From left: Cleopatra McGovern ’12, Samantha Hicks ’11, and Phoebe Lytle ’13. Above right: Shira Borzak ’12
Lytle also helped start a food cooperative and assisted the project’s director, Patricia Morck, in shutting down the microloan program, which foundered because the refugees were too unsettled emotionally and physically to launch small businesses. Most moving for her was interviewing refugees, some of whom had been in Quito for seven or eight years and “were still as troubled as when they arrived,” she says. “It was amazing that they were willing to talk to me about this,” she says of their stories of terrifying violence. “I couldn’t do anything more than listen. They said that was enough.” Broadening international understanding was a common theme for Remmer Fund recipients. Borzak, who is planning a career in international relations and foreign policy, worked in Budapest with other research interns from England, Ireland, Italy, Poland, and the U.S. on a comprehensive political and diplomatic history of the Cold War. During their time off, the researchers compared what they’d learned as students about the Cold War and how each country’s position had shaped its citizens’ views. Hicks’s summer abroad immersed her in Indian culture, which included slogging through monsoon season and exploring Mumbai. Workdays involved translating for Indians who were being fingerprinted for visas and attending consular events. “It was the first internship where I felt immediately like I was in the right place,” she notes. Talcott says each year’s crop of Remmer Fund recipients impresses her with their ambition and personal quest for global understanding. “They don’t see an international experience across the world as something they can’t do,” she says. Read what students have to say about their alumnae- and donor-sponsored internships on www.barnard.edu/magazine. Barnard Magazine Spring 2011 11