CA Magazine Spring 2010

spring 2010

Class Notes

Caelyn Kwak ’12 Drawing 2, Spring 2009

CO NCO RD ACADEMY MISSIO N Concord Academy engages its students in a community animated by a love of learning, enriched by a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, and guided by a covenant of common trust.

Students and teachers work together as a community of learners dedicated to intellectual rigor and creative endeavor. In a caring and challenging atmosphere, students discover and develop talents as scholars, artists, and athletes and are encouraged to find their voices.

The school is committed to embracing and broadening the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives, and talents of its people. This diversity fosters respect for others and genuine exchange of ideas.

Common trust challenges students to balance individual freedom with responsibility and service to a larger community. Such learning prepares students for lives as committed citizens.

spring 2010

Editor

Gail Friedman Managing Editor

Tara Bradley Design

Irene Chu ’76 Class Notes Editor

Ingrid von Dattan Detweiler ’61 Editorial Board

Tara Bradley Director of Communications

Gail Friedman Associate Director of Communications

Pam Safford Associate Head for Communications, Enrollment, and Planning

Carol Shoudt

F E A T U R E S

page

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14 On Shaky Ground Who from CA Is Helping Haiti?

Major Gifts Officer

Lucille Stott Campaign Writer, English Teacher

Meg Wilson Director of Advancement

First Person: Stories from Haiti

by Amy Bracken '92 “They Did Not Complain”

by Carla Piccinini ’69

Elizabeth “Billie” Julier Wyeth ’76 Director of Alumnae/i Programs

Managing the Mental Health Crisis: Trustee Silvia Gosnell P’10

Editorial Interns

January 12, 2010: Inside Partners In Health

by Zöe Agoos ’03

D E P A R T M E N T S

Maternal Instincts: Anne Pfitzer ’85

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Daphne Kim ’10 Scarlett Kim ’11 Suah Lee ’10 Photography Interns

Henry Kim ’11 Scarlett Kim ’11 Lisa Kong ’10

Concord Academy magazine is printed on recycled paper with soy-based ink.

Write us

Concord Academy Magazine 166 Main Street Concord, Massachusetts 01742 (978) 402-2200 magazine@concordacademy.org concordacademy.org © 2010 Concord Academy Committed to being a school enriched by a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives, Concord Academy does not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, creed, sexual orientation, or national or ethnic origin in its hiring, admissions, educational and financial policies, or other school-administered programs. The school’s facilities are wheelchair-accessible.

A Dangerous Crossroads: Elizabeth “Liza” McAlister ’81 A Mentor Makes a Difference: Rebecca Fox ’66

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Letters

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Campus News

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Alumnae/i Profiles Lee Lawrence Pierce ’46 Sharmin Eshraghi Bock ’80 Caroline “Carrie” Harwood ’69 David Cavell ’02

by Nancy Shohet West ’84

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CA Bookshelf

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Athletics 2010 Spring Highlights Profile: John McGarry, ski coach

by Tara Bradley

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Arts Q&A: Philippa Kaye ’87

Homeland Security’s Helping Hand

by Matt Chandler ’02 Small Successes: Bronwen Jenney Anders ’59 Hope, Fortitude, and Resilience: Bishop Ian Douglas P’05, ’07, ’10

28 A Price-less Sense of Humor Davidson Lecturer Hilary Price ’87

by Gail Friedman

31 Rushing to Judgment: MLK Day

Cover photo by Justin Ide, courtesy of Partners In Health; composite by Irene Chu ’76 Above right, detail from a Rhymes with Orange cartoon by Hilary Price ’87, referring to former CA teacher Ted Sherman

Message from the Head of School

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Class Notes

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In Memoriam

Tom Kates

message from the head of s chool

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arly on a Saturday morning in March, I found myself in the Agganis Arena at Boston University, home to concerts, basketball, hockey, and more hockey. But on this morning the arena looked like a flashing video arcade and sounded like a rock concert. The automated frenzy was appropriate to the day-long event: the Boston regional FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition.

I had been invited by John Abele, a Concord Academy life trustee, the husband of Mary Seton Abele ’56, and father of three CA graduates, Christopher ’86, Alexander ’87, and Jennifer (Jeneye) ’90. The company John cofounded, Boston Scientific, is a founding sponsor of FIRST Robotics, and as we watched robots competing on the field below, I thought back to the conversation I had had with John some four months prior. Over the course of a wide-ranging hour, he had enthusiastically explained the philosophy of the science and technology program, saying that solving problems through collaboration was its core value. What I would see, he said, was not a competition so much as a “cooptition.” The term, a blend of the words cooperation and competition, was coined by FIRST Robotics founder Dean Kamen, and I found it aptly applied to what was unfolding below us: robot teams had to work together in order both to score and to advance. For this Boston “cooptition,” high school students had programmed robots to play soccer.

Red and blue teams of three robots each battled on the field, some exhibiting a special ability to “kick” a ball toward a goal, others displaying remarkable speed and agility to defend their team’s goal. Like aliens from a Jetsons’ world, these bionic Beckhams slid across the arena, shot soccer balls into goals on the field’s four corners, and occasionally received extra points for lifting themselves onto a small, midfield tower.

I was mesmerized—not just by the students’ technical skills, but by the life lessons they were taking from their technoathletic combat. Teams earned points because their robots were built to maneuver skillfully and shoot accurately, but also because team members understood the importance of working together. I frequently witnessed teenaged robot commanders problem-solving on the spot, redirecting their errant charges, and fixing technical glitches. The winning team in the Agganis Arena bested the others with its skill in building and programming robots, but also with its adept collaboration.

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

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As I watched the FIRST Robotics Competition, I got caught up in the same cheering and excitement that capture me on the soccer and softball fields. And I realized that Concord Academy students learn and exhibit many of the same skills as these roboteers. The cooptition model resonates deeply at CA, a school built upon collaboration. Our students are certainly competitive, though mostly with themselves, thanks to our noprize, no-ranking policies. Those who navigate well the waters of high school often are the students who seek the support and camaraderie of others, both faculty and friends. I see that happen every day at CA. I believe the kinds of lessons learned at the FIRST Robotics Competition apply throughout CA’s curriculum: though students may not be building robots in history or learning computer languages in English, they are collaborating and innovating. Innovation is not just technical. Innovation is a well-turned phrase, an original idea, an observation, a courageously unpopular position in a classroom debate.

But CA does have a healthy population of robot-builders and techno-wizards. Consider the annual TechExpo, in which students have displayed inventions ranging from a synthesizer that turns computer files into sound to an application that synchronizes files between an iPhone and a computer. And the DEMONS (Dreamers, Engineers, Mechanics, and Overt Nerds) club is always getting its hands dirty, building things of practical use (most recently, a large tricycle customized to haul recycling and a device to stabilize the film department’s handheld cameras). DEMONS members regularly demonstrate how creativity and invention address problems in a tangible world.

Some of these technically talented students surprised me when, in some strange stroke of karma, they stood up during morning announcements the Monday after the FIRST Robotics Competition and encouraged fellow students to join a CA robotics team. They had no idea that, two days before, I had witnessed the very event they hoped to experience. Perhaps I’ll be back at the Agganis Arena next year, cheering CA students on as they problem-solve, collaborate, and make robots perform improbable feats.

Understanding the AIDS Vaccine

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IDS and immunology expert Dr. Anne De Groot kicked off the second-semester assembly schedule in January, explaining the widespread toll of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and how it disproportionately affects developing nations in Asia and Africa.

De Groot founded EpiVax Inc., whose goal is to develop an effective AIDS vaccine, as well as the Global Alliance to Immunize against AIDS (GAIA) Vaccine Foundation, through which she has focused her extensive efforts to combat HIV in Bamako, Mali.

With a backdrop of slides from Bamako, De Groot described her work there, including the Hope Center Clinic, which offers HIV care to Bamako villagers. De Groot, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Brown University School of Medicine, a professor in biotechnology at the University of Rhode Island, and the director of the Institute for

WE LOVE the new online issue of CA maga-

zine! We think that it is quite a feat—in so many ways. You and your team did a fabulous job ensuring that we see everything in the issue by highlighting the palette of choices up front with excellent graphics. All the links work too!

We could still choose to focus on five or six articles of interest, like the head’s letter (another eloquent and thoroughly genuine note), if we wanted to do so.

Although we are avid recyclers and have cut our household paper consumption by a third in the last twelve months, we are only slowly learning to appreciate photos, for example, online. There is something about touching a photo—but we are motivated and learning.

Congratulations!

Pat, Carl, and Erinn Geyer ’12

Corrections

Nancy Loring’s first name was incorrect in a letter to the editor in the winter issue.

Dr. Anne De Groot speaking to a science class after her assembly

If you missed our online-only winter issue, please check it out at concordacademy.org/magazine.

Concord Academy magazine welcomes letters to the editor. Please send correspondence to magazine@concordacademy.org or to Gail Friedman, Concord Academy, 166 Main Street, Concord, Massachusetts 01742.

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Sandra P. Rosenblum Faculty Emerita

— Sarah Faulkner Hugenberger ’94

Photos by Sarah Faulkner Hugenberger ’94

YOUR DECISION not to produce the winter issue of the CA magazine in print is very disappointing. I support almost all things green and am careful about using, reusing, and recycling paper products. However, I use a computer daily for professional activities but do not enjoy reading online for pleasure. In fact I just don’t do it.

Since the spring and fall issues will be printed, it appears that online-only publication for this issue may be an experiment. I hope others will respond with their reactions.

Immunology and Informatics at the University of Rhode Island, explained that, because different strains of the virus exist in different countries, many countries are concentrating on developing a vaccine that fights only the local strain.

The mission of GAIA is to develop a global vaccine that will combat all strains of the virus and that will be available without charge.

After her presentation, the internationally recognized vaccine expert received a standing ovation from students, who were clearly moved by the work to which De Groot has devoted her life.

C AM PUS NEWS

LETTERS

Photos by Gail Friedman

CAMPUS NEWS

Author Larry Tye

A Paige in History

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with the Cleveland Indians a year later. He had a 6–1 record that season and the second-lowest earned run average in the American League, Tye said.

Tye flashed a photo of Paige on the screen, sitting on the field in a rocking chair. It was 1965, and the owner of the Kansas City Athletics, hoping to increase attendance, brought in Paige for a game against the Red Sox. He mocked his age by putting the pitcher in the rocker and placing a nurse at his side. But Paige had the last laugh: in three innings, the Red Sox got one hit off the fifty-nine-yearold — from an excited Carl Yastrzemski, who hugged Paige because his father had gotten a hit off the legend twenty years earlier. “He stuck around so long that he could pitch against fathers and sons and grandsons,” Tye said.

Susan Lapides P’12

eeling backward, his left foot extended as high as his head, Satchel Paige appeared on the video screen, looking ready to launch his baseball right into the Performing Arts Center.

Larry Tye, author of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, husband of Lisa Frusztajer ’80, and stepparent of CA senior Marina Long, brought the baseball legend to life at a winter assembly, describing his unhittable pitches as well as the intransigent racism that kept Paige from Major League Baseball until late in his career.

“Nobody ever pitched better for longer,” Tye said.

Paige started pitching in the 1920s and was still taking to the mound in the 1960s.

