January 2008 Stories

Exploring Ecuador’s ‘Wild West’

I didn’t really think it would take me more than a month to get another email written, but perhaps it is a sign that I have successfully adjusted to the more relaxed pace of Latin America. Ecuador is indeed run at a much slower pace than the U.S., and heading out west to the Galápagos Islands slowed things down even more. …

It was almost nine months ago that biology major Ariel Grubb ’08 returned to Salem after a semester abroad in the Galápagos, but the memories are still as vivid as when she wrote this email to her friends back home. The young woman from Spokane, accustomed to the dark, chilly, rainy winters of her college days in Salem, felt as if she was on a different planet adjusting to humid days on volcanic islands at the equator.

But it was the perfect planet for this aspiring veterinarian, who spent her summers working at a small animal clinic, helped jump start a pre-vet club at Willamette and volunteers for a feral cat sterilization organization. The Galápagos are a virtual wonderland for those devoting their studies to animal life. Located about 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, famous as the place where Charles Darwin developed his theories of evolution and natural selection, the Galápagos are home to a unique blend of flora and fauna that arrived mostly by air or water. No amphibians exist there naturally, but 14 species of finch have evolved from one common ancestor on the mainland. Hammerhead sharks, sea lions, tortoises, blue-footed boobies and tropical penguins are among the creatures to call the islands their home. Five different colors of sand grace the islands’ shores.

Grubb studied in the Ecology, Evolution and Conservation program at Galápagos Academic Institute for the Arts and Sciences. Her two-story school in San Cristóbal was directly across from the area’s main beach, and the students would take dips in the ocean during class breaks. In her classes, Grubb climbed volcanoes to discover the ecosystems that thrived on them. She learned about the struggles between government parks officials trying to preserve the natural wildlife and local fisherman and tourism workers attempting to make a living.

While Grubb found the lessons invaluable, she also wanted to explore her interest in veterinary work directly. So she walked into the office for an organization called Comité Interinstitucional para el Manejo y Control de Especies Introducidas (CIMEI, or Inter-Institutional Committee for Introduced Species Management) and asked if she could volunteer. The organization works to control non-indigenous plants and animals on the islands and protect natural species. For instance, people are not allowed to bring new cats and dogs to the islands because they kill many of the smaller native animals. However, the dogs and cats already living on the islands continually repopulate. One of CIMEI’s projects is convincing dog owners to spay or neuter their pets to keep the population under control.

… Working [at CIMEI] has been quite the eye-opening experience. ... The veterinarian, for one, is only two years older than me, and he’s not actually a veterinarian yet. He’s in his last year of school, doing five months of clinical practice (completely unsupervised) here on the island before he goes back to Quito to do another five months at the veterinary school clinic there. The first thing I noticed is that the whole “sterile technique” thing was basically thrown out the door. …

For several years Grubb has volunteered with the Feral Cat Coalition of Oregon, so she’s accustomed to observing spay and neuter operations. The FCCO works to reduce feral cat populations humanely through spaying and neutering and community education. Targeted toward feral cats that have caregivers feeding them, the program allows caregivers to capture the animals, bring them to a clinic where volunteer veterinarians perform surgery, then return the cats to where they’re being fed. The organization frequently brings its mobile clinic to Willamette, using labs in Olin Science Center for the animals to recuperate after surgery. Grubb is one of a group of Willamette students who regularly assist with these clinics.

Grubb’s work with FCCO and at a vet clinic in Spokane showed her the great lengths many Americans will go to when it comes to their pets — a feeling she’s shared since childhood. “I’ve always taken a lot of solace in animals, their peacefulness and sincerity,” she says. “You can be with animals and be calm, even when other things are going wrong.”

So it was tough at first when she observed Ecuadorian pet owners who let their animals constantly roam free, didn’t play with them and only fed them meat scraps. But she realized it wasn’t that the people didn’t care about the animals — it had more to do with a difference in their culture. “It’s a luxury to be able to keep an animal in your home and treat him like your own child,” Grubb says. “That’s not something everyone can do there.”

As part of a sterilization campaign, Grubb spent a week on a smaller, more secluded island with only about 100 people. She and her fellow workers went house to house to survey people on what animals they owned and ask if the dogs could be sterilized. The rural conditions often required them to conduct surgeries with weaker anesthesia and compromised sterile standards, but Grubb knew the veterinarian was doing the best he could under the circumstances.

“The work was important. With 100 people and 100 dogs on a small island, there’s not enough food for all of them, and problems can escalate. The experience really taught me about veterinary missionary work.”

