The Brief History of a Box
Hello fellow Scholars,
I’ve been meaning to post for sometime now from Moss Landing, CA, home to Phil’s Fish Market, more sea lions than people, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), where I am serving out the 10 weeks of my internship in generally good conduct. For those who don’t know me, my name is Jonathan Karp and I’m an Earth and Ocean Sciences major finishing his last semester at Duke this fall. For those who were drawn in by the title, don’t worry, you’re in the right place: my task this summer was to build a plastic box.
Morphologically similar to, but wholly unrelated to the common box, I was recruited to design an incubator for water vessels that will be housed on the open deck of a research vessel in the North Pacific Ocean. The box needed to be sealed from the inside to prevent leaks when pumped full of seawater. It needed to be strong enough to deal with the environmental stresses of the open deck. It also needed to look impressive. (For those interested, we ended up with a 4′ x 2.5′ x 1.7′ box made of clear polycarbonate with PVC corner angles for support and blue 2069 acrylic sheeting for light filtration. Leaks be damned, the box has more holes than a miniature golf complex.)
This was my first venture into engineering, scholastically or professionally, and I had no idea that I was doing this heading into the summer. Six weeks later, I look back on an exciting project, a breath of fresh air that has shaken me out of the funk of ordinary classwork and summer jobs. Moral of the story: do technical work in a field in which you’ve had no prior training.
Aside from that, life in California is great. I wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, and get excited when I remember that I’m getting paid by MBARI to be here. Lately I’ve been rediscovering some of my favorite Bob Dylan songs. I’m learning SCUBA. What more could a person ask for?
I hope to post again at least once before we all head to Durham, but feel free to contact me (jonathan.karp@duke.edu) if you are interested in boxes, doing research, cooking, or you know a good pizza place in the Monterey area. Hope you are all enjoying the summer, and I wish everyone the best until next time.
-Jonathan K.
Hello from Abuja, Nigeria.
Ah, I see I am the third to post today. Tori. You write extremely effective emails.
Hello everyone, and a special hello to all of our new Scholars! Welcome to Duke! I hope this blog will provide us a means to connect before we meet for some heart-to-heart time at the September retreat.
I’m Jane, and I am a rising senior, currently using my Uni enrichment opportunity to have the summer of a lifetime. I spent the first month in Brazil, filming a documentary with my seven-person team from Students of the World, a 501(c)3 organization. We worked closely with the NGO Citizens for Democracy in Information Technology and documented the work they are doing to bring computer technology and education into the favelas. Millions live in the “slum hills,” so-called “invisible” communities steeped in abject poverty, violence and drug-trafficking. And yet, very little is known about these and similar unplanned urban sectors, spreading through Brazil and throughout the developing world. For more information on our work in Rio, Salvadore and Belem, you can check out blogs, videos and photos on our team’s “live site” at www.seechangenow.org/2008/Brazil.
I am spending the last two months of my summer in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, volunteering with the NGO Teachers Without Borders (TWB) to realize the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. It’s been a completely different kind of experience. In Brazil, as the interviewer behind the camera, I was part of collaborative efforts to bring outside, international attention to local crises. In contrast, I have come to Abuja as an individual volunteer and have found that everything rides on personal initiative. Here we launch projects and implement educational reform on the grassroots level, inside out, bottom up. We most recently launched our first Wall-less Classroom, which is a class I teach with another volunteer in the middle of the sprawling dirt expanse that is Jabi Motor Park. I don’t want to risking boring you with details, but if you are interested, you’re free to look up my daily scribblings at whereonearthisjane.blogspot.com. I’ve copied my most recent entry below, in the interest of not cheating and making this a real blog contribution.
I wish you all the best this summer, wherever you are in the world. I would also love to hear from you: let’s connect before it’s over!
Jane C, Trinity ‘09
Day 33. 07.23.08. Education is more than literacy.
We finished up late today and waited under the canopy for Mr. Oko to come from the office to pick us up. Amarachi and Ngozi were seated across from me, discussing today’s class –when behind them, a man in maybe his mid-twenties reached out and slapped a woman to the ground. Shocked, I stood there as she lay there, ten yards away, facedown in the dirt, shaking. Three men seated at a table inches –literally, inches –away from the girl, did nothing. They did not move to help her, or turn to ask how she was, or really, give any indication that they had witnessed what had just happened at their feet–or felt happen, from the tremors in their table legs.
All around, people sat around, on makeshift benches, on cars, all watching in that nonchalant way of the accidental, incidental spectator. A full ten seconds or so later, feeling entered my legs and I found myself rushing over; Amarachi realized what was happening and helped me try to get the woman to stand so we could assess the damage –she was sobbing and sobbing –and as I brushed off her arms, covered in that horrible dusty orange dirt, the dirtiest kind of dirt –I had a second shock. This was just a little girl. Though relatively tall, she was so skinny that my hand fit around her forearm. Amarachi began shouting at the man who had struck her, and at this point another man saw fit to come over and join in on chastising this silent man in the blue jersey. We eventually determined that the blue-shirted man hit her because he did not want to pay her the 10 naira he owed her. Ten cents.