With Tye as a guide, CA students, faculty, and staff traveled through Paige’s life, from the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law Breakers, where he learned to pitch, to his first game with the all-black Chattanooga White Sox, in 1926, and on toward his Major League career. Jackie Robinson reintegrated baseball in 1947 (it was partially integrated after the Civil War), and Paige signed

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

Mock Trial, Real Courtroom Drama

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veryone could feel the tension in the courthouse.

Eitan Tye ’12, CA’s witness for the defense, was not giving up. The opposing lawyer, from Acton-Boxborough Regional

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High School, kept asking the same question, trying to elicit a damning one-word answer with his cross-examination.

But Eitan knew his affidavit well and stuck to his answer.

Satchel Paige’s distinctive pitching stance

The opposing lawyer grew increasingly angry and confused, like an actor making up a new script on the spot, but Eitan did not back down.

The Mock Trial Club, CA’s newest team, competed this winter, along with about two hundred other Massachusetts high schools, in the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Mock Trial competition. Members received trial books with rules of the competition as well as affidavits and other evidence that would be used in the trial — a case involving a middleincome man who sued his investment adviser after substantial losses in a high-risk hedge fund.

During meetings each week, CA’s legal coach, Steve Winnick, senior partner at Winnick & Sullivan in Watertown, Massachusetts, along with faculty advisor and CA Assis-

tant Librarian Wendy Berger P’01, ’06, taught club members courtroom basics: how to handle themselves before a judge, how to put documents into evidence, how to object, and how to get witnesses to say exactly what they want them to say. “The case materials and the applicable law were highly nuanced, offering pluses and minuses for both sides in advocating for their clients, and are as challenging as any graduate law student might face on the Massachusetts bar examination,” said Winnick.

Club members wrote scripts for opening statements, closing statements, and cross- and direct examinations for both the defense and plaintiff. At the first trial, against Acton-Boxborough, CA’s team of four lawyers and three witnesses entered the

Photos by David R. Gammons

Advisors, in 17 Syllables

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o enliven the winter and encourage class bonding, CA held its first Chameleon Relay in February, centered on friendly interclass competition.

Among the challenges: to write haiku about class advisors.

Andy Zou ’13 posted a paean to Library Director Martha Kennedy and visual arts teacher Jonathan Smith:

Our class advisors are Martha and Jonathan wonderful and proud

Ben Weissmann ’10 chimed in on English teacher and senior advisor Ayres Stiles-Hall:

That Ayres Stiles-Hall Trying to wrangle seniors How can he do it?

Springtime in Rome: March trips also took CA students to England, France, and to colleges from New England to the mid-Atlantic.

On the other senior advisor, Modern and Classical Languages Department Head Jamie Morris-Kliment, Sam Tobey ’10 penned this: as on which side’s arguments would have won in a real courtroom. At the end of the Acton-Boxborough competition, CA’s team won on merit (meaning it had the best arguments for the case) but lost by three points out of a possible ninety in performance.

Undeterred, team members polished their arguments and took on the defense role against Lunenburg High School. “It became pretty intense at times. During my cross-exam, the opposing attorney and I had a pretty loud and difficult battle,” said Kathleen Cachel ’12, who played the defense’s main witness.

“Neither one of us was going to back down.” CA competed with two fewer lawyers than Lunenburg had, but won on both merit and performance.

Berger lauded the novice team’s hard work and dedica-

tion. “They learned how to understand the intricacies of a complicated case, the laws applicable to fraud, and how to understand both sides and argue forcefully for their assigned side,” she said.

Though they didn’t make the finals, the team plans to continue polishing its courtroom tactics. “With all the club’s members returning next year, except for club president Jee Hee Yang ’10,” said Winnick, “the Concord Academy Mock Trial Club is poised to establish itself as a force to be reckoned with in the competition of 2011.”

Empress of Latin Jamie is the slave-driver She lays down the law

Then Ghage Lay ’12 summed up sophomore advisors Mike Wirtz, CA’s science department head, and history teacher Stephanie Manzella:

Mike Wirtz, what a bro And that Stephanie’s no scrub You wish you were us

— Lizzie Rodgers ’12

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Concord District Court ready to fight for the defendant.

“Mock trial is my way of being competitive. Because I’m not so sporty, it makes me feel like I’m on a real team,” said Elke Schipani ’12, who played an expert witness for the defense. “It’s a lot of work, especially during the competition season, but once you get up on the stand or speak before the judge and truly understand what it is you’re doing, it’s totally worth it.

Once the trial is over, the sense of togetherness and pride for the team as a whole is unimaginable.”

Each participant is awarded points by the “judge,” sometimes a practicing lawyer but in this case Concord District Court Judge Peter Kilmartin, who based scores on the performance of the team’s lawyers and witnesses as well

Suah Lee ’10 Lisa Kong ’10

CAMPUS NEWS

In January, the student-run carnival known as Winterfest raised more than $8,700 for financial aid.

Centipede staff at the Boston Globe

Centipede Visits the Boston Globe

Henry Kim ’11 Henry Kim ’11

ics interest her most. “When in doubt, I always come back to politics,” she said. Vennochi also showed the group souvenirs she collected from political conventions and emails received from political celebrities.

After the visit with Vennochi, Beard answered questions, explaining how the Globe has shifted from an exclusively print newspaper to an increasing presence online.

The group ended its field trip with a short visit with David Dahl, the Globe ’s regional editor, who encouraged the students to contribute to the “Your Town” community sections of Boston.com.

—Suah Lee ’10

Lisa Kong ’10

he student editors of the Centipede and their faculty advisor, Emily Coit ’98, recently visited the headquarters of the Boston Globe and Boston.com.

David Beard, editor of Boston.com and parent of CA junior Jordan Beard, welcomed the group with a mini tour, including a peek at an enormous printing press at the core of the building and pictures of Pulitzer Prize–winning Globe journalists. The group met with Joan Vennochi, who writes a column on Sundays and Thursdays in the Globe as well as a Web-only column once a month. Vennochi explained how much she enjoys her job and which top-

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Keys to Good Writing

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he writing talent of David Do ’10 and Haley Han ’10 (right) has been recognized by the Boston Globe Scholastic Art Awards. David won a “gold key,” which qualifies him for the national competition, and Haley a “silver key,” as well as an honorable mention. The students’ entries were assignments for the English class, Memoir and Autobiography.

Elisa beth Beck witt ’11

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

Henry Kim ’11

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ceramics teacher Ben Eberle ’99 (bottom right).

The faculty maintained its undefeated streak with a 295– 220 win, but students had some bragging rights. According to Dean of Students and Community Life David Rost, the final score was the closest in CA Quiz Bowl history.

Ben Stumpf ’88

he answers ranged from James Joyce to the Yankees, from the Caspian Sea to the Sons of Liberty.

Students faced off against faculty in Concord Academy’s annual Quiz Bowl, a playful but grueling war of words and wisdom. Four students — Bronwyn Murray-Bozeman ’10, Mike Pappas’10, Sam Boswell ’13, and Philip Stefani ’13 (top right) — braced themselves against the faculty firepower of Library Director Martha Kennedy, Academic Dean John Drew, German teacher Susan Adams, and

Alumnus Addresses Model UN

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n a keynote address to Concord Academy’s sixth Model United Nations (CAMUN), Matt Chandler ’02 related his own experience on 9/11 to his current job as deputy press secretary at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He explained how the tragedy — which occurred while he was a senior at CA — piqued his interest in news and reporting.

Chandler told CAMUN delegates that the DHS, created in 2003, integrated twenty-two

agencies and now employs 200,000. The need for it was obvious. “What came immediately before, and after, 9/11 illustrated the critical gaps in our national security and response apparatus,” he said.

“Wholesale reinvention of aviation security, border security, intelligence sharing, and federal law enforcement cooperation followed in order to enhance our core ability to quickly and accurately combat threats that are constantly evolving.”

our nonessential student records—that’s everything except your official transcript—will be destroyed this summer, unless you contact Registrar Sue Sauer. The records contain teacher comments, application materials, and other information.

If you graduated from CA between 1996 and 2000 (or withdrew from one of those classes) and want your records, please contact the Registrar’s Office no later than July 10 at sue_sauer@concordacademy.org or (978) 402-2274. More recent alumnae/i also can request their records, which will be destroyed seven to ten years after graduation.

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Recent events, however, demonstrated that government, law enforcement, and the intelligence community can do better, he said, referencing the attempted attack on a December AmsterdamDetroit flight. Since that bungled plot, Chandler said, the DHS has enhanced airport security and President Obama has requested about $900 million in his 2011 budget to fund imaging technology, increased air marshals and canine teams, explosion detection devices, and other means to keep air travelers safe. Chandler stressed that the December airline event demanded an international response, particularly because more than one hundred European passengers’ lives were threatened. This year alone, international cooperation has resulted in several historic multinational declarations designed to improve aviation security.

Chandler’s speech was an appropriate introduction to CAMUN, which this year included a historic simulation of 9/11. For the March conference, led by Secretary General Kendall Tucker ’10, CA hosted more than one hundred dele-

gates from thirteen schools, who broke into three committees. The General Assembly debated the global arms trade and sustainable energy, and the UN Security Council tackled security situations in Haiti and Afghanistan. Students on the U.S. National Security Council, which did the 9/11 simulation, quickly learned the truth behind Chandler’s remark: “Government does nothing more fundamental than protecting its citizens. But the execution of this mission can be very complex.”

Matt Chandler discussed the DHS’ response to the earthquake in Haiti; see page 25.

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Classes of 1996 through 2000

Lisa Kong ’10

Tara Bradley

Closest Quiz Bowl Ever

ALUM NAE I PRO FILES

Lee Lawrence Pierce Class of 1946

A Doll’s View of History

BYNANCYSHOHETWEST’84

“She was a rag doll with very scary eyes.

I knew she had a secret, and I had to find out what it was.”

T H I S

I S S U E

• Lee Lawrence Pierce Class of 1946

• Sharmin Eshraghi Bock Class of 1980

• Caroline “Carrie” Harwood Class of 1969

• David Cavell Class of 2002

W

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

hen Lee Lawrence Pierce ’46 was a girl, her grandfather returned from Japan with a present. An inveterate tomboy, she hoped it would be something military, maybe a sword. Instead, it was an ornately dressed doll in a glass case. The well-mannered child who had no interest in dolls tried hard to hide her disappointment.

More than seventy years later, Pierce is a collector with 180 dolls representing nations all over the world, and recently completed a book called More Than Meets the Eye about seven of her dolls. Each chapter tells stories of world history through a different doll’s voice.

Back when her grandfather gave her the doll, Pierce put it aside and went back to playing baseball and football with her brothers. But her indifference to dolls changed when she was thirteen. Her mother declared that it was time for the tomboyish ways to end and brought Pierce from their Long Island home to New York City for a weekend of museums, theatre, fine dining, and shopping. At a bookstore, in an artful display about travel books, Pierce noticed a doll, the most mesmerizing she had ever seen. “She was a rag doll with very scary eyes,” Pierce said.

“I knew she had a secret, and I had to find out what it was. I loved mysteries and Nancy Drew books, and this was a mystery I wanted to solve.”

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Faith Gude

On a subsequent visit to the bookstore, Pierce asked to buy the doll, and the bookstore owner gave it to her. Pierce would come to find out that her instincts were right, though it took several years as an adult to piece together the story. She learned the doll had belonged to a famous World War II spy, who used her extensive doll collection to get information for the Japanese from other doll collectors about the ships, planes, and submarines their husbands were on.

