November 2006 Stories

Living the Lessons of South Africa

I really wasn’t expecting to lose a toenail that day. The room was stifling — 85 to 90 degrees — and full of the stench of body odor and rotten fruit. The single ceiling fan on the far side of the room lazily floated on the slowest setting, accomplishing little more than stirring the hot air.

Standing in the middle of a rude mob in a passport control room on the border between South Africa and Mozambique, finding myself repeatedly elbowed in the stomach, stomped on and rammed into a metal railing, I thought, “We’re not in Oregon anymore, Toto!” This was definitely not the weekend getaway I had expected.

It was a little more than three months since I had begun my six-month volunteer stint in South Africa. I was working with an AIDS organization named Community Aids Response, located in a Johannesburg neighborhood. Johannesburg is a big city by any standard. With about 3.3 million people — not counting the illegal immigrants, refugees and those living in the informal settlements just outside city limits — it is a teeming metropolis. I quickly became accustomed to big city life, South African style.

However you view it, it’s a big step up in size from Portland, where I had lived and worked for the previous two years, and a giant leap from the “Willamette Bubble” I experienced during my undergraduate years in Salem. I was fortunate because I hadn’t fallen into the city completely blind. My choice to volunteer was strongly rooted in the amazing experiences I had two years earlier during a three-week Chamber Choir tour through most of South Africa. Subsequent to a passionate speech from Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Willamette’s campus, Choral Director Wallace Long and President Lee Pelton began planning the tour — planning that began with a wild idea and ended a year later with more than 50 current students and recent graduates boarding a plane to travel to, literally, the other side of the earth.

When I returned to the country for my volunteer trip, I wanted to feel the full impact of the diversity of a country like South Africa, so I ventured out of the hustle and bustle of the city to the rural areas any chance I got. Besides the unspoiled nature of the villages, there is just something clean and pure about being with native peoples.

The temperature was close to 100 degrees, and it was very humid when my friends and I visited a village named Venda. Venda is the kind of village that I imagined Africa being like before I learned how big the cities really are — and no, lions did not walk down the middle of the dirt roads. White people are not common in Venda, and most children have never seen a white person before. The only paved roads in the region are the motorways (highways) and in the nearby town of Thohoyandou. Otherwise, all roads are dirt and most require the assistance of four-wheel drive.

I believe that Venda is one of the poorest areas of South Africa, at least the poorest area that I have yet seen. Unfortunately, as in most of the world, poor and rural seem to go hand-in-hand.

The most heart-warming experience was our visit to a rural primary school. These kids didn’t have much in life. Many of them were barefoot, most of their clothes were torn and ragged and a number of them came to school just so they could get a free government-provided meal. Some kids were scared of me; white skin is pretty odd if you’ve never seen it. But once they warmed up and saw my camera, they went crazy. They were jumping, laughing and smiling. I love the kids there! They can have so little and still show so much love, excitement and enthusiasm for life.

One particular boy was very frightened of me. Every time I got close to him, he started crying. I was told later that he thought I was a “she-goat.” I don’t quite understand how a woman can be confused with a goat, but it really hit home how much of an outsider I was. Never before had I been thought of as non-human!

Of far greater impact was the realization that, for the first time in my life, I got a sense of what it is like to be judged based solely on the color of my skin. That’s an experience that just doesn’t happen to most white people in Salem, Portland, or most of Oregon or the U.S., for that matter.

Once I was back in the city, the realities of working with people infected with or affected by HIV or AIDS set in again. Deaths are so common there that they are not viewed quite the same as they might be in the U.S. Nearly everyone you talk with knows someone who has died from an AIDS-related illness, and many have an immediate family member who is infected and/or they themselves are victims.

There were 499,268 reported HIV-related deaths in South Africa in 2002. To put that in perspective, that is more than three times the population of Salem dying in just one year in a country the size of Texas. And that is only the reported deaths. There still is a great stigma in South Africa around one’s HIV status, so many of the deaths are recorded as something other than AIDS or are not recorded at all. In 2005, 10.8 percent of the population was HIV positive and, sadly, these numbers are growing.

My goal for this trip was to impact the life of at least one person. I believe I did that through the support groups I facilitated for youth who are either infected or have family members who are infected, and the trainings I did every two weeks to help infected people gain general office, computer and presentation skills.

But nothing I was able to offer the people of South Africa compared to what I gained from the experience. Nothing in the world is more valuable than immersing yourself in another culture. I learned how much patience it really takes to care for others. I learned that some of the poorest people will give you anything they can if they think you need it. South Africans are the warmest, most welcoming people I have ever met. I realized that sometimes you can learn much more about life from someone who has lived it than you can from textbooks that only talk about it. Experience, whether your own or someone else’s, is priceless.