… So, it’s been an adventurous month. I’ve gotten used to being on an island in the middle of the Pacific, but every once in awhile I look around and get shocked again by how far away I am and how different this place is from my home. It is evident that Ecuador is a developing country, and it is evident that the Galápagos is its “wild west,” where people seeking fortune with fish or tourists come, and where nature is in a life or death struggle with development.

Peeling Away the Layers

In Scott Nadelson’s fiction writing class, he urges students to stop being ... well, students. He tells them to put away their academic voice and look for their natural voice.

Those voices often take them on similar journeys. “Many students are in the process of separating from their family,” the English professor says, “and they write about generation gaps, about children and parents trying to understand each other. Romance is also a huge preoccupation. There’s a dance that goes on between people who want intimacy and connection but aren’t ready for commitment.”

In recent years student writing has taken on more political and environmental overtones, Nadelson says. “It shows up in science fiction, with stories about government having more power than it should, and in apocalyptic stories about the aftermath of global warming or genetic experiments gone awry. There’s a different backdrop than even five years ago. The writing is not necessarily more dark, but there is definitely a changed world view.”

Nadelson is hoping to give his students the aha! moment a high school teacher gave him. He was a quiet kid who avoided reading and kept his head on his desk, but he had started listening to the lyrics in his dad’s collection of Bob Dylan records. “I was sitting in my high school English class when she read T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men,’ and I suddenly heard the beauty of language, the rhythm and emotion. I felt as if I had been asleep for 16 years. The words lit a fire under me.”

Nadelson began to copy poems in his notebook, and in his first year of college he began to write stories. His first published collection, Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, won several awards, including the 2004 Oregon Book Award for short fiction. A second collection, The Cantor’s Daughter, won an award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. The Austin Chronicle called Nadelson is “a gifted storyteller” who is “adept at peeling away the superfluous layers.”

It’s the peeling away that fascinates Nadelson. The mundane New Jersey suburbs of his childhood provide the backdrop for most of his stories, but under the surface, he says,
“Nothing was as ordinary as it seemed.

“In my Jewish community it was difficult to maintain a sense of self. We were partly inside, with one foot in the dominant culture, wanting to be like everyone else, and partly outside, intent on maintaining our ‘otherness’ and separated by accent, looks, faith, holidays, even food. That cultural limbo created a tension.”

Nadelson’s character-driven fiction also portrays people struggling at the intersection of desire and fear. “That place feels like a bottomless well,” he says. “People desire intimacy, but what they most want they are often most afraid of, and they sabotage their lives. Caution prevents people from fully immersing themselves in their own lives.” Publishers Weekly wrote that Nadelson’s fiction “depicts lonely people yearning to connect while their relationships stall on resentment and self-doubt.”

As Nadelson follows each character into the story, they often surprise him. “Sometimes they lead you to places that scare you or make you uncomfortable, but I actually feel great joy when characters get themselves into deep moral or psychological trouble. Even if the place they end up is not a happy place, I like going there. I’m rooting for the character to do well, but I know it’s not honest if they always do. I don’t enjoy the nice characters as much. It’s too easy to like them.”

And following the stories to dark ends allows authors to lead lives they may not otherwise want to lead, he says. “As human beings, we’re limited to one set of experiences. Stories allow us to step outside of our own lives.”

In his fiction, his characters move toward tenuous reconciliation. As The Oregonian wrote, “the characters come to understand that no better place is waiting around the corner, so we must simply live in whatever flawed or circumscribed space we have.”

In more philosophical terms, Nadelson says, “The impulse of art is to create order out of chaos.”

As for the shy teen of former years, Nadelson says writing was the avenue that helped him open up to others. “Writing helped me connect, and it gave me a deeper understanding of people. But the more I write, the more mysterious people seem. You enter into that mystery of what it means to be a human being.”

Nadelson follows the mystery each morning at seven, when he carries his cup of coffee to his laptop in a half dazed state and “disappears.” He follows an idea out to a dead end or a story, then writes it again, and then again 30 times until he begins to understand the characters and they have taken on their own life. “I let the stories take me where they want.

“I have to write every day or I go crazy,” he says. And he never turns off the author in himself. Every day he observes and eavesdrops. He watches the way people talk — what they reveal, and what they don’t reveal. He blanks out in the middle of conversations to make mental notes. And he fills his notebooks with ideas for future stories.

Nadelson, who once saw himself as one of T.S. Eliot’s “empty men,” has been filled.