Not long after getting that doll, Pierce went off to Concord Academy for two happy years, then traveled to Mexico the summer after her junior year. The country transfixed her, and she decided to take courses at the University of Mexico without finishing at CA. When she returned to the States, she moved to New York City, where she finished high school, followed by a secretarial course.

The fluency in Spanish she’d developed in Mexico turned out to be valuable to her career. In 1951, she took a job with the State Department and spent the next several years living in countries throughout South America and Europe. “I was always curious about what was going on in the rest of the world,” she said. “I wanted to learn about cultures, music, languages. So I worked and studied in various countries. I like to

say I earned a PhD in life.” In her thirties, she married, moved to Cambridge, and raised two young sons alone after the premature death of her husband.

As she traveled, she collected dolls and explored their historical stories. She gave presentations on the dolls at schools, libraries, museums, and festivals. A lifelong writer who had published poems and plays throughout her adulthood, she finally decided to commit the dolls’ stories to paper just a few years ago. She is self-publishing the first seven stories through AuthorHouse later this year.

That leaves more than 170 dolls whose stories still need to be written, but right now Pierce’s attention has turned to another project.

From a great-aunt, she inherited the letters of a Russian noblewoman from St. Petersburg who married one of Pierce’s Pennsylvania ancestors.

The great-aunt told her the letters contain a mystery and a love story, and Pierce is busy piecing that story together.

So at the age of eighty-three, with her 180 dolls surrounding her, Pierce’s eyes are turned to Russian history. The doll stories, like the dolls, will wait on a shelf while she unravels her next mystery.

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Lee Lawrence Pierce ’46

Alison Yin / Oakland Tribune

Sharmin Eshraghi Bock Class of 1980

Intrepid Prosecutor

“I

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

prosecute human trafficking cases: young American girls sold for sex on the streets and over the Internet in what has become an epidemic in our country.” Sharmin Eshraghi Bock’s calm and steady voice almost — but not quite — belies the chilling reality of what she is saying.

“This is the least recognized form of child abuse in our country. It’s akin to modern-day slavery.”

For the deputy district attorney in California’s Alameda County, prosecuting human traffickers was only the beginning of her battle against this societal problem, one that targets girls as young as eleven who often don’t realize they are victims. “In our schools, we teach English and math but not what love looks like,” Bock said. “These girls get tricked into prostitution, thinking they are providing for their boyfriend — someone who has claimed to love them.” Though they may have started out as runaways, the girls soon become captives, Bock said, unable to leave and sometimes unable to recognize the danger they are in. Stockholm Syndrome, in which victims identify emotionally with their captors, is a major obstacle in child prostitution cases.

Bock has put perpetrators behind bars for more than twenty years as a prosecutor in the Oakland area, but she also has tackled child prostitution on a more macro level. “I realized I couldn’t effectively prosecute those cases without a support system for girls because they had such specialized needs,” she said. “Society views them as prostitutes and criminals, not victims of abuse. I set up a network of providers that specialize in this area — community-based organizations, social workers, child advocates — and interfaced them with law enforcement. Now in California and throughout the nation, advocates are involved from the first point of contact when a child prostitute is apprehended.”

Bock also has worked for legislative action, including two laws recently passed in California, one creating a diversion program to give girls an alternative to prostitution and another aimed at 10

Sharmin Eshraghi Bock ’80

prosecuting pimps as drug dealers are prosecuted: by seizing their assets. Georgia and Hawaii sought Bock’s help to draft similar laws. There is still more to do on the legislative front, said Bock, who currently is working to revamp California’s human trafficking law so the state will not be required to prove force was used in trafficking of a minor. Often, she explained, girls are tricked into prostitution and do not articulate their experience in terms of physical force. “In fact,” she said, “the most effective forms of coercion make the victim believe she has not been coerced.”

Several years ago, recognizing that girls needed alternatives if they were to stay off the streets, Bock helped establish Safe Place Alternative, a drop-in center offering services tailored to girls rescued from prostitution. The acronym SPA is no coincidence; Bock wants the girls to feel as pampered and valued outside prostitution as they once felt working for their pimps.

When not advocating for teen prostitutes, Bock sometimes takes on cold cases, using DNA and other forensic evidence to unravel unsolved murders and rapes. “Sadly, many of my victims in these old unsolved cases are prostitutes targeted by criminals because of their invisibility and belief that society won’t notice or care if they go missing,” she said.

Bock’s work can be stressful and oppressive, but she finds release in horses, particularly show jumping. A firm believer in equine therapy, Bock hopes to use horses to help rehabilitate victimized girls. In 2006, she founded Paddock Cakes (paddockcakes.com), which makes gourmet treats for horses and distributes them all over the U.S. She is working to establish a residential safe house in the California countryside for casualties of the child sex trade. Proceeds from Paddock Cakes help support that effort.

This deputy DA and activist has won two major awards for her work: the California State Legislature named her 2010 Woman of the Year, and in 2009, California Women Lawyers gave her its most prestigious honor, the Fay Stender Award. Determined to raise awareness even more, Bock is working on a book; her advocacy efforts have been featured in documentaries, on television, and in magazines.

“My goal is to ensure that our country recognizes the existence and severity of this problem and appreciates how each one of us contributes to its proliferation,” she said. “I want to eradicate the stereotypes and myths that color our judgment of these children and preclude us from seeing them as the victims of child abuse and modern-day slavery that they are.”

Caroline “Carrie” Harwood Class of 1969

“Raising a daughter with a chronic illness made me a very different person from the one I probably would have otherwise become.”

When Scientific Research Turns Personal

Fred Taub

aroline “Carrie” Harwood’s first contact with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation occurred when she was a young microbiologist applying for postdoctoral grants. She wanted to study the pseudomonas bacterium, which plays a key role in the lung infections that plague cystic fibrosis (CF) sufferers.

Harwood ’69, who fell in love with science in Molly Plumb’s class at CA, majored in biology at Colby, earned her PhD at UMass, then received the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation grant and began studying the bacterium intensely at Yale—with no inkling that it would someday dominate not only her research but her personal life as well. By a peculiar and unfortunate coincidence, Harwood’s daughter Barbara was born with CF in 1985.

“Cystic fibrosis is the most common, lethal genetic disease among Caucasians,” Harwood explained. “It’s a defect in a gene that causes mucus on membranes to build up and get really thick. That affects a bunch of different organs, but it’s mainly a problem in the lungs.”

Harwood and her husband, also a microbiologist, realized as soon as their daughter was diagnosed as a baby that the situation was grim, but, as biologists and parents, they threw themselves into making their daughter’s life the best and healthiest it could be. Throughout her childhood, Barbara took a daunting dosage of pills and inhaled medicines and spent an hour in physical therapy every day, but she remained healthy enough to live a relatively normal childhood through middle school, her schooling interrupted only by occasional hospital stays. Harwood and her husband had both started their careers teaching in upstate New York, but they redirected their careers toward the best cystic fibrosis research and treatment centers, which brought them first to Iowa City, where they had a healthy son, Ted, then later to Seattle, where Harwood is in her fifth year as a microbiology professor at the University of Washington (UW).

Throughout high school, Barbara’s health declined steadily, but it improved dramatically two years ago when she received a double-lung transplant. “It was a really hard recovery, but so far she’s done really well,” Harwood said. “The lungs she received don’t have the CF gene, so there’s no infection anymore.” For the first time, Barbara, now twentyfour, is living a fairly normal and healthy life and is attending UW. Harwood, meanwhile, is at the top of her game as researcher; she recently was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and named 2010 laureate of the Procter & Gamble Award for Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

“Raising a daughter with a chronic illness made me a very different person from the one I probably would have otherwise become,” Harwood reflected. “I am kinder and more compassionate. I am a better leader to my research team. Having a child who has really struggled makes me look at people more as individuals and treat them more patiently than I once did. It made me come down from my ivory tower of research and focus on something that could really help people.”

Carrie Harwood ’69

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David Cavell Class of 2002

Channeling the Governor

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program but really worthwhile.”

After TFA, Cavell headed back to his hometown of Boston and met with a former fellow intern from the Patrick campaign, who had become the governor’s speechwriter. As interns, the two had once pinch-hit on a speech when the paid staff was out of the office. “He invited me to work with him,” Cavell said. “Less than two weeks after I left the fifth floor of a chaotic elementary school in the Bronx, I walked into the State House and sat down at an oak desk in front

Eugena Ossi / Office of the Governor of Massachusetts

hen David Cavell ’02 tells new acquaintances he’s a speechwriter for Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, he is accustomed to hearing a couple responses. Many ask, “Isn’t it weird to hear your words coming out of someone else’s mouth?” But the mischievous wonder, “Do you ever slip in something silly or inappropriate just to see if he’ll say it?”

To Cavell, both questions, even if meant in jest, miss the point of what he does. “The governor isn’t a robot. The words he says are his,” Cavell said. “He’s a heavy editor and he knows more about speechwriting than I ever will. After listening to pretty much everything Gov. Patrick has said for the past three years, I’ve developed a good sense of how he feels about the world in general and about specific issues. When I’m writing, it’s not my voice that I’m hearing, it’s his.”

Politics has been in Cavell’s blood since he volunteered as campaign coordinator for a Massachusetts legislative candidate the summer after graduating from CA. During his senior year at Tufts University, he interned with the media department of the Patrick campaign. But after college, he was accepted into Teach for America (TFA), which recruits recent college graduates to teach in under-resourced public schools. From August 2006 to August 2007, Cavell taught fourth grade at a public school in the South Bronx. “I don’t think I realized when I was at CA just how massive the gap is between the best and worst schools in this country,” he said. “It was shocking to me.”

The teaching stint had highs and lows. “I held a parent-teacher conference in a homeless shelter. That’s not something you ever forget,” he said. “And when you see a kid who is every bit as smart as you were as a child, and reminds you so much of your friends when you were young, but is growing up in such a violent environment, it’s very hard. TFA is a complicated

of a twelve-foot window overlooking Beacon Hill.

That was an adjustment.”

Cavell, officially Speechwriter and Deputy Director of New Media for the Governor, loves his job. With lead times that vary from fifteen minutes to several weeks, he relishes the challenge of speechwriting. “It’s a learning process,” he said. “One of the things I learned at CA is that you really have to get over your fear of failure. You have to be willing to do something that doesn’t work so that you can figure out what does.”

Among Cavell’s proudest accomplishments are a speech announcing that Massachusetts would welcome same-sex couples from anywhere in the country to marry and another commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Little Rock Nine’s integration of Central High School in 1957. “Helping prepare remarks that would be delivered to eight of the Little Rock Nine, about whom I’d learned in a history class at CA just five or six years earlier, was unforgettable,” he said.

All this keeps Cavell excited to arrive at work every morning and to stay late into the evening.

“Governor Patrick is one of the most intelligent, thoughtful, and engaged people I’ve ever met.

He really believes in his role as a public servant,” he said. “Ultimately, what matters to me is that I can be part of the governor’s overall plan to make the state a better place.”

David Cavell ’02 and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick

Liberalism and Prostitution Peter de Marneffe ’75 Oxford University Press, 2010

An unassuming summer trip to Arizona launches the Merkles on an extraordinary adventure. The discovery of a skeleton sets in motion the busybodies who reside in a village at the rim of the Grand Canyon, all harboring their own dark secrets.