The worst part. The man felt bad. I could tell. He did not move or say a word as we dusted the girl off, or when Amarachi issued him a warning, or even when others then began yelling, even jabbing at him. I looked at this man, a little older than me; his unchanging expression, how still he stood through it all, and I knew. He felt bad. It was strange, how horrible this was, this knowledge that he was sorry for what he had done. It would have been easier to digest, maybe, if I thought that he thought he was in the right. But “right” and “wrong” are not such clear things here. You act. You do. And when a foreigner gets into the middle, and then of course others get involved in the muddle, and you are forcibly held accountable for what is daily occurrence here in the Park, and you look at this girl, bleeding and sobbing, clutching thirty crumpled naira…I don’t know. I don’t know how that feels. How confusing, and tumultuous, and bad.
I feel sick writing this, hours later. Education is missing from Jabi Motor Park, and that doesn’t just mean the people who spend all the hours of the day here lack the opportunity to read fancy books and write fancy letters and pursue better salaries. There is a violent undercurrent in the motion of daily Park life, and even at the best of times, it is expressed in a kind of roughness, a brusqueness of the hands and of the feet. I know the beatings cannot be uncommon. Children and women are especially vulnerable. It is not a question of whether they are treated well or badly –they are not treated at all. They are handled.
violence in the district
This summer, I have the pleasure of interning as an investigator with a criminal law internship program, thanks to the summer enrichment fund. There’s never a dull day on the job here in the District of Columbia, where there’s no shortage of alleged murders, rapes and assaults to keep me occupied.
My blog, lconquersdc.blogpot.com, chronicles some of my experiences and many of my thought processes.
Uni love,
Lisa M.
Summer with Narcissism
Hi all and welcome new Unis!
For those who don’t know me, my name is Yeney Hernandez and I am a rising senior Uni from the Trinity School of Arts and Sciences. I am majoring in Psychology and English. For my Psychology graduation with distinction thesis, I am working in the Leary Lab within the Social Psychology department on a very interesting and (slightly self-centered) topic dealing with Narcissism and romantic relationships.
For the past 8 weeks, I have been attending seminars and working one-on-one with my graduate adviser, Marie-Joelle Estrada (a brilliant Doctorate candidate whose relationship psychology book collection would give even Lily library a run for its money!) to develop an instrument to assess relationship interactions and maintenance mechanisms, as well as individual “degrees of narcissism.” Since we are not working with a clinical sample of people suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder (a very small portion of the population are ever diagnosed with this truly debilitating psychopathology, less than 1 per cent!) we will be able to see how people with “normal” levels of self-absorption view relationships and, most importantly, how their relationships affect their partner’s conception of the relationship. If this sounds a bit complicated to you–and trust me, you are not alone in this!–just think of a situation in which maintaining a romantic relationship with someone has caused you to have to “humble” yourself or put the interests of the relationship before your own ego. Imagine how difficult it was for you (or, perhaps you are imagining a close friend who has told you about their trials in love) to put these feelings aside. Now imagine how difficult it would be for someone who’s entire world revolves around an inflated self concept, people who are not only higher than normal on vengeance, self-promotion and relationship-switching (alternating partners and often cheating on individual partners).
So yes, that is what I have been working on for the past 8 weeks (well…maybe a bit longer). Its a lot of reading, a lot of math (a real treat for statistics-loving me! Not really…) but, like L’Oreal…Its SO worth it!
–Updates to come,
Yeney Hernandez
Greetings from the Rocky Top Retreat
I open my eyes from a hazy sleep to see a spider above my head. It looks dangerous. It takes me a while to register what exactly is going on. I get a book, knock the thing from out of my tent and go back to sleep.
I awake forty five minutes later because the heat in my tent is unbearable. I crawl out of my tent, and walk barefoot to “the porch.” Roger, who’s accent is so thick I can barely understand him serves me an awful cup of coffee. I say “Roger, this stuff is so bad, it gives me the shits.” Roger’s reply: “Its good for you boy. Make you light and strong. You’ll climb better.”
No, im not somewhere fancy like New Zeland or Africa. I have been spending my last few weeks camping at Roger’s Rocky Top Retreat in Fayettville, WV. Its a simple place consisting of a field and a shack (pictured below.)
Rock climbers from all over the country come here every year to climb on the Nuttal sandstone that hangs high over the New River, ironically one of the oldest rivers in the world.
Tucked away in rural West Virginia, the New River Gorge is a little known haven for all who enjoy “human powered recreation.” Although the most popular activity is white water rafting (the New is considered one of the best white water rivers in the country), rock climbing, mountain biking and hiking are also very popular activities.
Some photos so far.
Hope everyone else is enjoying themselves,
Greg
