While other seniors were looking forward to graduate and professional schools last year, Laurie Ball, Courtney Crosson, Jay Lee, Katie Mitchell and Harry Phillips were debating how to conquer a slew of worldwide problems.
The five graduates, who were selected for the 2004-2005 Hart Fellows Program, collected their belongings this summer, said goodbye to their families and headed for destinations halfway across the globe. Now they are in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya, India, Tanzania and Brazil, working for local non-governmental organizations and helping to tackle complex social, political and humanitarian problems.
For most of them, this is their first time in the host country. Nonetheless, as the best of the best students at Duke, chosen by the Hart Leadership Program from hundreds of applicants, everything in their four years at the University suggested that they would succeed, if not excel, at their post-graduate assignments.
But 10 months in another country is a long, long time. And a textbook cannot justifiably capture all the challenges of real world policy-making. Three months have passed since they first arrived, and they are feeling the effects of being miles away from home.
Lee, Trinity ’04, conducts research for the Bangalore-based Freedom Foundation to help it improve its care of orphaned HIV positive children. Where he lives, death is not a possibility but a certainty for many. He does not know how to tell the children he has developed relationships with that he will leave after 10 months and probably never return.
“I can’t really bear the thought of leaving here when it’s all over,” Lee said.
In the largest slum of Nairobi, Kenya, Crosson works for an organization to improve the spread of information and self-help programs. The Trinity ’04 graduate knew poverty had degrading effects on people, but she has since experienced firsthand how poverty can lead people to betray even their friends.
A friend who had recently lost his job told Crosson that his association with her, a white woman, had gotten him fired—but he was actually discharged for an entirely different reason. Crosson came to realize that he had deceived her to gain her sympathy and financial support. After having her trust betrayed, she wonders if she can trust again in a foreign environment.
“It was easier to see things in absolute terms at Duke, it was ethically more black and white,” Crosson said.
Laura Thornhill, a 2003-2004 Hart Fellow and current program coordinator, said some Fellows find the real world far messier than they expected. “You have to deal with the fact that nobody is perfect, and you want to do good work but you’re working in an imperfect world,” Thornhill said.
Meanwhile, working with the NGO Development Foundation in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ball, Trinity ’04, has been shocked by Bosnians’ opinions of America, their former benefactor.
“Time and again, I am told by concerned [Bosnian Muslims], ‘Ten years ago Americans saved us. Now [President George W.] Bush wants to kill us,’” Ball wrote in an e-mail. “And then, just to make sure that I have understood them properly, they usually make some kind of telling gesture, such as squashing their hands together and saying, ‘He wants to do this to us.’”
She was also startled by some Bosnians’ continued reverence for their leaders, despite the fact that many are wanted war criminals. In a letter to the program, she wrote, “The background on [my tour guide’s] phone is a picture of Karadic, one of the two most wanted war criminals from Bosnia and Herzegovina who remains at large, wanted on counts of genocide and other crimes against humanity. ‘Do you know who this is?’ [my tour guide] asked. I nodded. ‘He is my president,’ he said. Then, to be certain that I understood, he added, ‘Like Bush to you.’”
Phillips is based at the Federal University of Salvador, Brazil, and works with micro-enterprise organizations to increase work opportunities for young people. The Trinity ’04 graduate has become increasingly concerned with the growing divisiveness among the world’s citizens. “It seems we are doing a poor job of finding the common ground amongst us,” he wrote in a letter back to the program.
The reform-minded Mitchell, Trinity ’04 and an ardent supporter of women’s rights, translates legal documents for the only legal aid provider to women in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. She perseveres despite personal setbacks: She learned of her grandfather’s death in September and realized she couldn’t return to the States. She was also diagnosed with malaria Saturday.
Mitchell originally intended to work abroad most of her life, but she has become painfully aware of her limits as a person for bringing about change in the world.
“I think I really do want to make change,” she said. “But now I realize that home is where my family is, where my base is and that I want to be a leader in my community at home.”
Supportive professors warn Fellows that their experiences will be jarring, but the real world is often more challenging than students can anticipate, said Bridget Booher, assistant director of the Hart Leadership Program.
“The world’s problems don’t exist in isolation, and students who go out there with ideas for solving them realize it’s a lot more complex than they imagine,” Booher said. “You’re going to feel overwhelmed, but part of the leadership development is to work through this purposeful disorientation and reflect on what it means to be a leader in today’s vast world.”
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