Jane Merkle, the young wife, falls for a dashing ranger, as stodgy husband Morris pines for his loyal spaniel and the quiet life they left behind in St. Louis. Our country’s most famous national park provides the picturesque setting for Erhart’s latest, a mystery filled with intrigue, romance, playful humor, and passionate lepidopterists. The author scores another hit with this, her fifth novel. The characters come alive, as they did in Crossing Bully Creek, bringing contemporary readers to 1950s Arizona, a place of abandon and opportunity.

In this latest volume from the Oxford University Political Philosophy Series, de Marneffe, a philosophy professor at Arizona State University, addresses a wide spectrum of viewpoints on prostitution.

From libertarian claims that prostitution should be legalized as a voluntary practice to the moralistic and contemporary feminist arguments for far-reaching antiprostitution laws, de Marneffe strikes a middle ground, arguing that prostitution laws are justified and compatible with liberalism, despite libertarian claims that such laws are paternalistic and infringe on free will.

Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won’t Break Your Health Alice Domar ’76 and Susan Love Crown, 2009 Drs. Domar and Love challenge conventional wisdom with a healthy dose of common sense. By taking on oft-quoted surveys and the recommendations of alleged experts, the doctors offer women a realistic alternative to the hype and a sensible route toward a lifestyle that promotes good health and balance.

For example, the authors challenge several rules, accepted as gospel, around sleep, stress, health screenings, exercise, nutrition, and relationships. “Some of these rules are based on excellent evidence,” they say. “But many are not. Plenty are based on scanty evidence or even bald corporate interest.” Domar and Love help the reader sort things out.

Twenty-First Century Macroeconomics: Responding to the Climate Challenge Neva R. Goodwin ’62, P’89 and Jonathan M. Harris P’02, ’07 Edward Elgar, 2009 Following decades of foot-dragging, countries are acknowledging that they must consider policies to directly reduce carbon emissions, for the sake of world economies.

That climate change is shaping today’s macroeconomic policies is good news indeed. Building upon the success of a 2006 Tufts University environmental conference, Goodwin and Harris — both associated with Tufts’ Global Development and Environment Institute — have gathered the best practices and theories from economists, who offer timely innovations at this critical juncture in human history.

CA Bookshelf

by Martha Kennedy, Library Director

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The Butterflies of Grand Canyon Margaret Erhart ’70 Plume, 2009

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Anne Pfitzer ’85

y k a h S

Carla Piccinini ’69

Andrew Marx / Courtesy of Partners In Health

Carla Piccinini ’69

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d n u o r

After the January earthquake flattened much of Portau-Prince, Concord Academy alumnae/i sprinted into action. They traveled overland from the Dominican Republic to treat injured children and pregnant women.

They counseled victims and overwrought medical workers. They secured scarce supplies and, working through NGOs, helped instill order in the chaos. Their stories will make you proud.

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Who from CA Is Helping Haiti?

On Shaky Ground

Alain Armand

First Person: Stories from Haiti

When I returned to Haiti four days after the quake, I saw destroyed primary schools everywhere, the telltale smiling Mickey Mouse and Smurf murals toppled.

Amy Bracken ’92 interviewing a boy (pictured below) who lives in the background tent camp. He told Bracken the camp was “beautiful” because of all the colored sheets.

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hen I moved to Port-au-Prince in August 2004 to report for Reuters and the Haitian Times, I described it to friends and family back home in words that are now painfully ironic: “It’s like San Francisco after a devastating earthquake.”

I saw the city’s steep hills, beautiful blue bay views, and radiant pink, wall-climbing bougainvillea, all offset by its dusty, trash-filled streets, where pedestrians begged—not for food or money, but for work, a chance in life.

Port-au-Prince had the aura of a place that had suffered some kind of terrible blow.

The political, economic, and military assaults on Haiti began before its birth 206 years ago and are too many to list. But one recurrent problem is the failure of other nations to constructively engage with Haiti (not in Haiti, with Haiti).

This was the case from the start, when much of the world refused to trade with the

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first black republic on Earth, and France demanded reparations that burdened the young country with crippling debt. To a lesser degree, it is still the case today. Billions of dollars are spent in Haiti through foreign governmental and nongovernmental organizations, while the Haitian government, beleaguered even before the destruction of the Parliament, the National Palace, and every ministry, now conducts its business from under a mango tree in the backyard of a police station.

One of the most damaging effects of a weak government is weak education. And this is part of a cycle: weak education fails to produce leaders. By a World Bank estimate, Haiti has the lowest rate of public education in the world.

Every fall, parents do what they can—working, praying, and prodding family overseas—to find enough money to send their children to school.

Still, most can’t afford to keep them there beyond the sixth grade.

For those of us who have had the good fortune to attend a school such as Concord Acad-

emy, the difference between what we had (and what some of us too often took for granted) and what our Haitian counterparts experienced is almost immeasurable. And that was before the earthquake.

When I was looking for a place to live in a nice residential neighborhood of Port-auPrince in 2004, I really liked a comfortable, breezy house on the edge of a leafy ravine. But I

Amy Bracken ’92

by AMY BRACKEN ’92

couldn’t bear to move in. By the front door was the top of a dirt path, and all day, every day, young school-age children descended into the valley to fill buckets with water and climbed back up the steep slopes to their homes, their tiny frames wobbling under the heavy loads, faces glistening in the relentless heat.

I saw the “lucky ones”—the high school and university students—in the evenings. Some of the generator-powered bright lights of embassy housing illuminated the sidewalk outside, and young men and women would gather, crouching against the wall to read a book or write a paper in that “stolen” light. In the rainy season, those same students would hold an umbrella in one hand while focusing intently on the schoolwork in the other.

Before the earthquake, only about 1 percent of Haitians made it to university, and even then, getting in was no guarantee of success. I met two law school students who had been intercepted at sea in an overcrowded and listing boat while trying to reach Miami. They said they couldn’t afford to finish school and had no hopes for employment. They planned to try to take the harrowing journey again as soon as possible.

When I returned to Haiti four days after the earthquake, I saw destroyed primary schools everywhere, the telltale smiling Mickey Mouse and Smurf murals toppled. Many of the schools were half-day, and the afternoon shift was in session during the quake. I spoke with foreign doctors who had worked in war zones but said nothing had prepared them for the sight of so many very young people with crush wounds.

All the primary and secondary students I met on the street and in camps said their schools had been destroyed. One mother described her nine-year-old son’s reaction to the earthquake: vomiting when he realized what had happened, then crying every day and asking

his parents about his classmates. With his school destroyed, learning the fate of friends was that much harder.

With almost the entire public university system for the country concentrated in Port-auPrince, the universities were even harder hit.

Almost all the academic departments were destroyed, killing staff, faculty, and students.

The survivors, many of whom had dedicated their lives to attaining a degree despite all the obstacles, were suddenly helpless, like everyone else, in the face of catastrophe.

Walking through Port-au-Prince five days after the earthquake, most bodies had been removed, but some streets still held the raw sights and smells of the human toll, and on Avenue Christophe, stiff and swollen limbs jutted from collapsed buildings. But people walked purposefully down the street, sometimes covering their noses and averting their eyes from the source of the stench.

It was Sunday morning, but not a time for rest. On one street corner, a prayer service spilled out from a basement, with men and women singing in their black-and-white pressed suits and dresses. On the next block, in front of collapsed university buildings, scores of young men and women watched as two students wrote numbers on an easel. One of them, from the business school, had launched a radio

appeal to his fellow students to organize and help the government and international community with relief and rebuilding. Among those gathered were engineers, psychologists, agronomists, computer scientists, and others, all eager to serve their country.

I left with a sense of cautious optimism. I wondered if finally the world would recognize the need to strengthen Haiti’s foundation by giving young Haitians the chance to become the leaders their country needs.

Amy Bracken ’92 is a freelance journalist based in Boston. She plans to spend the summer in Haiti before returning to school in the fall to study international relations.

The author interviewed Gilene Basile, pictured with her ten children, some biological, some adopted, at a tent camp after the earthquake destroyed their house.

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Photos by Amy Bracken ’92

On Shaky Ground

On Shaky Ground

Above: Carla Piccinini ’69 with three boys she often saw playing around the camp. Right and below: young hospital patients.

With the international aid, they have had something they never had before—free treatments—but likely will never have again.

“They Did Not Complain”

by CARLA PICCININI ’69

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s a psychologist trained in disasters and traumas, I went to Port-au-Prince from February 9 to 27 with the Italian Civil Protection National Service. I was asked to go because I am part of an association for emergency health intervention known as ARES (Associazione Regionale Emergenza Sanitaria).

We were supposed to take over a field hospital, set up a few days after the earthquake in the yard of St. Damien’s children’s hospital, which is run by an Italian charitable institution.

We worked with whoever came in—mostly patients medicated from previous surgical operations (including many amputations)—and with the hospitalized children. We also did some work with people displaced from Port-auPrince to another town called St. Marc.

My work was mostly with traumatized children, youths, and their parents. But the most difficult thing was that after they had been cured in the hospital, they had no place to go.

Most of them had had their houses destroyed by the earthquake and were living on the road, often without a tent. It was really hard to discharge them because as long as they stayed in the hospital, they had a safe place to stay

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and something to eat, besides the fact that they were cared for.

It wasn’t easy for me to communicate. I had to brush off my high school French—one class I took with Mrs. Wight when I was at CA as an AFS [American Field Service exchange] student in 1968–69. But it worked well enough, together with nonverbal language, like the smile, which is international.

Most Haitians are extremely poor, and many lost the little they had. There is no public health system, and most simply don’t have the money to pay for treatments or medications. Now, with the international aid, they have had something they never had before— free treatments—but likely will never have again. So, while we worked hard, we had the impression that everyone’s work was like a drop in the ocean.

One thing that really struck me was the hopelessness of the young people, especially those who were students and helped as interpreters: they kept asking us if we could take them to study in Europe because there was no future for them in Haiti. Another thing that struck me was the strength with which most children and adults reacted to the multiple traumas they had suffered—many were injured,

had lost their homes and everything they owned, had lost relatives and friends, and still were capable of smiling and being kind to one another. They did not complain. I assumed they were resilient because they have had such a hard time all their lives, even before the earthquake.

Still, it was impressive.

Carla Piccinini ’69, a psychotherapist, works for Italy’s national health system and is an emergency psychologist for the Associazione Regionale Emergenza Sanitaria, a medical disaster-relief organization.

On Shaky Ground

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artners In Health (PIH), the Bostonbased international organization, evacuated more than a dozen Haitian patients to Philadelphia and Boston for critical care within days of the earthquake. Once stabilized medically, they became patients of PIH Head Psychologist Silvia Gosnell, a current parent and Concord Academy trustee.

Among Gosnell’s new cases: young women in need of amputations after being buried in the rubble, a fifteen-month-old with pneumonia who lost his mother, a five-year-old at risk of dying from tetanus. “Although profoundly resilient, these patients and their families—having suffered catastrophic loss and finding themselves transplanted to foreign and disorienting environments—welcomed the opportunity to receive mental health support,” said Gosnell, who has followed them closely, met with them individually in Philadelphia and Boston, and arranged for referral as needed to ensure an appropriate level of continuing care.

Gosnell has been working on various fronts to address the mental health needs that arose amidst the unimaginable pain of postquake Haiti. Perhaps more than at any other time, she said, addressing those needs became a priority for Haiti’s Ministry of Health and for its close partner, PIH. To address the provision of services in Haiti, Gosnell and PIH’s mental health team, led by Dr. Giuseppe “Bepi” Raviola, are working closely with Haiti’s Ministry of Health to assess short- and long-term needs and to develop an efficient infrastructure for care delivery.

