May 2006 Stories

Trio Oregon Warms Up

May marked the first public performance of a new music ensemble at Willamette. Trio Oregon, composed of pianist Jean-David Coen, violinist Daniel Rouslin and cellist Hekun Wu, recently gave a warm-up concert at Willamette before heading to China and Japan. They will perform seven concerts in seven cities, including one at Willamette’s sister institution, Tokyo International University, in Kawagoe, Japan.

The concert tour, organized by Wu, retraces familiar territory. Trio Oregon will perform and give master classes at Shanghai’s Conservatory of Music, where Wu once studied and taught, and at other cities across his homeland. The concert will feature pieces by Beethoven and Brahms, a bittersweet reflection on World War II by Russian composer Shostakovich, and a piece by Willamette composer-in-residence John Peel, in which “particles of music” drift away from each other.

Pianist Jean-David Coen: Practice makes perfect
Pianist Jean-David grew up in Beverly Hills, the son of a screenwriter and novelist. “My parents recognized the value of the arts, and the value of children doing something that would challenge them and take them outside of themselves,” he says. He was enrolled in piano lessons at age five with a legendary teacher — the first of many. “I had to be pushed to practice, but I always knew that there was nothing more important than music.” As he grew older he came to understand that command of the instrument necessitated hours at the keyboard.

“By the age of seven or eight I had the understanding that music did something to me outside of my normal experience. I got chills when I listened to Beethoven. That was something even Sandy Koufax, the pitcher for the Dodgers, couldn’t do.”

Coen has performed with numerous orchestras, appeared in solo recitals in Paris and New York and been featured on National Public Radio. His students have won major international piano competitions and performed at Carnegie Hall.

Daniel Rouslin: Wearing his heart on his sleeve
Violinist Daniel Rouslin’s first musical influence was his grandfather’s 78 rpm records. His grandfather, a grocer and tailor, had played violin and conducted a small orchestra in England before coming to America. Rouslin’s parents scheduled piano lessons for him at age six, but Rouslin had already fallen in love with the violin, which he heard at a school assembly. “I came home and said I wanted to play the violin, and I’ve been doing it ever since,” he says.

“I tell my students it’s not enough just to practice hard,” says Rouslin, who plays an 1860 French violin. “Music is a whole world. You grow by listening to performers who have something to say and the tools to say it.” Rouslin’s playing has changed as he has matured. “I’ve stopped worrying about mistakes and worry more about communicating. I’m not as afraid to wear my heart on my sleeve.”

Rouslin has toured in South America and the Middle East for the U.S. State Department. Before coming to Willamette he toured in Europe and the United States with the award-winning Delos String Quartet, in which he was first violinist. He is currently concertmaster with the Salem Chamber Orchestra.

Cellist Hekun Wu: To be a complete artist
Cellist Hekun Wu came of age in China during the Cultural Revolution, when music conservatories were closed — all except four. At age 12, Wu was admitted to one, where he threw himself into piano and cello practice. His talent later earned him a place at the highly competitive Shanghai Music Conservatory.

In the 1980s Wu left China to begin studies at the Paris Conservatory, where he immersed himself in all that had once been forbidden — art museums, the opera and literature. “I was in my early 20s,” he says, “a time when one absorbs an understanding of life. That period made a huge impact on me as an artist.”

Wu went on to energize orchestras with his conducting and to electrify audiences in Europe, China and the United States with his cello performances. He has been featured on numerous radio and television broadcasts, and currently conducts the Salem Chamber Orchestra.

Wu says, “To be a complete artist you have to have a scientist’s mind, a philosopher’s way of thinking, the imagination of a poet, and the stoicism of a Buddhist monk.”

Composer John Peel: Rethinking music
Peel began his musical career singing in a boys’ choir and playing clarinet and oboe. At age 15 he began riding his bike to a nearby university for lessons. “I wanted to play more than one line,” he says, “so I began studying piano and composition.” Organ lessons soon followed, and mentors gave him insight into the life of a musician, including the commitment involved.