And so it was experience I sought on that day I traveled to the border of South Africa and Mozambique. The experience of being assaulted by a jostling crowd of impatient African men in a culture with little sense of personal space (and apparently little concept of queuing) was unanticipated! Five and a half hours later I crossed into Mozambique with a very sore baby toe (minus one nail), and I once again was totally overwhelmed with how much of the world I had yet to experience.

Lisa Oakley ’04 wrote this article during a six-month volunteer trip earlier this year in South Africa, where she worked with HIV-infected and -affected teenagers.

The Teacher Everyone Wants

The 27 third-graders noisily walk into Larry Conley’s classroom, but they quickly quiet down as they take their seats in a circle, facing him in his rocking chair.

Conley’s voice remains even and calm as he reviews the activity of the day — making prints as part of a lesson on Americana and the art of Andy Warhol. He commands the attention of every student and has complete control over the room — something he is accustomed to from his first career as a Russian translator in the Air Force — but he is not stern. He doesn’t “dumb down” his terms as he kindly explains the lesson, instead speaking as if to a room of adults.

The students thrive on the equal treatment. As they choose the pictures they will use for their prints — the boys arguing over the tiger, the girls debating who will get the butterfly — they remain on task, for the most part. They are anxious to get started and to show Conley their progress. Even a perfectionist student who has a mini-meltdown receives respect and kindness from Conley, who constantly delivers praise to the beaming children. “It’s a good thing Andy Warhol was born before you,” he tells one girl who shows him her print, “because if you had done this first, he would have just been a copycat and you would have been famous.”

No wonder Conley MAT’99 received a prestigious $25,000 national teaching award. He is the model of the excellent teacher. “The kids are so capable,” he says as he shows off his students’ projects adorning the classroom walls. “They come up with such great ideas if we just listen to them instead of saying, ‘What do you know? You’re 9.’”

Conley was one of two Oregon teachers to receive a Milken National Educator Award this fall. Called the “Oscars of Teaching” by Teacher Magazine, the awards make up the nation’s largest teacher recognition program and honor up to 100 outstanding elementary educators every year.

The Milken Family Foundation has a tradition of giving out the awards by surprise assembly. Conley’s campus, Heritage Elementary School in Woodburn, gathered one morning in late September for their assembly, although no one but the principal knew the reason. Oregon Superintendent Susan Castillo was there, as was former pro football great Rosey Grier. Soon foundation chairman and co-founder Lowell Milken spoke about a teacher at the school deserving an award. “My honest reaction was that it could be just about anyone in the room,” Conley says. “The caliber of people working in Woodburn and at Heritage is just so high.”

Woodburn schools, which have extremely high percentages of English-language learners, are not easy teaching grounds. Heritage has a special bilingual program that works with most of the Russian-speakers in the district. Eighty-two percent of Heritage students are Latino or Russian, and 86 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. Conley student-taught at Heritage while working on his MAT at Willamette and chose Woodburn, in part, because of the language challenge. He hoped to make use of his Russian skills from his military days.

It’s a long way from preparing morning briefings for Air Force officers to teaching art, social studies and reading to third-graders, but it’s a transition Conley made successfully. He volunteered in his children’s schools while in the military, and he enjoyed it so much that he knew he wanted to pursue teaching once he left the Air Force. Conley previously taught adults and high school students, but he feels that third-graders are the best fit for his teaching talents. “They’re young enough where that sense of wonder is still strong,” he says, “yet they’re still willing to do things like homework.”

Conley still is highly involved with Willamette’s School of Education, both by working with new student teachers in the classroom and taking classes to get his administrative license through the Center for Excellence in Teaching program. “I love Willamette,” he says. “I think the preparation that goes into the program is unmatched in the state.”

Student teachers view Conley’s innovative teaching style as a model. Conley follows a method called “storyline” that uses story-making to get the students actively involved in the lesson, help them reflect on what they’re learning and give them ownership in their projects. For example, he teaches a parallel science and social studies unit where the youngsters create a fictional community and government that has to decide whether to allow a book-binding or a salmon-farming industry to come to town. Their decision is based on the community’s resources and already existing industries. Even in third grade, the students learn about taxes.

The key part of the lesson is that students spend time developing their “character” in the town and analyzing how each industry might be good or bad for that character’s life. “The kids are so engaged. They are part of the whole process,” Conley says. “It’s about contextual relevance; the lesson has meaning to them because of it.”