Shortly after the quake, relying on a continuous flurry of cell phone calls and emails, Raviola and Gosnell helped ensure that mental health services were in place for the staff of PIH’s Haitian affiliate, Zanmi Lasante—some 4,000 workers, most of them Haitian. These doctors, nurses, and other personnel were treating the victims who poured from Port-au-Prince to PIH sites outside the city, but many of them were suffering themselves, having lost family, friends, and homes. “One lost ten family members,” Gosnell said. The need to care for the caregivers was critical. “If our Haitian colleagues weren’t supported, the whole system of care might fail,” she added.

After receiving reports that medical volunteers who had deployed to Haiti from a number of institutions were experiencing distress upon

returning home, Gosnell and Raviola put systems in place to provide them with mental health care. “Bepi and I saw it as a mandate to make sure that our partner institutions—hospitals and universities—had mental health protocols in place, and if they didn’t, we would provide services,” Gosnell said.

Having served as a consultant before the earthquake, Gosnell was called into PIH headquarters three days after and asked to assume the role of head psychologist. Since then, her days have been long and adrenaline-driven.

She has devoted most of her working hours to relief efforts while keeping up her Boston-area psychology practice, which treats many clients from underserved populations. At PIH headquarters in Boston, she is addressing the mental health needs of volunteers and staff who are returning from Haiti. “Initially it was overwhelming for everyone—even at PIH, which is made up of very hardy people who always operate in emergency mode,” she said.

But the overburdened PIH staffers who hadn’t left their desks needed support too, precisely because they hadn’t left their desks.

Mostly twenty-somethings, they responded to the need with such compassion and commitment, Gosnell said, that they risked running themselves to the point of exhaustion. “These young people felt that they literally could not go to sleep because an email might be delayed and somebody might die,” she said. “They felt it might have dire consequences for someone, and they weren’t necessarily wrong about that.”

Gosnell helped to put programs in place and counseled PIH staffers individually, emphasizing the importance of self-care and referring out those who welcomed more long-term therapeutic support. “The organization’s motto is ‘Whatever It Takes,’ and PIHers live up to it,” she said. Gosnell and her colleagues are helping staffers to realize that, whatever it takes, it shouldn’t take a toll on their own health.

—Gail Friedman

SILVIA GOSNELL P’10

teenith a nine Gosnell w ia g; v il le S r , e p h To part of d who lost recovere o h w year-old ld o five-yeara , m o tt o b nus from teta

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Managing the Mental Health Crisis

On Shaky Ground

January 12, 2010: Inside Partners In Health

to ask yourself, ‘Will anyone actually die if I don’t get to this today?’ Because in this job, sometimes the answer really is yes. But otherwise, take a breath.

It will all be there tomorrow.”

by ZÖE AGOOS ‘03

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learned about the earthquake in Haiti through an email at 5:52 p.m. on January 12 to our Partners In Health (PIH) Haiti Program distribution list. The program’s finance manager wrote: “Is everyone OK? I just got the disaster report.”

My first thought was, “Seriously, an earthquake? Hasn’t Haiti been through enough?”

Four minutes later, another email arrived from a Haitian-American listserv: “A 7.0 earthquake just hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti . . . Stay tuned while we find out more . . . not everything confirmed.” And, more ominously: “The palace has collapsed . . .”

I pictured Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, as I had seen it the previous April—a city immensely crowded with people and buildings, constructed in the absence of safety codes or properly reinforced concrete—and I experienced one of those moments of still, silent clarity in which it is suddenly apparent that things are about to fall to pieces.

Emails began to stream in from PIHers in Haiti and the U.S. with reports and updates.

Our sites, all rural, were far enough away from the epicenter that they sustained no damage, but Port-au-Prince was devastated. PIH Boston opened a conference call at about 6:30 p.m. to discuss updates as they arrived and how we should respond; the call lasted until midnight.

Through emails and calls from field-based staff,

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we compiled lists of the PIH staff who had been accounted for and those who were still missing.

Our twelve sites reported in, a few immediately, and several much later, after electricity and Internet capabilities were restored. Some of the communication was filled with relief. Other reports, like an email from one of our pharmacists who had lost his parents, his brother, and all but one of his children, were heartbreaking.

The first few days after the earthquake have become a blur of meetings, emails, phone calls, and donated pizza and coffee. Anyone associated with PIH who could drop everything to work on the relief efforts did so. Remarkably, our colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, publishers and editors, and anyone working on ongoing projects with us also put them on hold by some unspoken consensus of solidarity, allowing us to devote all of our time to Haiti.

The sheer volume of information, requests, and offers of help that flowed through our office in the first few weeks was both staggering and humbling; we received many hundreds of emails and phone calls each day. Daily email summaries compiled by program assistants helped everyone who couldn’t keep up with the volume, and morning update calls, as well as daily meetings for newly formed response teams, identified needs and bottlenecks and worked to allocate resources to them.

Like others in our Boston office, I shifted my own efforts to fill needs as they arose. I

Partners In Health staff (in orange) distributing medical supplies Andrew Marx / Courtesy of Partners In Health

A coworker told me, “You need

helped to triage media requests and general inquiries; managed a donation from a large corporation; worked as a “flight leader,” coordinating an orthopedic surgical team flying down on a donated private plane to serve at one of our sites; and finally focused on evacuating staff members’ families from Haiti. This last task was both the most rewarding and the most frustrating. I worked most with two families: the eight newly orphaned cousins of a Harvard Medical School student who was working with us in Haiti, and the sister of a colleague working at PIH’s Prevention and Access to Care and Treatment (PACT) Project in Boston.

The crucial difference between the two cases was that the cousins are American or Canadian citizens, while the sister is Haitian. This legal divide was the tipping point between a logistically complicated but bureaucratically smooth evacuation and an utter dead end. The cousins had lost all their identification papers in the quake, but records existed and the barely functioning U.S. Embassy was able to give them papers to submit at Customs when they landed in Chicago. The Haitian sister of my colleague, however, was stuck in a terrible limbo: she was seriously injured, but not badly enough to qualify for emergency medical evacuation to the U.S. (and thus, humanitarian parole). She had identification documents, but couldn’t get a tourist visa to enter the U.S. because the embassy had shut down all visa services in Port-au-Prince. The painful irony was that my colleague’s sister, who was partway through immigration proceedings at the time of the quake, had already been approved to come to America. But because of the way the U.S.

immigration system is set up, she is a full two years away from receiving the physical document needed to do so. Regulations to allow exceptions after a natural disaster for foreign nationals with naturalized family in the U.S. do not exist.

So the success of getting the cousins to their extended family in Canada was and is tempered by the never-ending set of brick walls keeping

COMPOSER JUSTIN SAMAHA '94 (right) wrote the music for "The Quake," a PBS Frontline program about Haiti's earthquake.

Samaha said the project, which aired on March 30, was challenging. "The music had to reflect and reinforce the human tragedy in the film and tie together different stories and themes, without being manipulative or drawing attention to itself," he said.

Using synthesizers, piano, and vocal samples, Samaha created music that he described as "ambient, with minimalist melodies and instrumentation." He and the producers were committed to a score that was powerful but not melodramatic. The earthquake itself provided drama enough.

question for each of us at PIH really was “yes,” nearly every time. That is why we all worked so hard for such long hours, and will continue to do so for as long as is needed. I am extremely proud to work with colleagues who have poured their hearts and souls into this effort nonstop for weeks on end. And I am so moved by the huge outpouring of concern, care, and generosity from all over the world for PIH and, more so, for the people of Haiti.

The extent of the devastation is overwhelming. Paul Farmer, my boss and mentor, who has worked in Haiti for decades, through violent coups and hurricanes, can hardly describe it. So to everyone who has donated their time, money, and attention to help Haiti: thank you.

Please remember that Haiti will need support for many years to come, long after the headlines cease. Partners In Health has no “exit plan”; we never have. Please join us as we stand in solidarity with the people and government of Haiti to help rebuild.

Kenbe fèm.

Zöe Agoos ’03 is research and staff assistant to Dr. Paul Farmer, cofounder of Partners In Health.

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A family receiving medical care at a Partners In Healh mobile clinic

my Haitian-American colleague’s sister out of the U.S. The thought of my only sibling, my younger brother, in the same situation—hurt, disoriented, homeless, relying on friends for care, and kept away from me by the single bureaucratic requirement of a piece of paper—is enough to make me crumble with rage and fear.

My colleague is still standing, and still working, while her sister is in Port-au-Prince. I hope never to need her courage and heart.

The question I’ve been asked recently by my friends and family is whether things are getting “back to normal” at work. It’s hard to answer, partly because my “normal” was not, perhaps, what others would deem to be so. The needs of the communities in which PIH operates are so huge that our baseline state is essentially a continual crisis mode. When I began my job two-and-a-half years ago and became overwhelmed with the number of tasks on my relatively inexperienced plate, a coworker took me aside and told me: “You need to ask yourself, ‘Will anyone actually die if I don’t get to this today?’ Because in this job, sometimes the answer really is yes. But otherwise, take a breath. It will all be there tomorrow.” That advice—the gravity check—has served me well in an organization that takes every part of its mission, whether medical work or advocacy efforts, as seriously as life or death (which, in the not-so-grand scheme of things, it is).

What was striking after the earthquake was that, for weeks, the answer to that life-or-death

Tanya Rosen-Jones

Andrew Marx / Courtesy of Partners In Health

On Shaky Ground

On Shaky Ground

Maternal Instincts

ANNE PFITZER ’85

Anne Pfitzer ’85

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gotten everything we needed to establish a small birth clinic.”

They got to work amidst the chaos. Maternity tents sat alongside pediatrics, which sometimes meant that children’s limbs were being amputated near women in labor. “You had gangrene next to C-sections, which is not what you want,” Pfitzer said. Women in labor, sometimes attended to by medical workers with limited obstetrical training, had no privacy and endured 100-degree temperatures.

Richard Lamporte

he main university hospital in Port-auPrince was plagued with problems before the January earthquake. Sewage would sometimes back up; bathrooms often were out of order. But that was nothing compared to what Anne Pfitzer ’85 found when she arrived at the hospital with Jhpiego, an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University that focuses on maternal and child health.

The hospital was vacant. Supplies, beds, and equipment had been dragged outside, and the maternity ward was housed in a cluster of tents.

Obstetrics had used an indoor operating room until about a week after the quake, when a giant aftershock hit. Pfitzer arrived in Port-au-Prince three days after that tremor. The Haitian Ministry of Health directed Pfitzer, Jhpiego’s associate director of global programs, and her colleagues to the university hospital. “We thought the best way to help was to leap into action as soon as possible,” she said. “From Johns Hopkins Hospital and from stores and pharmacies in the Dominican Republic, we had

Pfitzer described a frenzied scene: women in labor ambling about, relief workers and missionaries handing out water, the Army’s 82nd Airborne standing guard, even a youngster smoking marijuana in the maternity ward.

Among her stories is a portrait of one resolute Haitian woman, Marlene Gourdet, the chief nurse of the maternity ward. Gourdet fought relentlessly to move the ward back inside the building, which had been deemed safe. Pfitzer calls her a hero. “She was haranguing support staff about getting back into the building,” Pfitzer said. “We latched onto this formidable woman. With her help, we saved equipment.

We started doing services inside.”