That commitment carried Peel through graduate school, where he set biblical psalms and French poetry to music. He was a traditional composer until he discovered modern French composers, especially Debussy. “I was attracted to their tonal beauty, their abstraction and sensibility,” he says. “They projected a radical rethinking of musical color.” Since then, Peel, a modernist composer by training, has been on “a trajectory toward formal loosening, moving toward wider melodic expression.”

Peel is currently composer-in-residence at Willamette University, where he writes solo, chamber, symphonic and operatic compositions. His works have been performed by symphonies across the nation, and he has received numerous awards and grants.

Natalie Muren: Runner at Heart

Natalie Muren ’06 lives by the motto “Once a runner, always a runner.” She followed it in high school, when she ran around the soccer field before deciding to try cross country. She followed it while on Willamette’s track and cross country teams, despite dealing with a painful stress fracture in her sacrum, the triangular bone located between the two hip bones, which left her unable to train or compete for two years.

She overcame that difficulty to rejoin her cross country teammates in the fall, only to suffer re-injury before track season. But she continues to follow her motto, talking of how she hopes to join a running club in Pasadena, Calif., when she goes there this fall for graduate study at the California Institute of Technology.

“I have all these dreams of coming back and running with people at Willamette who I’ve wanted to run with but couldn’t,” Muren says. “Instead, I’ve been cheering them on from the sidelines. We all talk about wanting to come back in 10 years and run a race together.”

Muren’s running talent — along with her academic strength — has earned her a prestigious NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship worth $7,500. She is the fourth member of Willamette’s cross country or track program to receive the award in the past two years.

The sacrum injury was difficult for Muren, who took five trips to the national championships in cross country and track and field and twice earned All-West Region honors in cross country. The pain became so great that she couldn’t run at all. She took about 10 months off from her passion, going biking or swimming instead. But the draw of another cross country season her senior year brought her back to training.

“Trying to get back into shape was really hard because I hadn’t been able to run much and my body just couldn’t take it,” she says. “My coaches, Matt McGuirk and Jimmy Bean, were amazing at helping me take the training really slow so I could build up gradually.”

But sports aren’t everything to Muren. Thanks to several of her passionate science teachers at McNary High School in Keizer, Ore., she developed a strong interest in chemistry. She double majored in chemistry and Spanish, and spent her last two summers conducting molecular biology research at Princeton University and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

As a sophomore, she was named a Barry M. Goldwater Scholar, an honor given to students in the fields of mathematics, natural sciences and engineering. This year, she also received an honorable mention for the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

“Natalie is a true problem-solver who likes to discover the next big question,” says chemistry Assistant Professor Sarah Kirk, who has worked closely with Muren. “She is a conscientious and hard-working student, and I am confident that she will make great strides in the field of chemistry.”

Muren enjoys studying the way chemistry and biology relate, looking at the chemical side of biological questions. She plans to pursue chemistry in Cal Tech’s graduate program. She has been highly involved in Willamette’s Chemistry Club, visiting local elementary schools to teach science to students.

“We just do a lot of combustion reactions that look really cool and exciting,” she says. “We’re trying to get them excited about science. I also think it’s a big issue to show them that females can do science, too.”

Muren’s love for interacting with others could lead her to become a teacher once she finishes school, although that is just one of many possible careers she is considering. “I like research, but I also like working with people and explaining ideas. I could totally see myself teaching. But I have very diverse interests, so I hope to be involved in a lot of different things.”

No matter where she ends up, Muren knows what she’ll be doing in her free time. “There’s just something about running and finishing a race and doing really well — there’s just nothing else like it,” she says. Once a runner, always a runner.

Willamette Student Receives Two National Scholarships

As far as summer jobs go, if you want to study environmental science, working at Yellowstone National Park is as perfect as it gets. Audrey Squires ’07 spent her past two summers there as a waitress, enjoying the natural beauty of the landscape in her free time, but this summer she will return through a Student Conservation Association internship to help remove the invasive lake trout from Yellowstone Lake.

Her internship will allow her to use her science education and develop more skills for her future. But she’ll also get to have some fun. “There’ll be times when I’ll get to go in the backcountry for a few days to just fish for trout,” Squires says.

