December 2007 Stories

Living a Semester on “African Time”

In July I embarked on the 48-hour trip to Grahamstown, South Africa. As I sat on the plane, I felt as though I should cry. I had no idea what to cry about, but everyone had asked me, “Aren’t you scared?” I suppose fear is a natural reaction when leaving everything you have ever known to go to a place you have only read about in books. But I wasn’t scared so much as anxious and excited to be on my way. Besides, I did not know what to be afraid of. With nothing but a Rough Guide book and a little knowledge about South African politics, I sat on the plane, excited and ready for action.

As soon as I stepped off the plane, I knew there was nothing to fear. It was dawn, and the sun above the ocean was full and red. There is no way to explain the sun in Africa; it is something one has to experience. The air was humid and smelled of ocean. On the ride from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown, I saw parrots and monkeys, and upon arrival at Rhodes University, I was greeted by genuinely friendly people and the sweetest cat I had ever met (there are cats and dogs everywhere around campus and South Africa in general). The cat followed me to my room and took a nap with me for the rest of the day. Everywhere I looked, I felt as though I was in a living postcard.

Before I left, people had warned me about the isolation and culture shock one experiences abroad. I figured this would happen to me, however; I did not figure it would be so quick. As soon as I shut the door to my room, I realized I didn’t know another person on the entire continent of Africa. I had two days before orientation began, with no Internet and no cell phone. I phoned home on my calling card, but even that only lasted about 20 minutes. I felt trapped. What was I doing in South Africa?

Lucky for me, I had the friendliest cat in the world to nap with. And that night I was fortunate enough to bump into a few of the other study abroad kids. We all had similar goals and reasons for being in South Africa. The bond was nearly instantaneous and, since that night, I have not felt isolated or alone. Though I now have South African, Zimbabwean and Namibian friends, the study abroad students are my “home base.”

Culture shock, however, is another story. There are little things that you miss about home. For example, the combination of peanut butter and chocolate simply does not happen in South Africa; people find it revolting. The Internet can only be found in the computer lab and unless you go at three in the morning, you will wait for a computer. It’s so slow and the bandwidth so low that even checking Facebook will slow down the entire process. YouTube is completely out of the question. People walk and drive on the left side of the street. Everything moves slower; the entire concept of time is negotiable. When you say “now” in “African time,” it means any time between 5 and 30 minutes.

But eventually you realize that peanut butter and chocolate is kind of gross, that the Internet is mostly a way to waste time (particularly YouTube), and that taking life slower is healthy.

Though I did not cry on the plane trip here, I will cry on the return flight. Leaving South Africa will be one of the hardest things I ever do. I am now only halfway through my journey, but the experiences I have had so far have been unforgettable.

Story and photos by psychology student Acacia McGuire’09, who recently completed a Study Abroad semester in South Africa.

View from the Other Side

Bob Collin lived in a trailer when he was a child, and near the town dump for his first three years. The family fortunes saw a dramatic turnaround after his father got his engineering degree on the G.I. bill, but Collin had already been shaped by his early experiences. He had begun to question a status quo that sometimes seemed unfair.

“Why do we not talk about the inequalities in where we locate waste dumps and factories?” asks the senior research fellow with Willamette’s Center for Sustainable Communities. “Why, in a country of plenty, do millions of mothers run out of food money at the end of the month? Where can underprivileged people or people of color find justice, if they can’t find it in the courtroom?”

At 21, Collin helped argue his first court case as a New York law clerk — for an elderly black woman who died of diabetes and privation — and at 24 he signed on as a community activist in Kansas City, advocating for tenants who were being forced out of their homes by illegal condominium conversion practices. “All I owned back then was my bike and my books,” Collin says.

“At night there were gunshots and police sirens, but many mothers were trying to keep their children above it,” he says. “When kids are lost, it’s a loss to society.” Collin looked at poverty from the viewpoint of the impoverished. “My mother told me, ‘Suspend judgment. You don’t know why people are acting in any particular way.’”

Collin focused on poverty, and then housing and discrimination, and finally environmental justice, as he earned graduate degrees in social work, urban planning and law. The senior researcher has published prolifically, individually and with his wife, Law Professor Robin Morris Collin. Many of their publications address the environment and social justice. Disenfranchised people — especially people of color — bear the brunt of environmental decision-making, they say. Toxic wastes typically end up in the neighborhoods where people with darker skin or lower incomes live.