For Jhpiego, Pfitzer’s work was hands-on and immediate, but also conceptual and longterm. She helped women in labor, handwrote medical charts, and doled out prenatal vitamins, but she also drafted proposals, attended meetings, and coordinated planning with agencies of the United Nations. She returned home to Maryland after ten days, satisfied that she and her colleagues had helped reopen the maternity ward and restock it with basic supplies. But she was exhausted and pensive. She shared the concerns of her colleague, Richard Lamporte, who wrote in a blog: “. . . Seven thousand pregnant women— all expected to give birth in the next month. After the earthquake, will they make different decisions about their family, the size of their family, healthy choices? Will they know where and when to seek care? . . .”

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

Anne Pfitzer ’85 sorting medical supplies in Haiti; above, the constant medical activity she witnessed

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Pfitzer may not learn the answer firsthand.

In March, she left Jhpiego after sixteen years for a position at Save the Children. Haiti was a sort of grand finale, an indelible memory.

“The hardest thing is those stories,” she said.

“Everybody tells you where they were on the day of the earthquake, the people who lost all their family. After a while that would really get to me, but doing the work was really inspiring and motivating.”

No quake could quash the unique emotions that live in a maternity ward. “There was a lot of joy. Even though their lives had fallen apart, they had this new life,” she said. “There were some sweet moments like that.”

—Gail Friedman

On Shaky Ground ELIZABETH “LIZA” MCALISTER ’81

Pierre Minn

A Dangerous Crossroads “In the face of a completely collapsed social infrastructure, in the face of indescribable suffering and sudden suffering, the only thing many people had is religious resources . . . “

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Elizabeth McAlister ’81, second from right, with her husband Holly, his mother Andrée, and their son Julien

psychologically. “In the face of a completely collapsed social infrastructure, in the face of indescribable suffering and sudden suffering, the only thing many people had is religious resources, that is, the resources of inner strength and an understanding of a connection to a larger cosmic order, the sense of a connection to powers outside oneself,” she said. She noted a woman trapped for several days who had recited psalms to endure and the songs that wafted through Port-au-Prince after sundown. “People were singing hymns as a way to run pain through the body, as a way to run pain through the psyche,” she said. “It was a way to breathe life back into the space of death.”

McAlister’s first book, Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora, published in 2002, cemented her standing as an expert on religion’s role in the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. But her connections to Haiti were well-established even before she arrived as a sophomore at Concord Academy.

During her childhood, the area where she lived in Rockland County, New York, experienced a substantial influx of Haitian immigrants. McAlister’s father, a civil rights activist, opened a community center and became “the

unofficial welcomer to the community.” McAlister was intrigued by the people and their culture; slowly, she also became intrigued by the field of anthropology. By the time she was a junior at Concord Academy, she was urging the school to offer a class. Then Head of School Philip McKean, who holds a PhD in anthropology, agreed to teach a small group of students.

McAlister researched the Hare Krishnas. “They let me sign out to the Hare Krishna headquarters in Boston,” she marveled. “I remember sitting in my room in Haines House writing my paper. I remember taking myself very seriously. I was doing anthropology of religion even at Concord.”

She went on to Vassar, and after a junior year abroad returned home to find some friends studying under a master Haitian drummer. At CA, McAlister had played piano and flute, but that spring and summer, she learned to drum, eventually performing with the master drummer at religious services. “I was an anthropology major. When I started going to religious services in Brooklyn, I thought, ‘This is anthropology.’ No one had written about ceremonial religious services in New York.”

The seed was planted for her undergraduate 23

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ou may have seen her on TV or read her opinions in major newspapers. In the days following the Haitian earthquake, the media, searching for insight, repeatedly ran to Elizabeth “Liza” McAlister ’81, an associate professor of religion at Wesleyan University and a recognized expert on Afro-Caribbean religions. She was on NPR, PRI, Fox Radio, and New York Times Interactive. She wrote pieces for CNN and publications including the Washington Post and Forbes, and she was quoted in the New Yorker. Those reports, however, did not necessarily let on that McAlister was personally affected by the quake: her husband, Holly Nicolas, is Haitian, and much of his extended family lives on the island. “The first three days were this particular kind of uncertainty when you just didn’t know,” McAlister said. “There was no communication. The stress of the uncertainty is very, very bad.”

Slowly, she and Holly learned that family members had survived, though many were living outside, fearful of another powerful tremor.

A sister-in-law lost the second floor of her home; a nephew was buried under a school but rescued quickly. At home, McAlister was worried about her husband’s family. But on TV, radio, and in print, she was a scholarly voice offering perspective on the Haitian people and their culture. “Since my field is religious studies, I’ve been looking at various aspects of the story of religion in Haiti and the quake,” she said. “How are people making meaning out of suffering? I also looked at the politics of religion and how religiously motivated aid groups are operating.”

McAlister believes religion is a key component of the Haitians’ survival, physically and

On Shaky Ground recognized Haiti scholar. She currently is writing a book on the history of the idea that Haiti has been cursed, an opinion voiced by Pat Robertson and taken up by many evangelicals.

When she ponders whether there is hope for the country, devastated before the earthquake and ravaged after, she mentions a song called “Dangerous Crossroads,” written by her sister-in-law’s band, Boukman Esperyans. “Haiti is at a dangerous crossroads,” McAlister said.

thesis, on the religious experience of new Haitian immigrants in Brooklyn. She traveled to Haiti in 1984 with La Troupe Makandal, a Haitian drumming group with which she remains involved today, and did field research for her thesis. She went on to get a master’s in African American studies and a doctorate in American Studies, both at Yale.

Now, some thirty trips to Haiti later, McAlister speaks Creole daily with her family and is a

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CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

hen Rebecca Fox ’66 became chief of staff to University of Miami (UM) President Donna Shalala, the president told her she hoped Fox would have meaningful contact with students. Fox had no idea that would draw her into a drama involving a Haitian student’s post-quake hunt for her daughter.

Fox mentors about two dozen UM students; all have special circumstances, and she is available to them, whatever problems may arise.

Long before the January quake, she had worked with Rachelle Louis-Jeune, an American citizen born in Haiti.

The UM junior had lost both parents when she was young and shuttled between relatives in Haiti until one flew her to Miami to meet family. She was never picked up at the airport.

Discovered by social services, Louis-Jeune endured fourteen foster homes in six years, dropping out of school so she could earn enough to live on her own. An agency worker encouraged Louis-Jeune to get her GED. She then earned A’s at a community college and enrolled at UM. A foster care worker brought her to Fox’s attention.

The young woman’s potential was obvious.

A model of strong will, she consistently made smart, executive decisions despite limited education, said Fox. And she persisted through inordinate misery. “She’s so courageous, so articulate, and so bright; her hopes for herself are so admirable,” Fox said. “It’s hard to look at her without marveling about the incredible resilience of the human spirit.”

Louis-Jeune has a daughter, and had asked her grandmother in Haiti to care for the girl while she finished her education. When the quake struck, Louis-Jeune was desperate to know if her daughter was safe and sought 24

REBECCA FOX ’66

Barbara P. Fernandez / The Miami Herald, 2010

A Mentor Makes a Difference

“If the international community adopts the same practices it has been using, then we’ll see a continuation of inequality and dysfunction. If the international community changes its approach and changes the paradigm, then Haiti can move through the crossroads onto a less dangerous path.”

How to change the paradigm? “That,” said McAlister, “is the $64,000 question.”

—Gail Friedman

Rebecca Fox '66 with Rachelle Louis-Jeune (far right); Louis-Jeune's daughter, Kennedy Skyler Thompkins, and husband, Stephane Jean Charles; and BJ, the cousin Louis-Jeune and Charles plan to adopt

Fox’s help. “I was so impressed by her and so moved by her long before the Haiti earthquake that I really wanted to be there to support her,” Fox said.

Using her own funds, Fox flew the student to the Dominican Republic and helped her cover expenses. After an arduous trip to Portau-Prince, Louis-Jeune found her daughter and her husband safe, but also found her nine-yearold cousin BJ orphaned, his mother crushed in the disaster. Unwilling to let him grow up without parents, as she had, Louis-Jeune secured papers from the U.S. Embassy and brought him to the U.S.; she and her husband plan to adopt him.

When Louis-Jeune and the two small children arrived in Miami, UM helped out: the law

school’s clinic provided pro bono legal guidance, and the university provided temporary housing. “We did what was necessary for these children,” Fox said, adding that the university has raised more than $5 million for the UM Miller School of Medicine’s medical operation in Haiti.

Today Fox talks with or emails Louis-Jeune at least once a week, sometimes several times a day. She is confident her mentee will finish her education. “There’s absolutely no doubt about it,” Fox said. “And she will go to law school.

She wants to engage with the foster care system.

She had such horrendous experiences, so difficult, that she decided she wanted to do all she can to change the system.”

—Gail Friedman

On Shaky Ground

Homeland Security’s Helping Hand Haitian orphans who had families waiting for them in the U.S., government employees worked through days and nights to enable the evacuation of the critically wounded, and search-and-rescue teams refused to give up, even when hope was seemingly gone.

I believe there is no more poignant reminder of the Haitians’ resilience than Kiki, a seven-year-old boy freed from the rubble eight days after the quake. As rescuers pulled him from a collapsed building, he looked around at the assembled crowd, raised his arms in the air, and smiled the biggest smile anyone had seen in a long time.

That resilience was evident stateside too.

Nearly a week after the earthquake, I travelled to Miami with Vice President Joe Biden and DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano to visit members of the area’s large Haitian-American community as well as the staging location for aid at Homestead Air Force Base, from which planes were deploying to Haiti. Between stops, we stopped at a Haitian Catholic church, whose priest had lost several members of his immediate family.

Instead of being overcome, he told us he used his grief to attend to his parish and to ensure that his community would survive.

by MATT CHANDLER ’02

Matt Chandler ’02 speaking at Concord Academy’s Model UN conference (see page 7); above and left, Coast Guard operations he helped publicize

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beaming images of flattened buildings and bodies in the streets. That same morning, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Forward arrived in Port-auPrince’s harbor, to the applause of Haitians gathered amidst the wreckage of the destroyed docks. Coast Guard helicopters began a familiar mission, evacuating injured persons to hospitals across the Caribbean, executing 250 medevac flights during the initial response.

While the first responders in Haiti deserve all the credit, like them, we were on call twentyfour hours a day, sleeping a few fitful hours each night. We sustained that pace for nearly a month. Due to the DHS’ experience with domestic natural disasters, we are ready to shift into disaster mode at a moment’s notice—and we did.

As the hours passed, the extent and violence of this particular earthquake quickly became known. A fierce urgency was palpable, not only in the aid-staging areas in South Florida, where aircraft from around the world landed to take on supplies to fly into the one, unlit runway that still functioned at the Port-au-Prince airport, but also in Washington, DC, and in capitals around the world.

Within days, in coordination with the Haitian government, the U.S. Navy ship Comfort, a 1,000-bed hospital, arrived to provide acute medical and surgical care. The U.S. Coast Guard distributed 38.5 tons of water to people without a clean water supply. International aid flowed into the country.