When she returns in the fall, Squires will have financial support in continuing with her environmental science major through two national scholarships she received for her academic excellence and leadership. Squires is one of two Willamette students this year to receive a $2,400 award from the Datatel Scholars Foundation. She also is the only student from Oregon this year to win a $1,000 “Diamond 45”/UbiquiTel Regional Scholarship from the Tug McGraw Foundation.

Squires runs on Willamette’s track and cross country teams, something she also did in high school. Her father, Rick Squires, just retired last year after many years of coaching track at her high school in Springfield, Ore. So, as Squires puts it, she “grew up at the track.”

She also dedicates much of her time to helping children. Squires has worked for three years at Bush Elementary School in Salem, helping in classrooms and acting as a mentor. She helped organize a campus event this spring called Bearcat Day, where about 150 students from Bush Elementary visited Willamette and learned how to play sports from the University’s athletes.

Squires even took her talent for working with children to Quito, Ecuador, where she studied last fall and helped teach in a school for children of construction workers. The poverty of the children was overwhelming, Squires says, but she was amazed at the students’ enthusiasm despite their living conditions.

“They were just so happy and full of energy anyway,” she says. “Each day when I walked into the classroom, I was overwhelmed by a sea of children trying to hug me. Their love for others and enthusiasm to learn truly inspired me.”

Arabic Life: Student to Study in Middle East

Matthew Buehler ’07 is venturing into the international political realm the old-fashioned way: by working his way up. He started when he was 12, knocking on people’s doors in Lake Oswego, Ore., to convince them to vote for Bill Klammer for mayor. In the 2000 election, he turned to state politics, campaigning for Jim Hansen in an unsuccessful bid for state representative. Four years later, Buehler went to Washington, D.C., for several months to work for the Department of Homeland Security, where he helped with security for a national presidential election and for the funeral of President Ronald Reagan.

Now, as he finishes his studies at Willamette, he is making his way to the Middle East, where he will study this summer and next academic year through two different national scholarship programs.

“I’ve always been interested in public service and working on campaigns,” says Buehler, who majored in politics and history. “I loved going door-to-door and getting people’s views on issues. It showed me the diversity of America.”

Buehler will spend this summer as a William Jefferson Clinton Scholar at the American University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. While there, he will study Arabic and comparative Middle Eastern foreign policy.

For the next academic year, Buehler will continue his study of Arabic language and culture at the University of Damascus Arabic Language Center in Syria. He received the National Security Education Program David L. Boren Undergraduate Scholarship, which encourages U.S. students to study languages critical to U.S. national security. In exchange, Buehler will seek work in the federal government. He would like to get a graduate degree in political science and become a professor or work for a national security agency.

Buehler’s work with the Department of Homeland Security showed him the great need for Americans to have a better understanding of Arab culture. “I realized that we were inventing all these security policies, but we were doing it without in-depth knowledge of the culture and the language,” he says. “We need more intelligence analysts who are culturally sensitive, and that’s what I want to be.”

Receiving a fellowship named after President Clinton is quite ironic for this conservative student who is involved with Willamette’s College Republicans. But Buehler says he likes to keep an open mind and listen to different opinions; he also is chairman of the Willamette Event Board’s Issues and Controversies Committee, which brings speakers with diverse views to campus.

“I’m a very political person, but I don’t dislike the Democratic party so much that I wouldn’t work for a Democratic president,” he says. “I think we basically have the same goals and same values, we just have different ways of getting there.”

Buehler says his parents cringed when they heard he received the two national awards — they were excited for him, but nervous about him living in the Middle East with the current tensions there. Buehler admits he’s a bit nervous himself, especially if the United States decides to take military action against Iran, creating unrest among the people. But he sees the U.S. government’s current work in Iraq as critical — no matter why the country entered the war in the first place.

“Regardless of what your opinion is on the war, I think we have an obligation to do what we can to help that country get back on its feet,” he says. “Whatever I can do to help with that is good.”

Willamette Student Earns Doctoral Fellowship for Plant Research

How can crops survive and still be productive in countries with harsh, warm climates? Or if global warming does occur, what will happen to plants struggling to grow in hotter temperatures?

