant telling my mother that

‘Hi, your daughter’s running o# into a con!ict zone,’ it’s something I knew I wouldn’t have been happy with myself if I didn’t do.” On her $rst day of work at the girls’ high school in Nablus, she saw a 20-foot wall with an additional 10-foot-high chain-link fence decorated with ivy surrounding the school building and yard. A security

guard stood watch outside. Only women are allowed inside the gates, so the 12- to 15-year-old girls could escape the burdens on Muslim women in the city. “It’s this incredible free zone where I didn’t have to be worried about what guys are watching me on the streets,” she said. “On the streets, [women] have to be very poised and covered.” Helen Brooks, assistant director of Teach for Palestine, said some of the female volunteers struggle with being harassed on the street because women are expected to be either at home or work. “Girls around here, particularly high school girls, are discouraged from play-ing sports and being con$dent — all the things Sara really likes and encourages them to do,” she said. For Fitouri, teaching wasn’t about help-ing the students build language skills — most of the girls won’t be allowed to leave the country or be able to a#ord a college degree. “I had some concerns with what I was teaching them,” she said. “It wasn’t my place to go in and say, ‘Yeah, liberate yourselves,” Fitouri said. “I just wanted to understand, and I wanted them to under-stand me.” She said part of getting to know her students was seeing the violence they lived with every day. While traveling outside of the city, she saw 18-year-olds car-rying ri!es, and the people around her didn’t think twice. She !inched as $ghter airplanes roared above of her school, but her students didn’t look. Martyr post-ers plastered the walls of buildings, and a nearby cemetery was constantly $lled with fresh !owers and pictures of children. “Nablus was hit the hardest during the last intifada,” Fitouri said. “%ey were massacred, so it’s like you don’t meet someone who doesn’t have somebody dead in their family.” She said seeing how the money the U.S. sent Israel as foreign aid was used to oppress her students and their families made her question the importance of her work in the classroom. “It seems so contrite and fake to be like, ‘I taught them English,’” she said. “Who cares? My tax dollars, my own personal tax dollars, have undone any good that I could have done.” In the classroom, Fitouri taught her students the few American songs she

could $nd that were appropriate for her Muslim classroom. She decided her students would learn “I Am Woman” by Helen Reddy. “Every time they were singing ‘I am woman, hear me roar,’ I was forgetting for a few moments the pain I was in or, for a few moments having a connection with them,” she said. “I was the big, strong teacher who would never fail and never fall, and was there to hug them when they needed to cry. I needed that class more than they ever did.” %e day before her three-month visa expired, Fitouri left Nablus. One student gave her a pouch with a Palestinian !ag-shaped necklace, and letter that read, “I love you so much, I know you’ll probably forget me, but I’ll never forget you. Always remember Palestine.” Fitouri said her co-workers, like her, wanted to do something in Palestine other than simply teach English. Some came to escape student debt, some were looking for a distraction after a personal disaster and some were so disillusioned with their country’s policies they chose to leave. “It wasn’t the satisfaction of volunteer-ing and the ‘self sacri$ce’ we could claim out teaching,” she said. “%ey needed to get away from something or they needed to $nd something.” Fitouri’s father, Ezzedin, noticed she

had changed when she came home. He said she was more mature and grateful for what she has. “I can see it in her face that she really loved them,” he said. “I’m so proud of her.” Fitouri continues her Palestinian adventure on campus as a teaching as-sistant for Beth Harris, associate professor of politics. She helps to facilitate Skype conversations and shares blogs between students at the college and students from a university in Nablus next to where she lived. %e initiative is part of a partner-ship between Harris and Peyi Soyinka-Airewele, associate professor of politics, which focuses on connecting classrooms around the world. “When we’re learning, we make as-sumptions about the given understand-ings that our knowledge is based on,” Harris said. “Reaching beyond borders creates a greater self-consciousness among the students, both individually and collectively.” Fitouri said working in Palestine made her see the con!ict as more than a policy debate or a foreign issue. “It’s not this abstract Jews versus Muslims, and Palestinians versus Israelis,” Fitouri said. “As much as people want to declare themselves neutral, if you’re not speaking out against the occupation, then you’re, by default, supporting it.”

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Cover art by Shea O’Meara