This teaching method is particularly successful for English-language learners, Conley says, because it allows him to make concepts more understandable. “The lessons are rich in oral language development. It allows students to engage in the content in a non-threatening way.”

Every wall of Conley’s classroom is another story about how his students are engaged in learning. One wall is covered with paper collage self-portraits, with Conley’s in a prominent place in the middle. In making the portraits, first the students colored pieces of blank paper in various peaches and browns to represent skin tones, then all the papers were put in the middle of the room so students could pick one they felt most closely matched their own skin. When they made their portrait, they often were using paper created by another classmate — yet another way Conley involved the students in each other’s learning.

During the print-making project, each student has a unique take on his or her picture, using different colors or different patterns. Soon it is time for class to end. “Artists, we’re going to have about five more minutes,” Conley says.

One student laments that he never made it to the painting part of the project. Conley deftly counters by putting the boy in charge of making sure his group puts away all the materials, a role the boy relishes. Conley continues handing out praise as students show him their paintings.

“Now for the fun part,” he says, with a chuckle. “Cleanup.”

The Nuts and Bolts of Religion

“I became a professor because I couldn’t say anything in a short amount of time,” says Doug McGaughey, who teaches religious studies at Willamette. “I need 15 weeks.”

Apparently, he also needs lots of empty pages. His third volume in a series on theology was just sent to a New York editor, and each one would grace a bookshelf by itself. The first dealt with philosophical theology, the second with systematic theology, and the third — Religion before Dogma: Groundwork in Practical Theology — with practical theology. “It’s devoted to the nuts and bolts of religion as the endeavor of becoming fully human,” McGaughey says. “I just sent out the final, final, final proofs!”

McGaughey has come a long way from his youth. Heading to college from a small town in Vermont, he didn’t want anything to do with religion. Even though his father was a Methodist minister, McGaughey saw religion as intellectually empty, and so he took up Asian history. But he soon came to believe that he couldn’t begin to understand Asian culture without understanding Asian religion. The deeper he went into his studies, the more he realized he didn’t even understand Western religion, let alone Eastern, and he became intrigued.

A change of interest, and a change of heart, led him to the Chicago Theological Seminary, a school steeped in social activism; it had been founded by leaders of the Underground Railroad. “I thought I was going to be a pastor,” McGaughey says.

The Life of the Mind
That was before he got waylaid by a German philosopher named Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time was starting to take North America by storm. “That was the fall of 1969, and I haven’t been the same since,” McGaughey says.

A dairy farmer who attended a theology seminar by McGaughey offered him seed money for a four-year sojourn in Germany, where he researched and wrote his dissertation and made money typing — at phenomenal speeds — for translation companies. His first teaching job offered a 4/4 teaching schedule, a summer school load and an extra curricular adjunct position to make ends meet. It wasn’t the “life of the mind” he had envisioned, and he made a courageous decision. “I quit cold,” he says. “I wanted to teach, but I also wanted to write and publish.”

Though writing and publishing theology is not exactly a secure career track, McGaughey found success, and in 1988 Willamette offered him a position, and a more balanced teaching schedule.

Humanity Becoming Human
At Willamette, McGaughey began to influence students in much the same way he had been influenced by Heidegger. He also began his trilogy of theological works.

McGaughey didn’t start from the usual premise, but took a different approach. “At the core of most of Western Christianity is a focus on our incapacities, what’s wrong with us.” He began to concern himself with our capacities, what we can do. “Religion is about humanity becoming human,” he says.

“It is ultimately not only the responsibility of each individual to continuously exercise her or his moral capacity, but it is also the responsibility of religion to create the moral culture that encourages the spiritual — hence, moral — elevation of the individual and humanity.”

“Without confusing difference for superiority, we know that humans have something more than other species. We can lay out pieces of a computer on the floor and nature will never put them together. Humans can initiate sequences of events that nature can never produce on its own.

“Humans don’t have to take things as they are; we can talk about what should be. If we were just products of nature we would be marionettes, but we are moral beings. We can make moral choices that lead to improvement, and religion is concerned with the proper exercise of human freedom. It is because of this freedom that we can experience a ‘should’ and an ‘ought.’”

The most important “shoulds,” according to McGaughey, are to acknowledge the dignity of others — to treat them as ends, not as means. This is something McGaughey not only writes about, he practices it. He is an influential teacher, mentoring students to probe their own feelings about religion. Many of his students come to believe that the intellectual exploration of religion enhances the emotional side. Some of his students have also won top honors in national essay contests.