These are the questions Malia Dong ’06 has been asking during her time studying biology at Willamette. And now Dong will take her plant molecular biology research to Michigan State University, where she was awarded a University Enrichment Fellowship through the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory. She was one of just 20 among the incoming class of about 500 doctoral students at Michigan State to be chosen for the fellowship. Michigan State has one of the premier plant biology graduate programs in the U.S.

Dong says Michigan State has multiple labs examining different aspects of ecological stress on plants, and she’ll decide which labs to work in once she arrives. “They’re really good there at letting you explore and not tying you down to a certain type of research right away,” she says.

Dong’s research focuses on Nicotiana glauca, or tree tobacco. Previous work led by biology Professor Gary Tallman showed that tree tobacco guard cells survive at higher temperatures, Dong says. An ongoing project at Willamette is trying to determine how these cells are able to survive at high temperatures when most other plant cells die. Dong decided to examine one specific plant hormone called auxin. At lower temperatures, the plants cannot survive without auxin, but at higher temperatures, they do fine without it, Dong says. She wants to know why this happens.

She worked with Tallman through the Science Collaborative Research Program, a Willamette program that allows undergraduates to collaboratively research with faculty members. Dong’s research was funded by the Arthur Wilson Fellowship at Willamette, for female students who plan to pursue graduate studies in molecular biology.

Dong didn’t know research would be her passion when she first decided to major in biology. She thought she might be a high school teacher. “But after I started doing research, I discovered I enjoyed that,” she says. “I was kind of surprised. Research is very different than doing a biology lab in school. With research, there’s no wrong answer. You’re always asking questions about why this is working, or why this is not working.”

Science isn’t Dong’s only passion. She also has an artistic side, which she demonstrates through dance. Growing up in Kaneohe, Hawaii, not far from Honolulu, she learned various forms of Chinese dance. She traveled to China to share her dancing, and competed in Chinese dance through high school. When she came to Willamette, Dong joined the dance team, and she has been captain for two years.

Dong never expected that her college career would take her into a biology lab to examine the cells of plants, but now her research has seeped its way into the rest of her life. “I notice my surroundings more,” she says. “I’ll notice when plants are sick, or I’ll try to quiz myself when I’m walking home past the Capitol, to see if I can recognize the plants.”

African Faith: Student to Study Religion through Watson Fellowship

Michael Le Chevallier ’06 majored in religious studies and French at Willamette University, but he’s still not sure exactly where his learning will take him. In one imagined future, he sees himself as a professor, sharing his knowledge with others. In another, he has his dream job as a religious consultant for National Geographic magazine — a position he’s not sure exists but one that could allow him to travel and interact with people of other religions. Or maybe he’ll be a children’s librarian.

“Clearly, I have diverse interests,” he says. “But I can’t stop studying religion right now. I think it’s one of the most relevant things I could have studied here. It affects the way I live, the way I understand the world.”

His passion shows in the way he gushes when asked about his studies, eager to elaborate on his experiences learning about world religions. Le Chevallier’s thirst for knowledge will carry him to Africa for the next year through a prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, a grant for independent study and travel outside the United States. Le Chevallier describes it as “a $25,000 fellowship to go explore your passion for a year.” He is the fifth Willamette student to be named a Watson fellow, and one of 50 students in the country to receive the award this year.

Le Chevallier titled his project “A Faith of Their Own: A Study of Inculturation in Africa.” He plans to immerse himself in local religion in Uganda, Tanzania, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia and examine how Christianity — particularly Catholicism — has blended with traditional African cultures. “It can’t help but happen, this blending. I just want to go there and document it,” he says. “What I really want to know is how the Africans are making their faith relevant.”

The Catholic church is highly based on tradition, which has had an influence on religious ceremonies in certain African countries, Le Chevallier says, although many churches there are independent and have adopted native and Christian practices. He is particularly excited about studying Ethiopia, which has not been colonized, to see how its long-time Ethiopian Orthodox church has managed to maintain its own traditions, he says.

He will observe different ways Africans express their faith at their services, like through dance, for instance. “Language for us is just spoken language, but over in Africa, the body is expressing these ideas. Dance isn’t just something added to the service to make it aesthetically pleasing. Dance is an expression.”