In 2006, the Willamette law professor published The Environmental Protection Agency: Cleaning Up America’s Act, a volume in a series designed for citizens, teachers and students to learn how government works. The book details how a young, powerful federal agency was charged with the protection of America’s environment, and how it handled crises like Love Canal and the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Collin and wife Robin Morris Collin, who also teaches at the Willamette College of Law, will co-chair Oregon’s Environmental Justice Commission, and Collin’s 2-volume Battleground: Environment is due out in spring 2008. The book analyzes more than 100 of the most controversial environmental topics, including climate change, the Kyoto agreement, genetically modified food, urban sprawl, reported links between air pollution and childhood asthma, and whether industrial pollutants cause cancer.

“Environmental issues have been fueling debate since the age of the pyramids,” Collin says. “They inflame passions in people on all points of the political spectrum.

“People will be wrong. People will be right. What’s critical is that each stakeholder have a say so we can have a reasoned debate.” His book seeks to do that, providing a platform for spokespeople from industry, government and the community.

Willamette is in a unique position to carry this dialogue forward, he says. “There is a brain trust of environmentally minded professors and students here, including the unique constellation of people associated with Willamette’s Center for Sustainable Communities.

“There are a lot of ‘inconvenient truths’ pressing down on us,” Collin says, “and ultimately, everyone is going to be part of the conversation about the environment.” By disseminating information, Collin hopes to ensure that the most disenfranchised can come to the table.

Looking to the Earth for Answers

Scores of people visit the Parthenon temple in Greece each year, asking questions about its distinct architecture and historical significance. When Scott Pike sees the Parthenon, his question is filtered through the eyes of a geologist: Where exactly did all that marble come from and how did it get there?

An expert in tracing marble back to the quarry from which it came, Pike, assistant professor of environmental and earth science, finds such questions fascinating. It is known that the Parthenon’s marble is Pentelic, meaning it came from quarries on Mount Pentelikon, located 11 miles outside Athens. But was it taken from quarries near the top of the mountain or the bottom? What was the mining strategy? The answers can reveal how the marble was managed and how it was worked before it arrived at the temple — important facts in trying to answer one of the Parthenon’s great mysteries: How did ancient people build such a beautiful and complex structure in only 15 years?

Pike hopes to uncover the secret by studying marble samples from the building. It’s yet another of his many projects as an ancient Aegean marble expert. Determining the source of various marbles can reveal everything from the locations of ancient trade networks to quarry management practices.

Ever since he was a child growing up in Georgia, Pike has been interested in archaeology and studying other cultures. His family often traveled to other countries, and Pike would explore tunnels and areas underground rather than checking out the sights above.

In college, he discovered his geology interest rather by accident. He was on a summer archaeological dig in northern Israel when he noticed that a water source near the site had turned murky overnight. He was told the phenomenon likely was caused by a recent earthquake beneath nearby Mount Hermon. “At that moment, it clicked that there must be a connection between archaeology and geology,” he says.

Pike came to Willamette three years ago and is the lone geologist on the environmental science staff. His love for travel has long influenced his work. In graduate school he received a nine-month Fulbright grant to go to Greece and map out different quarries on Mount Pentelikon — he stayed in the country for four years.

He served for two years as acting director of the Wiener Laboratory of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The school is the principal resource in Greece for American scholars conducting advanced research on Greek language, literature, art, history, archaeology and philosophy. More than 160 North American colleges and universities are affiliated with the school; Pike helped Willamette become a member last year, and he serves on the school’s managing committee.

He continues to maintain an Aegean marble database that includes data from various Aegean quarries. Each year, he analyzes new marble samples and compares them to the database to determine their origins. Pike’s current projects include analyzing marbles from a Roman site in Israel and a Roman shipwreck off the coast of Turkey, as well as sourcing the marble from the Apollo Temple at Bassai and from a colossus statue on the famed island of Delos, both in Greece.

Despite all his study in this area, Pike says he doesn’t want to be known only as the “marble guy.” So every summer he makes a research jaunt to central Italy to work on a landscape restoration project in the Sangro Valley. He takes students with him through the Science Collaborative Research Program, a Willamette program that allows students to research alongside professors.