On a Personal Note
Although McGaughey is from the opposite end of the country, he and his family have planted deep roots in the Pacific Northwest. They hike and ski the Cascade Mountains and have a special affinity for the lakes below Three Finger Jack.

McGaughey does more than discuss sacramental bread in class. He bakes bread at home, a skill passed on by his mother. To bake German bread correctly, it helps to have a clay, wood-fired oven, so he built one in his backyard. He kneads the dough just so, and uses the correct amount of yeast. Even in baking, it all comes down to the nuts and bolts.

McGaughey’s essay On the Role of Religion in Moral Development was recently awarded third place in an international essay contest, sponsored by the Forschungsinstut fuer Philosophie in Hannover, Germany. McGaughey is currently the executive secretary of the Pacific Northwest region of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR).

Rivals Reunited

Two former high school rivals from Boise, Idaho, now seniors on the Willamette women’s soccer team, are providing the offensive power and goalkeeping strength that have earned the Bearcats a No. 19 ranking and an at-large berth in the NCAA Division III National Tournament. With Susan Butler leading the offense and Kari Woody leading the defense, Willamette has outscored its opponents 43-9 this season.

Butler and Woody were hometown competitors, matched head-to-head by Butler’s desire to score goals for Boise High School and Woody’s determination to keep the ball out of the net for Timberline. Now they play for the same team, even if most of their efforts are at opposite ends of the field.

“Our games against each other brought out the most rowdy fans, and the games were always the most intense and physical games of the year,” Butler says.

“Our schools were the best in the state every year, and they despised one another,” Woody says. “Boise High games were absolutely ridiculous; I remember every one perfectly — each meeting was the biggest game of the year.”

One might wonder how well two highly competitive athletes with a history of bitter rivalry would get along as key players on the same college team.

“There was definitely more of a bond than tension because we were both adjusting to college and excited to play for Willamette as teammates,” Butler recalls.

“It was nice showing up for soccer tryouts our freshman year already knowing someone,” Woody says. “We joke about our high school rivalry, but there’s no hostility.” Even so, she can’t help but add, “Go Wolves!” invoking the Timberline mascot.

The better part of four seasons later, the former competitors have helped move the Bearcats into the NCAA Division III National Tournament for the first time since 2001. They attained starting positions their freshman year and have now taken on leadership positions.

“Our parents have bonded over the experience of Kari and I playing together,” Butler says. “Every home game, both my parents and Kari’s parents drive from Boise to cheer us on.”

“After hating Susan for so long, I’ve realized I like us much better as friends,” Woody says. “Willamette soccer has been a great opportunity for us to finally win at the same time.”

Willamette made four consecutive trips to the NCAA Tournament from 1998-2001, including three seasons in the quarterfinals and two appearances in the final four. Head Coach Jim Tursi, now in his 14th season, also led Willamette to five NAIA postseason appearances from 1993-97. The Bearcats joined NCAA Division III in 1998.

“Playing together, we have experienced great wins and disappointing losses,” Butler said of their collegiate soccer career. “I think it just proves that the game of soccer can create enemies, but bring them together when they are on the same team and going for the universal goal of the game — to win.”

It’s been five years since Willamette last advanced to the NCAA Tournament, and Butler and Woody hope to play deep into the postseason in 2006, ending with the first national championship in team history. It would be a final opportunity for the two talented players, one at each end of the field, to play together. This time their parents, family and friends will be cheering for the same team.

As of Nov. 4, Butler leads Willamette in scoring with 23 total points on a team-high nine goals plus five assists. She is tied for third in the Northwest Conference in both categories.

Woody has been the goalkeeper of record in all 20 games for the Bearcats this season, and has twice been named NWC Defensive Player of the Week.

Train Bandits and Sinking Ships: The Longest Journey of His Life

By the time Morteza Pourdanandeh was 10 years old, he and his family already had been thrown out of one war-torn country, fled another country in the middle of the night, avoided being robbed by bandits on a train, almost sank on a fishing boat in the Baltic Sea, and spent nearly eight months living in refugee camps.

“I don’t have a normal life story,” he says as he recounts the details of his childhood.

That is an understatement. Pourdanandeh, who was born in Baghdad, Iraq, to an Iranian family that later settled in Sweden, is a junior studying politics at Linköping University in Sweden. He came to Willamette University this fall through a one-year exchange program.