Le Chevallier, who aspires to earn a PhD in theological studies, has long been a keen observer of religion’s impact on people’s lives. He received a grant from the Lilly Project, a program at Willamette that helps students discern their calling in life, which took him to Berkeley, Calif., in spring 2005 to study at the Jesuit School of Theology. While there, Le Chevallier ministered to inmates at San Quentin State Prison.

When he returned to Oregon, he took his ministry work to the Oregon State Penitentiary, where he leads the music at worship services. He noticed a definite difference in the services at San Quentin, which drew numerous inmates, and those in Oregon, a less-churched state with fewer attendees.

Regardless of how many attend, Le Chevallier says he has relished his time working with the inmates. “I can go there and talk to any type of guy,” he says. “I enjoy that opportunity to engage in conversation with people who are ignored by the rest of society.”

Love for Language: Fulbright Grant Takes Student to Korea

Poetry is a precise form of writing in many ways, one where each word is chosen carefully for its significance to the entire work. So when you take those words and try to translate them into a different language, the meaning, beauty or flow can easily be lost.

That’s how Eric Swinn ’06 feels about the English translations of the works of some of his favorite poets, who are Russian. He loves Mikhail Lermontov and Sergei Yesenin for the masterful way they use the Russian language. “Their language is so rich, they’ve been able to keep the rhyme and the rhythm without going into the mundane,” he says.

Swinn is a lover of language, getting his degree in Russian and French, and he’s ready to take on the words of yet another culture. Swinn will spend the next year living in South Korea thanks to a grant he won this spring from the Fulbright Program for U.S. Students. The program allows Americans to study and conduct research in more than 150 countries. Swinn will be teaching English in a secondary school.

Swinn says he is ready for the task, partly because of three of his activities during his time at Willamette. One was interacting with Koreans at a church in Salem, which taught him about that culture. Another was tutoring students at Tokyo International University of America, which got him used to the rote style of teaching used in East Asia.

The third, which perhaps gave him the most experience, was teaching Russian at South Salem High School. The school asked him to teach one Russian class when its regular teacher went on maternity leave. Swinn, who has a temporary teaching license, agreed.

“A lot of the ideas I had about what I would be like as a teacher were broken down,” he says. “I have always imagined I’d be the sort of teacher like Michelle Pfeiffer in ‘Dangerous Minds’ or Robin Williams in ‘Dead Poets Society,’ but what really made them great instructors was how they were able to adapt to their environment, not how they made it adapt to them. I finally learned that the best way to be an effective teacher is to pay scrupulous attention to the students’ needs, which vary drastically day to day.”

Swinn became interested in the Russian language when he discovered its literature, specifically its poetry. He spent his entire junior year studying in Ukraine, and he plans to return to Eastern Europe through the Peace Corps after his Fulbright experience. He wants to gain more exposure to Slavic languages, particularly the way people living in small villages share their history through oral tales.

Swinn is interested in studying languages as a whole, beyond just learning how to speak them. “I always have languages running through my mind,” he says. “It’s interesting how language develops.”

Sustaining the Future: Student Lands Udall Scholarship

Kirsten Nelsen ’08 didn’t set out to get involved with sustainability efforts at Willamette University. She wasn’t even planning to be an environmental science major when she arrived. But on a campus where the idea of sustainability — leaving the land in better shape than when it was found — is an integral part of university life, Nelsen couldn’t help but take part as a member of Willamette’s Sustainability Council.

“I wanted to be involved, but I didn’t go seek it out. It found me,” she says. “And now I go seek things out.”

Nelsen, known to her friends at Kiry, now is focusing her studies on environmental issues. This spring, she received a $5,000 national award that will help her with that goal: the Udall Scholarship, for students seeking careers related to the environment. She is the ninth Willamette student to win this award.

Nelsen grew up around nature, living on her parents’ five-acre Christmas tree farm in Hillsboro, Ore., where her father hand-chose the family’s tree each year and specially pruned it to prepare for the next holiday. But beyond that, she wasn’t very familiar with environmental issues until coming to Willamette and taking a class in the subject.

Now, she has strong views on the direction of the environmental movement. She worries that it has a stereotype of not being part of “normal” America. “I think the environmental movement has taken a wrong turn somewhere, because it doesn’t have attention anymore.”