From what I witnessed, this tragedy brought out the best not only in our country, but in communities around the world. American people reacted with characteristic compassion and generosity. The government responded with unprecedented resources: policy was amended to allow more rapid evacuation of

Lisa Kong ’10

U.S. Coast Guard

U.S. Coast Guard

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he reporters’ questions started shortly after the earthquake. In the first hours, there were few answers. Lines of communications, like much of the capital city of Port-au-Prince, were destroyed. But in those same hours, agencies across the U.S. government, in conjunction with the UN and the international community, had begun to mobilize what would become one of the largest international search-and-rescue efforts ever undertaken. My role, as the lead spokesperson in response to the earthquake for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), was to keep up with the twenty-four-hour news cycle that accompanies any large-scale event.

Upon President Obama’s pledge of immediate military and civilian disaster assistance, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in cooperation with the Department of State, the Department of Defense, and the DHS, ordered the deployment of U.S.-based resources, including seven urban search-andrescue teams from across the country.

Daybreak on January 13 led to our first pictures of the devastation. Aircraft flew reconnaissance missions above the affected areas,

On Shaky Ground

Small Successes

Pediatrician Bronwen Jenney Anders ’59 (above) focused on literacy in Haiti with a Reach Out and Read program.

“I took books with me. I had wonderful results with malnourished children who had never seen books.”

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CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

ronwen Jenney Anders ’59 treated children in Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami and in Mexico after the 1985 earthquake. She teaches two courses to prepare pediatricians to deal with disasters. Yet this global health expert and professor at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) wasn’t entirely prepared for the devastation, disorganization, and malnutrition she encountered in Haiti when she arrived there, three weeks after the earthquake.

For starters, there frequently was no one available to feed the babies at L’Hôpital de la Communauté Haïtienne (Haitian Community Hospital), outside Port-au-Prince, where she was working. And the already high rate of malnutrition had worsened because of the breastfeeding mothers killed in the quake. “I had taught at UCSD on malnutrition, but I hadn’t been in the midst of it,” Anders said.

Hospital supplies were scanty, but creativity and resourcefulness were not: Nurses fashioned an incubator for a 1.5-pound preemie from a plastic sheet, a light bulb, a thermometer, and

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BRONWEN JENNEY ANDERS ’59

some oxygen, Anders said. At one point, with no one handling crowd control, a throng pushed in the door of the clinic where she was working. In another surreal moment, while Anders was cleaning the umbilical cord of a newborn, a woman walked in with a prolapsed uterus actually dragging on the ground.

The memory of one patient, in particular, remains with Anders—a fifteen-year-old girl who was on oxygen and IV antibiotics and had a urinary catheter. She had lost weight and was having trouble breathing. Anders wasn’t sure what was wrong, but she saw immediately that she had been treated as an adult, not as a child.

First, Anders removed the catheter. Then, speaking with the girl in French, she determined that her breathing difficulties began after the earthquake. Anders began to realize that all her symptoms were related to post-traumatic stress and enlisted the help of a child psychiatrist from Quebec, who sat by her bedside, talked with her, and had her draw pictures.

“Her breathing improved, and we took out all her lines,” Anders said.

The pediatrician had to get used to the hospital system in Haiti, which typically expects families to provide medicines and to wash and bathe babies and their laundry. “We foreigners had to bribe the people downstairs to wash the clothes,” she said. “And all these babies came in with diarrhea.”

Anders, a 2004 recipient of Concord Academy’s Joan Shaw Herman Distinguished Service Award, traveled to Haiti with medicines suitable for children. “I know what is needed for kids. Even the UNICEF kits have capsules,” said Anders, who loaded fifty-pound duffels

with powdered antibiotics, chewable pills, and children’s vitamins.

She had been asked to fill in for a Haitian pediatrician because of her involvement with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which works closely with the Haitian Pediatric Society (HPS). Being there at the request of Haitians broke barriers. “The fact that we were there at the invitation of the Haitian Pediatric Society was key,” said Anders, who sensed that Haitian nurses were feeling undermined and unappreciated. “We weren’t foreigners coming in telling people how to do things.”

Anders, who is on an AAP global child health committee, was planning to go to Haiti in early April for what she called an “advocacy summit” with the Haitian child health community. “We’re looking to see how we can help them envision a better world for kids,” she explained. With that meeting postponed, Anders found herself addressing not long-term strategy, but immediate medical needs. She did pursue one long-term initiative during her two-week stay, however, a Reach Out and Read program. “I took books with me,” she said. “I had wonderful results with malnourished children who had never seen books.” Anders said she is working to get more books—which she called “literature of healing for children of disasters”—translated into French and Creole.

The reading program provided satisfaction amidst the trauma, but so did the care she brought to children in the hospital and the strides Anders made with the hierarchy of Haitian nurses. “We got people to work with them instead of over them,” she said.

Those accomplishments may seem small against the enormity of the crisis, but Anders is undeterred. “I’m used to small steps and small successes,” she said.

—Gail Friedman

On Shaky Ground

Campus Moved to Action

A bake sale sponsored by Concord Academy Service Activists raised money for Haiti.

FayFoto/Boston

Hope, Fortitude, and Resilience

Bishop Ian Douglas

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hen Ian Douglas was consecrated as Bishop of Connecticut in April, the offering from the consecration service was dedicated solely to the rebuilding of the Episcopal Church in Haiti. Normally, those funds would have been distributed among various worthy causes. But in the aftermath of the quake, said Douglas, “this just seemed right.”

Douglas, a CA trustee and parent (’05, ’07,

’10), has held Haiti in his heart since his missionary work there in the early eighties. He has remained close with its people, its culture, and its church—L’Eglise Episcopal d’Haiti, the largest diocese in the Episcopal Church. “Most people don’t know that Haiti has more Episcopalians than any diocese in the United States,” Douglas said. “It’s a credit to the Haitian church and its indigenous leadership by the Haitian people.” The bishop of the Haitian diocese attended Douglas’ consecration in Connecticut.

For more than a century in Haiti, the Episcopal Church has championed education, health care, and the arts. The church hosted Dr. Paul Farmer, the cofounder of Partners In Health when he was first working in Haiti, Douglas said. An Episcopal convent, the Society of St. Margaret in Roxbury, Massachusetts, established the only school for handicapped children in Haiti, and the same sisters run a music school, hosting choirs and the only philharmonic orchestra. In addition, the Episcopal Church has fostered the Haitian art movement and the national museum of art. “Whether classical music or Haitian painting, the Episcopal Church is well respected and well regarded and has helped to elevate the lives of Haitian people in so many ways,” Douglas said.

But, in the wake of the earthquake, he said, “the music school is gone, the handicapped school is gone, the art museum is gone. The Haitian church is going to have to rebuild them completely from the ground up.” Douglas was involved in the church’s decision to allocate

BISHOP IAN DOUGLAS P’05, ’07, ’10

$10 million over the next two years to the rebuilding of Episcopalian buildings and services in Haiti. “The important thing,” he said, “is not so much fixing the church for the sake of the church, but rebuilding the infrastructure so the schools and hospitals can be up and running.”

Even as he begins his new term in Connecticut, Douglas believes he will remain focused on helping Haiti. “For me personally, if I hadn’t been elected Bishop of Connecticut, I feel as if I would be dedicating my life to the rebuilding of Haiti somehow,” he said. “I believe that something in my tenure as bishop will also be intimately intertwined with the rebuilding of Haiti.”

To Douglas, the earthquake was like the death of someone beloved. “It was horrendous.

If you’ve ever had someone close to you die, you go into a kind of suspended animation of reality where it’s unimaginable how terrible it is, so you don’t think about it. Then suddenly the reality comes floating in, and you’re struck with grief and despair. Then you kind of pick yourself back up and get on with the day and try to look for hope and possibility,” he said. “Then, the reality floods back in again.”

He does, however, find hope in the harsh reality. “I have hope for two reasons: as a Christian, I believe in life after death, and I know the hope, fortitude, and resilience that the Haitian people embody.”

—Gail Friedman

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(CASA) inspired students, faculty, and staff with a photo presentation at morning announcements and urged them to place spare change in receptacles around campus. CASA members also collected donations at lunch, raising more than $1,200 in a single day. Within a week, through various efforts, the community had raised nearly $6,000, which was split between Doctors Without Borders and Partners In Health.

But the effort was by no means over. In the following months, nearly every fundraiser — pizza and bake sales, the annual ceramics bowl sale, concerts, bottle redemptions, the student-faculty basketball game — was dedicated to Haiti’s earthquake relief. As moving as those photos of the devastation were, so was the compassion demonstrated by students and the rest of the CA community.

Tara Bradley

AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE IN HAITI , Concord Academy Service Activists

The Davidson Lectureship was established in 1966 by Mr. and Mrs. R.W. Davidson in honor of their two daughters, Anne E. Davidson Kidder ’62 and Jane S. Davidson ’64.

Each year, the lectureship invites a distinguished guest to CA to speak to the campus community.

Photos by Tim Morse / cartoons courtesy of Hilary Price ’87

A Price-less Sense of Humor

Above, Hilary Price ’87 speaking in the Performing Arts Center, with one of her cartoons projected behind her

I CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

t was like watching a stream of consciousness turn tangible. As the audience filed into the Performing Arts Center, animals and caricaturish characters filled a screen, generated by the nonstop ideas and fluid pen of cartoonist Hilary Price ’87.

CA’s 2010 Davidson Lecturer turned out drawing after drawing, demonstrating the blessedly prolific mind and the stamina that helps Price supply seven strips of Rhymes with Orange to 150 newspapers around the world each week.

Rhymes with Orange appeals to anyone who has ever felt anxious, which pretty much includes all but the pharmaceutically assisted and a few yogis. “The best compliment I can get,” Price said, “is, ‘Oh my god — that’s so true.’” As she projected Rhymes with Orange strips in the P.A.C., many were thinking just that.

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but also for valuing differences among students and for providing her with excellent English teachers. “They prized clear writing over big words,” she said. “Thanks to them, I sound about 30 percent less pretentious.” Price considers herself a writer who draws, not an artist who writes, an important distinction for a former English lit major at Stanford.

Though Price claims no one considered her funny in high school, during the assembly she offered the sharp commentary of a standup comic. As she described the not-sofunny themes that make her cartoons so funny, she displayed examples of her work. “The Reckoning,” for instance, shows a psychiatrist reassuring his monkey patient that many struggle with passing birthdays. “Yeah, but do they live in a zoo? Do they look like a monkey? Do they smell like one too?” the monkey asks. In

Rhymes with Orange, animals often personify human traits and embody familiar concerns. In some cartoons, Price pays homage to former CA math teacher and advisor Ted Sherman.

“Any time I do a math cartoon — any time — I always use him,” she said.

Price gets ideas everywhere: from her dogs, her cats, newspapers and books, holidays, other comics, and a game in which she lines up people, jobs, and animals on one side of a page and situations and topics on the other, then matches them to see what ideas emerge. She also gets ideas from her fans and friends, one of whom inspired “The Beloved Pet,” whose punchline muses that a pet who passed away will forever be remembered . . . as a password. Price draws plenty of relationship cartoons too, but acknowledged the challenge of drawing them “as a feminist and as a

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Anxiety, Price explained, tinges much of her work, providing the color and meaning that resonates. Teenaged angst, in particular, figures prominently. Price blames (er, credits) “CA and the very experience of high school” for many of her insights. She finds humor in even the most painful events — at least in retrospect. Case in point: when she accidentally tripped the fire alarm on her very first day at CA. She was leaning on a wall when her hand slid down; alarm blaring, thanks to her, the whole school filed outside for an impromptu fire drill. An auspicious start at a new school. She can laugh about it now.