But the story of how he got to Sweden is complex and amazing. It’s a story that makes one wonder how he made it through childhood without being completely traumatized. But his youth actually was an advantage, he says. “I just turned 10 a couple weeks after we made it to Sweden,” he says. “It was pretty much an adventure for me, so I wasn’t afraid. I heard my parents talk about it or warn me to be careful, but I didn’t think about it much.”

A Long Journey
Pourdanandeh was born in Baghdad in 1983, in the middle of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in which Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded Iran following a long history of disputes between the two countries. Pourdanandeh’s grandparents originally moved their family from Iran to Iraq in pursuit of jobs. With the war raging, Hussein sent all the Iranians back to their home country — including Pourdanandeh’s family, who went to Iran soon after he was born. He hasn’t been back to Iraq since.

They lived in Iran until Pourdanandeh was almost 10, but even though it was their home country, his parents wanted to move him and his four siblings elsewhere. There were too many restrictions on people’s freedoms in Iran, Pourdanandeh says; the government did not allow freedom of speech or free elections, for example. His brother was almost 18 at the time, on the verge of mandatory military service — a “gruesome” prospect in Iran, Pourdanandeh says. “My parents wanted us to have more freedom, more choices. It was a case of my parents wanting the best for us.”

But moving to another country was not as simple as buying a plane ticket. The paperwork they needed to travel from Iran to another country was complicated. And more important, “if they knew that you were going to leave the country permanently, they wouldn’t let you do that,” Pourdanandeh says. So the family fled the country secretly in the middle of the night to avoid being caught, leaving behind all ties to their Iranian citizenship. Luckily, they had the financial resources to make their escape — the trip cost several thousand dollars per person. “It costs a lot to flee the country because it’s illegal, and they charge you a lot because you’re so desperate,” Pourdanandeh says.

Their goal was to relocate to Denmark. Not all of them could leave together. Pourdanandeh’s 18-year-old brother had to go on his own and take a different route. His father could not leave right away because of things he needed to take care of in Iran; he joined the family three years later.

That left his mother, who was pregnant with her fourth son at the time, on her own to make the trip with Pourdanandeh, his other brother and his sister. First, they took a bus into neighboring Azerbaijan, then into Russia, where they rode on crowded trains. They traveled only at night to avoid detection. Pourdanandeh vividly remembers securing their compartment door with two heavy locks so that bandits who often stopped the trains could not get in and rob them.

They finally made it to Latvia and had to take a boat across the Baltic Sea to Denmark. Pourdanandeh recalls helping his family dig a hole under a fence so they could make it out to the harbor in secret. They crowded onto a small fishing ship with about 100 other refugees; each bed was shared by three or four people.

At that point, Mother Nature stepped in. A storm brought high waves their little ship couldn’t handle, and they almost sank. Their rescuers: the Swedish coast guard. Pourdanandeh’s first memory after being picked up by the coast guard was of them giving him a cup of hot instant soup. “I remember that because the soup was warm, and I was so cold,” he says. “I felt a little safer.”

About five months after they first left Iran, they finally landed on Swedish soil, and that’s where they stayed. They lived in two refugee camps for about eight months until the government gave them permission to stay in Sweden. Six years later, they obtained their Swedish citizenship. Pourdanandeh’s recollection of the refugee camps mainly includes playing with other youngsters. “I was just a kid and there were a lot of kids there,” he says. “Children make friends quickly.”

Meanwhile, when his father heard about their boat almost sinking, he was so distraught that he had a small heart attack. Six years later, he died of cancer, and the family thinks it was partly attributed to the stress of the attack.

Adjusting to Willamette
Pourdanandeh is a friendly, upbeat young man who has easily made friends at Willamette and can be found most days hanging out at the Bistro coffee shop on campus. It’s hard to guess from meeting him that he went through so much during his childhood. But he says he doesn’t dwell on past events; if he did, it would be hard to live a happy life.

This is his first time visiting the U.S., although he has been fascinated by the country since he was in middle school. He was worried he wouldn’t be allowed to study here because of his Middle Eastern background and the increased security measures put in place after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. However, his visa application was approved quickly.

Pourdanandeh is fascinated by international politics, and one day he hopes to work for an organization like the United Nations, “somewhere where I hope I can make a difference.” He has strong opinions on the Iraq War — he believes sending in troops is not the best way to start a democracy there — and he says his most interesting Willamette class so far has been American Ethnic Studies, where he has been learning more about U.S. culture and history.

Pourdanandeh also is looking forward to sharing his views with Americans, whether it’s by talking about current international politics or drawing on his childhood experiences as a refugee. “I think it’s probably interesting for other students to hear a non-American perspective,” he says.