Nelsen plans to use her scholarship to study in Denmark in the fall, examining what that country is doing in the area of “green” businesses. “They’re really advanced with all kinds of legislation on sustainability. All the Scandinavian countries are good at that.”

She joined Willamette’s Sustainability Council last year. Her main passion is convincing businesses to adopt sustainability practices because, as she says, “it’s the only way for the market economy to work.” Businesses think it’s cheaper and easier to ignore sustainability, and although the technology is there to help them, they find it inconvenient, Nelsen says.

“I think if we’re going to preserve our Earth by any means, we need to focus on the economy,” she says. “People hear that. People hear money more than sentimental arguments.”

Willamette Student Wins Service Fellowship

Megan Flora ’06 finished her college degree this school year, but she’s not done with learning. Not one to limit herself to just one goal or one option, Flora currently works at a public relations office and a physical therapy clinic, two jobs that couldn’t be much more different.

In keeping with her inquisitive spirit, Flora will spend the next two years in Colorado working for El Pomar Foundation through a competitive national fellowship she won this spring. She will develop her leadership skills at the foundation, which gives grants to support state nonprofits involved in health, human services, education, arts and humanities, and civic and community initiatives.

“I am just looking for a different experience out of college rather than just going straight into the working world,” she says. “I feel like there might be a job out there that I might never have heard of or even considered, and this fellowship might open those doors for me.”

Flora is excited to be going to Colorado, a place where she lived briefly in the past and where many of her family members reside. El Pomar is well-known throughout Colorado for its work. Besides giving grants to other groups, the foundation runs 11 of its own programs to support people who serve their communities. Flora will spend her first year learning about the foundation’s programs, and her second year helping to direct them.

“It’s a unique opportunity,” she says. “I never imagined I would get it. It was a viable opportunity, but I wasn’t counting on it.”

Flora majored in exercise science and keeps in shape by running. She first got into exercise science because of a fascination with how the human body works. She’s not sure if she’ll seek a career in the same field, but she says the skills she learned in her major — how to think critically, write well, do difficult research and work through problems step by step — will benefit her no matter what she does.

“I’ve heard so many people say you don’t necessarily use your major after college, but rather the skills and experiences you developed,” she says.

Putting Things Back Together in New Orleans

Small frame houses had shifted off their foundations and floated down the street. They were overturned, stacked on top of each other, or flattened. Cars had been tossed onto porches, trees had crashed through roofs, a barge rested on top of a school bus. Telephone poles tilted at frightening angles along streets in the Ninth Ward, and mountains of debris had washed ashore in front yards.

In spite of the devastation, many New Orleans families still wanted to call the place home.

And so, during the holiday break, when many university students were basking on beaches or hitting the slopes, two groups of Willamette students went to Louisiana to help families whose homes had been battered by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The original trip, sponsored by Willamette’s Take a Break program, filled so fast that spillover students hastily organized a second, informal trip with assistance from the Lilly Project, a University program that helps students find their spiritual calling or vocation. Working with the United Methodist Storm Recovery Center, the students lived simply, slept on the floor of a local church and cooked their own meals. They worked side by side with homeowners and spent days shoveling mud and tearing out walls and floors.

“The destruction was overwhelming,” says student Lindsey Mizell ’07. “I didn’t expect that five months after the storm. A lot of the houses were so devastated they will have to be totally rebuilt. We were in areas that had seen extreme water damage, but there was a possibility of saving them, so we struck the houses down to the studs.”

The work was filthy, but the worst part wasn’t the oily muck; rather, it was the black mold that covered households. Many families, stricken with “Katrina cough,” were unable to help. “We wore protective gear,” says student Sean Muller ’08, “but by the end of the day our masks were full of dust and mold spores.”

“There was nothing left—nothing,” says Steve Boyd, a staff member who served as a trip supervisor. “There was just removal of debris. Only by luck were we able to find an intact memento or two.”

“One woman — she was around 80, I imagine — had been living in that area her whole life,” Mizell says. “Her house was totally devastated. We asked her if there was anything she wanted us to salvage. With prodding, she said there was a vase of her mother’s. That became my mission, to find that vase.” After taking out loads of soiled clothing and buckets of oily mud, Mizell found the vase. It had been protected by mud.