Essay
www.oregonhum.org/garbage-night.php

Scott Nadelson wins Reform Judaism Prize for Fiction

• The Cantor’s Daughter was awarded the Foundation for Jewish Culture's
  Samuel Goldberg & Sons Foundation Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging
  Writers.
• Won the 2007 Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction for his collection of stories titled The Cantor’s Daughter.
• The Foundation for Jewish Culture recently announced Scott Nadelson as the
  2007 recipient of the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Foundation Prize for Jewish
  Fiction by Emerging Writers.
• 2007 Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction.
[ posted january 15,2008 – 1 year, 9 months, 23 days ago ]
 

Greenbacks Go Green

Eric Brody ’96 believes in the capitalist system — he just thinks it’s a little skewed. It doesn’t account for the true cost of things, he says. Like water. Or clean air. Or wetlands, which filter water and prevent floods.

“That’s one thing I learned at Willamette — there are external costs and internal costs. A gallon of gas costs much more than the price we pay at the pump. The costs include air pollution and higher levels of asthma in children. It all has to be figured in.”

In 2005, Brody joined Portland start-up Nau as the company’s sustainability manager, where his responsibility is to measure the true cost of corporate decisions and help create a smaller ecological footprint. The outdoor and urban clothing company is banking on an untested strategy: In-store customers choose between taking products home or having them shipped, with a discount. This allows Nau to limit store size and rely more on warehouses, which use 1/16th the energy of a retail store. A typical week for Brody might involve a red eye to Thailand to evaluate the environmental record of a supplier, developing humane labor standards, or tracking Nau’s greenhouse emissions. “Rather than fix an existing business, we’re trying to integrate sustainability at the front end,” Brody says.

The job is a natural for Brody, who gained a love of the planet’s wild places on boyhood camping trips to the Redwoods and Sierras. “Getting away from the rush of everyday life makes you think about the meaning of life and how we fit into the grand scheme of things,” he says. Growing up in a small logging town also meant Brody witnessed the impact — positive and negative — that companies can have on the environment, and he realized they can play an important role in addressing environmental problems.

He got off to a running start toward his career at Willamette. “Professors Peter Eilers and Joe Bowersox inspired me,” he says. “They are passionate, and they practice what they teach. They look at a holistic picture of the world — at the interplay between environmental conditions, politics, geography, economics and people.”

Brody tries to keep his own ecological footprint small, often biking or busing to work. When he’s not hiking, rafting or snowboarding, he volunteers for Oregon Natural Step Network, a group that guides companies toward profitable sustainability. He’s volunteered with political campaigns, such as the recently passed Measure 49, a land use measure Brody believes will provide protection for Oregon’s farms and green spaces. He and his friends also established Portland Green Drinks, where professionals meet over drinks and discuss how to make their workplaces green.

We asked Brody to share some of his thoughts about sustainability.

Can green businesses be profitable?

Producing more for less money without concern for the impacts to people or the planet is the current trend, and without environmental and labor regulations, many countries and industries will continue the race to the bottom. But sustainable practices are becoming increasingly necessary for companies who want to have a true competitive edge. It’s no longer profitable to create waste or unhealthy work environments.

Corporations also need to look at the total operational costs over time, not just the costs up front. If a company reduces its waste, then it means that everything becomes product, with revenue generation. And you get the added benefit of favorable press. Companies can’t buy that.

How important is the role of consumers?

A handful of companies are trying to do the right thing, but it will take more than just a few companies to create marketplace shifts. It will take a much larger cultural-values shift in our society, characterized by an intensified search for balance, harmony, ethics and authenticity.

We also need progressive people in government at the local and national level, to create incentives and regulations to move business in the right direction. We need to create a sustainable infrastructure, and it’s much bigger than any one business.

Who are your environmental heroes?

Henry David Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt, Willamette Professors Pete Eilers and Joe Bowersox, and Tom McCall, the former Oregon governor who set a precedent for land use planning that balanced the needs of people — farmers, ranchers and city dwellers — with a healthy environment and clean water.

What’s the most important thing you learned at Willamette?

The importance of making a difference — having a voice and making that voice heard. Taking part in our political system, whether it’s voting or volunteering.

What’s the best piece of advice you can pass along?

Use the power of the dollar wisely by spending your money only on food, products and services that reflect your values.

Taking the NaNoWriMo Challenge

Writing a novel is no easy task, even for someone who writes professionally. So try creating a novel in just one month. And to complicate things further, try writing it in your second language.

This is the challenge Associate Professor Lora Yasen issues each fall to her creative writing students at Tokyo International University of America (TIUA). Through a partnership between Willamette and Tokyo International University (TIU) in Kawagoe, Japan, TIU students spend a full year studying in Salem and fully integrating into Willamette classes and the community.