The Sangro Valley Project — conducted by the Institute of Archaeology, Oxford University and Oberlin College in cooperation with the Soprintendenza Archeologica dell’Abruzzo in Italy — is examining the dynamic interactions between past cultures and their natural environments. By correlating the changes in farming strategies to those in the environment, researchers can determine more about the way of life of the Samnite people and their transition under Roman domination. “I’ve always been interested in how places have changed,” Pike says. “It’s interesting that people can grow up in a city and not know what was there before. I thought about this a lot growing up in Atlanta, knowing that at one time the entire city had been burned to the ground.”

For one of his latest projects, Pike will examine the changes in a place much closer to home — the Mill Creek Watershed that drains much of Salem and surrounding Marion County. He and three others — politics Professor Joe Bowersox, Community Service Learning Director Khela Singer-Adams and Tokyo International University of America faculty member Tamara Smith —received a $25,000 grant to study the watershed.

The grant from the Institute for Water and Watersheds will allow them to study water quality and perform community-based ecological restoration. Pike’s piece of the project will be to monitor stream quality throughout the watershed. He aims to develop lab modules to incorporate the research into his classes.

Thinking back to his desire to travel, Pike also is anxious to continue with his Parthenon project. He received permission to study marble samples not just from the Parthenon, but also from the Propylaia and Temple of Athena Nike, two neighboring Acropolis features. Architects working on a Parthenon refurbishing project are currently collecting those samples for him. “I know I have samples of the columns waiting for me,” he says, a gleam of excitement in his eye. “I just need to go to Athens to pick them up.”

Whiskey’s for Drinkin’, Water’s for Fightin’

Willamette Economics Professor Don Negri found his calling on a trek across California’s Anza-Borrego Desert. The endless bowl of cactus, rattlers and dust is edged by bare-bone mountains, and although the place offers 500 miles of dirt roads, only one river carves its landscape.

“I was taking a couple of days to figure things out,” says Negri, who was contemplating grad school in economics. “I’m a quantitative nerd, but I also wanted to figure out where my passions and the world’s needs intersect.” His passions, he knew as he walked across the fiery desert, were connected with the natural world. He wanted to put head, heart and idealism together.

The scarcity of water must have shaped his decision. Negri’s career since has focused on the challenge of managing water resources in the parched Western landscape. “Western cities are growing, and they’re thirsty,” he says. “Population is up and reservoir levels are down, and 80 percent flows to farmers. There’s not enough water to go around.

“When crisis occurs, the rules no longer work, and policymakers turn to the researchers who have been thinking about this for a long time,” Negri says. “Crisis is often the catalyst for change.”

That change will involve hard thinking about how we manage and allocate water. “We don’t price water at its true cost,” Negri says. “We grow rice in California. We subsidize water and create laws that discourage conservation. There is an institutional perversity in Western water law.”

We end up with reduced water quality, he says, and habitat and fish populations are lost. “Sometimes there’s this sadness that we can’t get it right, that we show such lack of wisdom.”

As the climate has warmed, computer models predicting drought and water scarcity have become increasingly dire, he says. While many models predict the overall impact of a rise in temperatures, Negri and his colleagues are developing the statistical methods that will calculate how small increases in temperature can lead to disproportionately large increases in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events.

The discussion of water has broadened, Negri says, and needs to include the climate change that drives drought and flooding. “If it gets two degrees warmer here in Salem, no one cares. But it’s the extremes that impact us — the extended droughts, torrential rainfalls and extreme temperatures. If we have two days in excess of 100 degrees it’s okay. Ten days kills people and devastates agriculture.”

Negri has become involved on a personal level, and he and his students have invited the campus community to join Focus the Nation in a nationwide conversation about global warming January 31.

“Why play Russian roulette with the future of our planet?” he wrote in a newspaper editorial. “Postponing our efforts to reduce greenhouse gases is a reckless and foolish strategy. Global climate change threatens to exact a heavy toll on human welfare all over the world, and complacency only further jeopardizes our children’s future.”

Negri still remembers his trek through the Anza-Borrego Desert, the trek that gave birth to a longer lifetime journey, one filled with research and teaching and activism. “That desert is a place of incredible beauty and intense spirituality,” he says. “You can look around and feel a sense of belonging. You find grounding.”

Water — and lack of water — helped shape that sun-baked, solitary landscape. Negri, in turn, hopes to help shape a new paradigm for managing water, our greatest natural resource.

“Whiskey’s for drinkin’, water’s for fightin’” was coined by author Mark Twain and used as a course title by Negri.

Anza-Borrego Desert photos by Kathryn Ware.