Students hauled out furniture and appliances and children’s toys. They ripped down ceilings and walls and piled the rubbish up to the roofline in front of each home so the city could haul it away. Last was the carpet, as they stripped each house clean.

Before leaving the bare shell of each house, students posed with the owners, or wrote “Take care, God bless, Willamette University, January 2006,” on the exposed wood. “We wanted people there to know that people from other parts of the country were thinking about them,” Muller says.

The student dedication was genuine, says Steve Boyd. Students bypassed an additional sightseeing opportunity to put in an extra day of volunteer work.

Two more Take a Break student groups left in March, heading for Texas and Mississippi, where hurricane refugees have been relocated. Mizell was so moved by the experience she declared a leave of absence for the 2006-07 school year, and will return to the area to do volunteer work.

Each night in New Orleans the Take a Break students gathered to reflect on their experience. “What we realized is that — even with lack of sleep and physical exhaustion — we really can make a difference,” Muller says. “And it was a lesson in humility. I think we learned a lot about the human spirit. People there have taken a hit I can’t imagine taking. They’ve been stripped down to nothing, lived through months of this, and they still have the spirit of hope. They’re still giving.”

In the wake of Katrina’s devastation, Willamette University mobilized to assist affected individuals and communities. The University offered a tuition-free semester to displaced students and matched donations from students, faculty and staff, sending $58,500 to the American Red Cross. The student club Blazing Hearts and Wild Minds created and sold “Katrina Relief” bracelets across campus to raise funds, and each undergraduate class competed with other classes, raising money by selling Mardi Gras necklaces made of glass beads. The Panhellenic Council sponsored a Red Cross blood drive, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity organized a benefit event with live bands, and students set up jars for spare change around campus. The Chaplain’s Office collected and sent health kits, while the Hatfield Library dedicated their annual book sale revenues to an academic library damaged by the hurricanes. The campus food service, Bon Appetit, also made a corporate contribution.

For more information, please visit our Living Motto web site.

Connecting with History: Student Wins Research Fellowship

Elizabeth Humphrey ’07 has lived and breathed history since she was a young girl reading the “American Girls” and “Dear America” historical-themed books. She took family trips along the Oregon Trail and to Lewis and Clark museums. She went to Civil War reenactments, and got excited about visiting the Library of Congress on a childhood trip to Washington, D.C.

Her love of history even crept into her playtime. “When I played with dolls, I didn’t just play dolls — I played dolls of the Revolutionary War,” she says, with a laugh.

This summer, Humphrey will sift through the pages of more serious books, as she searches some of the best early American history archival collections in the country. Humphrey is one of 10 college students nationwide to receive a competitive SHEAR/Mellon Undergraduate Fellowship. The fellows will spend three weeks in Philadelphia researching their own chosen thesis while working with historians from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

For Humphrey, who grew up in Dallas, Ore., the idea of having access to such valuable tomes is exciting. Her topic of interest is one that’s close to home — Jason Lee and his mission to Oregon, which led to him founding Willamette University — but she hopes that in Philadelphia she can find more information on Lee and other Methodist missionaries. Many historians already have grappled with one major question about Lee, Humphrey says: whether he was trying to colonize and create a white settlement.

“There’s a statue of Jason Lee over there,” she says, pointing toward the Capitol building, “and if you look at the writing on it, it says ‘First missionary in Oregon,’ and under that it says ‘Colonizer.’ That kind of epitomizes the problem many people have with Jason Lee. He was the first missionary, but he wasn’t very successful.”

But Humphrey is seeking more about Lee’s background and the larger missionary culture of his time. She hopes her research will reveal more about the world Lee and his contemporaries lived in, and what led them to venture into the unknown to create their own missions.

The history of religion and its impact on society always have been fascinating topics to Humphrey. “Especially in the United States, I think religion has had a huge impact on the development of American cities and the development of the American identity.”