Yasen teaches English as a Second Language, and her students spend their first semester honing their English skills. Then in the fall, she challenges them to take those new skills and write a novel through a program called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. Thousands of writers nationwide take the NaNoWriMo challenge every November to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel in one month.

Yasen sees it as a perfect assignment for her TIU students, many of whom have never written more than five pages in Japanese, much less a book in English. “I thought my students could use something like this where they didn’t focus as much on grammar and spelling,” Yasen says. “They relaxed and just wrote and wrote.”

Last summer, Yasen’s students participated in a similar contest called Script Frenzy that asked people to write a 20,000-word screenplay in a month. Two students, Marino Omori and Naoya Enomoto, succeeded (read more about their screenplays). This fall, her class of 12 all attempted the novel-writing. Here are excerpts from some of their stories.

---

“Bing-Bong.” The doorbell rang at that moment.

“Wait, Anthony. Someone is at the door,” Nico said to Anthony. He put down the telephone and opened the door slowly.

“Hello, food server Nico.” A postman stood in front of the door. Nico thought the postman looked familiar. “You’ve got some mail,” he smiled.

Nico felt something was weird.

“Thank you,” said Nico. “Have a great day.” As soon as Nico got the letter, the postman left.

“What’s this?” Nico looked at the green letter. He noticed that this letter was sealed by protection software that could not be stolen. His thumbprint was the key to open the letter.

He thought this was strange because he hardly got letters. He looked at the back. Then, his eyes opened very wide. His hands started shaking.

“Hey! Hey, Nico! Are you listening to me?” From the phone, Anthony raised his voice. Nico walked back to the phone with unsteady steps.

Nico picked up the phone again, but he couldn’t grab it. “Nico, I’m so hungry. May I …”

“A … Anthony,” Nico interrupted with a wavering voice. “Have you heard any big news about me?”

“What?” Anthony seemed to be surprised.

Nico thought he should open the letter. “I’ve got a letter just now,” Nico says slowly, “but … this is from Mr. King!” Mr. King was the king of the Internetian world. Nico had only ever seen him on TV. He only knew Mr. King has long mustachios.

— Miku Tanaka

---

There was a couple, a woman and a man. They were sitting on the ground and looking up at the night sky, stars, and planet shapes. There was nothing anymore. There were no trees, no animals, no river, no mountains, and no people. There was only the reddish ground.

“I’ve decided to stay here,” the man said. He sounded sad.

“I’m okay. I don’t think you are my true love. You don’t comfort me,” the woman said in a monotone voice.

“I thought you were …” He was not smiling.

She didn’t say anything. Her blue eyes looked up at the sky. Then the woman stood up and said, “Goodbye.”

She left, and he was still watching the sky.

In a white room, Ana woke up and opened her blue eyes. She slept on a hard bed. However, she didn’t know where she was and she didn’t know who she was.

An old man, dressed like a doctor, came into the room.

— Shigeki Nakajima

---

Feina opened the refrigerator and wondered what to cook for breakfast. Feina used to prepare a two sunny-side up egg sandwich, two cups of banana milk, and some fruit. But now, her father is here. And Shenfu’s Chinese culture was totally different from her Japanese husband, Shin. It took a little while for her to think what she should do.

In Shanghai, they could eat meat for breakfast. Like spiced ground meat and noodles, fried gyoza, steamed meat buns, wonton, and some leftover food they couldn’t finish eating last night.

But in Japan, they usually have yogurt, bread with jam, fruit, natto beans, and some healthy food.

Shenfu didn’t really like that stuff. He said bread didn’t make his stomach feel full. Also, he thinks yogurt is decayed milk and it’s gross.

Feina prepared spice ground meat noodles that is also one of her favorite breakfast, egg sandwich, and banana milk.

Shin finished shower and put on his gray suit on his white shirt. He tied his light blue tie with slanting gray lines that Feina gave him for his birthday present. He looked perfect. Actually, he always looks perfect. He passed the baby’s room and made a gesture to Shenfu. It means let’s have breakfast.

They walked down to the dining room, and breakfast was already prepared. Shin sat on the seat that he usually sat. He started to read the newspaper and have breakfast.

He had a bit of egg sandwich and said, “What are you guys eating? Noodle?”

“Yeah, it’s spice ground meat noodle. I love it. Do you want to try it?” Feina asked.

“Wu-uu, of course not. We don’t eat meat for breakfast honey. It’s so heavy for morning. I can’t believe you guys can eat it,” Shin said with giving a wry bitter smile.

— Huiling Zhao

Yasen’s creative writing students returned to Japan in December. The newest group of 114 TIU students arrives in Salem in early February.