Despite her long love for history, it wasn’t the subject Humphrey planned to major in when she first came to Willamette. She wasn’t into history so much in high school. Then during her first year of college, she took two history courses from faculty members Leslie Dunlap and Kara Ritzheimer, who rekindled her interest in the subject and helped her realize it only made sense to pursue it as a major.

She even uses her history-oriented mind when approaching her other love, debate. As a member of Willamette’s highly ranked debate team, Humphrey credits the activity as one of the things that has shaped her the most academically. It has made her more organized and given her confidence about speaking in public. And when she debates an issue of the day — such as U.S. foreign policy or the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians — she views it with a historical perspective.

“History provides a specific lens with which to view the present,” she says. “I believe you use history in the way that you think. Personally, history has made me more critical and has taught me the importance of connecting current events to the past.”

Sienna Houtte: A Roaming Spirit

Sienna Houtte ’06 has a roaming spirit, one that took her to many foreign lands during her childhood and continues to guide her as an adult. She has lived on a boat in the Bahamas, studied at a university in Japan, and now, through a national grant from the Fulbright Program for U.S. Students, she will teach English to children in Taiwan.

“I think study abroad gave me the travel bug,” she says. “I wanted to go abroad and learn a new language when I graduated.”

But behind the roaming spirit, Houtte has a definite purpose, and it’s not just to learn about people of other cultures. It is to interact with them, teach them about her way of life and help them adjust when they land on American soil. This spring, she mentored students from the Tokyo International University of America, many of whom she had met while studying in Tokyo last year. It’s hard to sit with Houtte on campus without hearing numerous Japanese students say “Hi, Sienna” as they walk by.

Houtte’s grant from Fulbright, a program that allows Americans to study and do research in other countries, will take her to Taiwan for a year. Her interest in East Asian culture — she majored in international studies with a focus on East Asia and Japan — stretches back to high school, when she discovered that her hometown of Palmer, Alaska, was the sister city of Saroma, Japan.

But Houtte’s experience with other lands came long before that. When she was 11, her parents sold their woodworking business in Florida to move to Alaska. But before going, they wanted to spend more quality time with their two children, and so the family relocated to a 48-foot sloop and spent 6 ½ months sailing around the Bahamas.

They lived on the boat, traveling around the Berry Islands, the Exumas and others, stopping along the way so Houtte and her younger sister could explore the beaches and caves they found. They ate the fish they caught — mostly grouper and snapper — and the two children were home-schooled. Houtte’s lessons often would relate to the adventures of the day. She would go diving with her dad, then come back and make a book about how fish live. “When I was 11, I was running our outboard motor by myself,” Houtte says. “It showed me a lot about how learning isn’t just restricted to the classroom.”

In high school, Houtte went to Japan through a student exchange program, and her first roommate in Baxter Hall at Willamette was a Japanese student. Her love for Asian culture grew, and when she studied there last year, she became intimate with it, preferring the smaller villages to the big city of Tokyo. “In the rural areas, there’s such a strong tradition, particularly relating to agriculture, which I find fascinating. There’s just such a rich culture that you don’t find many places in America.”

Houtte chose Taiwan for her Fulbright trip partly because she wanted to improve her Chinese. She already speaks conversational French and Japanese, and the official language in Taiwan is Mandarin. Houtte has been assigned to teach English to elementary school students in I-lan County, an area with strong agricultural roots, nestled between craggy mountains and the ocean.

“I think that’ll be great,” she says of working with the little ones. “You have more of an opportunity to make an impact, and I’m hoping to give them a positive impression of English so they’ll want to keep learning it.”

Plus, she hopes to use the experience to return to Alaska and interact with yet another culture: the Alaskan natives. Many of the indigenous tribes live in the Alaska Bush — the isolated parts of the state not accessible by roads — in areas that suffer from high turnover among teachers, Houtte says. Villages there lure teachers with high-paid positions, but the teachers leave because of the harshness of the lifestyle.

The result is that many Alaska natives struggle in school, and Houtte wants that to change. “The academic performance of many of these students is really low, and that’s something I’ve been looking at and would like to improve.”

It may seem ironic that with all her international travels, Houtte’s ultimate goal is to return to her home. But for a roamer of Houtte’s sort — one who lets her surroundings shape her as much as she shapes them — home is just as good a place as any.