Price called high school “a fetid breeding ground for anxiety” and said “anxiety is just behind hormones as the Gross National Product of high school students.” But she credits CA not just for fetidly feeding her inspiration,

gay person.” She has found a solution: “two words — furry monsters.” A strip called “Do-ers and Be-ers,” for example, captures how very different creatures — one a do-er and one not — can make beautiful music, or, as the last panel sums up, “do-be do-be do.” Price related this cartoon back to an experience at CA, when a teacher “stopped mid-lesson and had us listen to an aria. She was teaching us to be, rather than teaching us to be productive.”

At CA and throughout her childhood, Price did not feel like an artist. The alumna said she was more of a jock in high school, and explained that she first became a cartoonist in Ireland, during a year off between junior and senior year of college. Her visiting mother provided unintentional inspiration when she jokingly mistook a Dublin statue of a bespectacled

James Joyce for Elton John.

After her parents left, Price drew a cartoon based on the Elton John crack, then slipped it and two other cartoons, unsolicited, under the door of a local newspaper. Two weeks later they were in print, she was $75 richer, and her life as a cartoonist had begun. “In some circles, I say it was James Joyce who made me a cartoonist,” she said. “In other circles, I say it was Elton John.”

Occasionally, Price’s humor bends too far for mainstream America. “You never want to get a call saying, ‘do you want to risk losing papers over this strip?’” That happened when she ran a cartoon spoofing the “V-chip” — a device that a few years back was touted as an easy parental control embedded in TVs. In the strip, one little kid said to another: “I guess we

can’t call it the boob tube anymore.” Offended, the Peoria, Illinois paper pulled Rhymes with Orange.

CA audience members were considerably more tolerant. Price amused and entertained them for fifty minutes, sharing her quirky humor, acute observations, and pragmatic outlook. If, as she said, “humor is the night light in anxiety’s dark corners,” then cartooning is therapy and a bad day is a welcome opportunity. As Price explained, “I can say, ‘Wait, this isn’t just a dreadful moment, this is an idea for a cartoon.’”

— Gail Friedman

Hilary Price ’87 drawing characters nonstop as the crowd filtered into the assembly; right, the cartoonist visiting a photography class

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

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Rep. Byron Rushing

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tate Rep. Byron Rushing, a longtime social justice advocate, kicked off Concord Academy’s 2010 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day celebration with a powerful and provocative speech, asking the community, “Can we commemorate ourselves? Where do we fit in the legacy of Martin Luther King?”

Rushing read from King’s 1963 March on Washington speech, then warned that the “brilliant and profound” words of “I Have a Dream”

not be used to freeze the civil rights leader in that moment. He referred to King’s reflection on his own speech four years later: “I tried to talk to the nation about a dream that I had had, and I must confess . . . that not long after talking about that dream, I started seeing it turn into a nightmare.”

Scenes from the nightmare included the killing of four black girls in Birmingham, Alabama; race riots in American cities; and the escalation of the Vietnam War. Rushing, a state representative in Massachusetts since 1982 and former president of Boston’s Museum of Afro-American History, also quoted a letter from William C. Sullivan, former head of intelligence for the FBI, to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, describing Dr. King as “the most dangerous Negro in this nation . . .”

Rushing then urged CA students to become “dangerous Negros,” that is, to continue fighting for change even when their viewpoints are unpopular or met with suspicion.

The speaker pondered aloud the irony that a man dedicated to nonviolence could be deemed so dangerous. “He was serious about nonviolence. He believed we could solve emotional, violent problems by not being violent ourselves,” Rushing said of King, adding, “We need to believe that killing people is not the only solution when people kill us.”

MLK SERVICE TRIP:

Photos by Henry Kim ’11

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One of four service trips on MLK Day

Rushing urged students to incorporate into their daily lives what they learn about Dr. King. “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice,” he said. “But it never bends without us.”

After the keynote address, students and faculty attended a full day of workshops on topics ranging from interracial marriage and gender stereotypes to civil disobedience and Title IX. CA also offered four service trips off-campus: to a Habitat for Humanity site, the Cor Unum Meal Center, the Greater Boston Food Bank, and the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. The day ended with a clip of the “I Have a Dream” speech, followed by students’ works of self-expression at the fall-semester art show.

Manual Labor

wo minivans dispatched a handful of CA students to a workplace of hope. Armed with heavy-duty gloves and fervor, we arrived to a half-built blue house in Bedford, Massachusetts. We were welcomed with hot chocolate and munchkins into a cozy basement.

“I’ve been working with Habitat for Humanity for over twenty years, and every day I am making a difference in the world,” said Jim Comeau, construction manager for the Lowell, Massachusetts, division of Habitat for Humanity.

We marveled as he described

the wave of love that Habitat for Humanity sends throughout the globe.

We split into groups and started off on our day. A couple of us dug a hole to install electrical wires, and others leveled the basement floor.

Dense flakes of snow began falling, but we were too occupied with the work to whine about the weather.

Although we didn’t speak much, we shared a pride in the fact that we were creating a warm shelter for a family to snug into the next time the snow strikes.

“Are we ever going to finish leveling this floor?” I grumbled, staring down at the uneven basement surface of gravel and sand. Tonhu Hoang, a French teacher and Concord Academy Service Activists (CASA) advisor, answered, beaming: “You think we can’t do it?” That is when I was once again astounded by the power of a small group of dedicated people. I responded with a huge grin: “Of course we can!”

— Scarlett Kim ’11

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Photos by Tara Bradley

Rushing to Judgment: MLK Day

MLK SERVICE TRIP:

Meaningful Gestures

n Martin Luther King Jr. Day at CA, a group of students traveled to the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, a public school in Boston, and practiced the skills they learned in American Sign Language classes in the weeks preceding the visit.

The trip to Horace Mann had long been a goal of senior Julia Hanlon, who worked with CA’s multicultural group, MOSAIC, to organize the trip and the sign language classes.

During Julia’s last year at Bel-

mont Day School, which she attended prior to CA, she completed a project on deaf theatre and education and visited Horace Mann to learn about the school. She said she was inspired by the way the school functions as a family for many of its students who face additional challenges, ranging from poverty to being unable to communicate at home.

At Horace Mann, CA students watched an introductory video, observed classes, toured, and shared a pizza lunch with students from Laura Twitchell ’01

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Horace Mann’s upper school.

After lunch, Julia ran a culture circle — an ice-breaking exercise in which students step forward in response to various questions about their interests and identities. Horace Mann students performed a song, then CA students organized creative activities celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy. CA’s multicultural group MOSAIC, which sponsored the trip and four American Sign Language classes that preceded it, donated $500 to Horace Mann’s Incentive Program, which allows the school to give special privileges to students making the honor roll.

Julia’s enthusiasm and hard work paid off. “It was cool to be able to watch CA students’ reactions to the new environment,” she said, adding that she was touched by how much Horace Mann students opened up in the culture circle, where they contributed questions ranging from “do you like music?” to Julia Hanlon ‘10 runs the culture circle at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (behind her, Tiffany Nova ‘11 and Maris Hubbard ‘12).

MLK WORKSHOP:

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Sexuality and Social Hierarchy

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

he song “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc. played through the small speakers of a white laptop as kids trickled into room 121 at the top of the South School stairs. We kicked off the workshop — Sexual Orientation and Gender Hierarchy — by reading a short scene from Angels in America by Tony Kushner. In this scene, Roy Cohn, a powerful, politically connected attorney, discovers he has AIDS. His doctor’s insinuation that Roy is a homosexual sparks a passionate speech detailing how Cohn perceives sexuality’s connection to power in the

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social food chain.

We discussed Cohn’s understanding that heterosexual meant powerful, and homosexual meant weak. Following this discussion, we watched and discussed several clips, ranging from Walk on the Wild Side, a film from the sixties that flirts with the subject of homosexuality, to current TV shows like Will and Grace and The L Word that address homosexuality headon. Through these clips, we discussed the theme of “unhappy gay people” slowly finding the ability to respect their own sexuality. We ended

the workshop with a clip from The L Word addressing transgender issues.

After watching fifty years of history compressed into an hour, we ended the workshop celebrating how far we have come on the issue of homosexuality, and how far we still have to go until we can fully accept all forms of sexuality.

—Olivia Fantini ’10

“do you feel like a black sheep in your family?”

“We’re all high school kids and teenagers when it comes down to it,” said Julia — a sentiment keenly felt throughout the day.

—Laura Twichell ’01 French and English teacher

MLK WORKSHOP:

The Power of Hip-Hop

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t seems safe to say that hip-hop is one of music’s most commonly misunderstood genres. Today, when people think of hip-hop, many of them imagine the cliché-riddled odes to cars, sex, and the pursuit of large sums of money that clog mainstream radio stations. What is often forgotten is that this music originated as, and in many cases remains, a culturally rich, unique form of self-expression in which artists can convey their thoughts or opinions through music.

The workshop I attended, “HipHop: Sending Out Messages,” focused on the various ways rappers have woven politics into their music and analyzed how effective these instances can be. Political hip-hop has a fervent yet relatively small fan base in comparison to the watered-down work of more mainstream artists. Our group came to the conclusion that it is very valuable when these more commercial rappers branch out and discuss the views that they generally push aside in favor of higher sales.

As a music lover and aspiring writer, I am drawn to songs with meaningful and complex lyrics. It was refreshing to be among a group of peers who regarded hip-hop in the same way that I do, and it was enjoyable to engage in the type of discussion that often occurs at a lunch table and build upon it in a classroom setting.

But when the music started playing, we listened to each song in silence, concentrating on what each artist had to say.

—Will Harrison ’10

CA’s alpine skiing teams finished an extraordinary season with undefeated records in the Central Massachusetts Ski League (CMSL), earning titles for the girls’ championship, boys’ championship, and the combined title. The teams also sent representatives to the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council (NEPSAC) ski championships, where the boys finished sixth and the girls seventh. Several individual skiers placed in the top ten in the CMSL, out of about fifty skiers.

Stephen Sarno ’11 placed first, Peter Benson ’11 second, Peter James ’12 fourth, and Matt Deninger ’13 eighth. On the girls’ side, Alexandra Urban ’10 placed second in the CMSL, Hadley Allen

’12 fourth, Ariel Bliss ’10 ninth, and Ryan Hussey ’13 tenth. The ski teams have brought home CMSL titles in four of the last five years.

The girls volleyball team finished fourth in the Eastern Independent League (EIL) and second in Pool B of the end-of-season Eastern Independent Tournament. Kendall Tucker ’10 and Ashley Brock ’12 were named All-League players, and Eileen Yung ’10 and Steff Spies ’12 received EIL honorable mentions.

The girls squash team finished second in the EIL with new sophomore Hailey Herring-Newbound stepping into the number-one spot and earning All-League recognition.

Seven girls attended the New England Interscholastic Squash Association tournament; Katie Koppel ’10 finished sixth in the number-five flight and Carly Meyerson ’12 finished fourth in the number-six flight.

The boys wrestling team went 5–4 on the season and finished third in the EIL tournament, where Dylan Awalt Conley ’10 and Sam Miller ’12 each were named EIL champion in his weight class.

Jeremy Owades ’10, David Do ’10, Henry Kim ’11, and Max Samels ’12 all finished in second place in their respective weight classes. Dylan, Sam, Henry, and Jeremy also qualified for the NEPSAC tournament, where Dylan made it to the second day of competition.

The girls basketball team finished the season with an outstanding win over Newton Country Day School.

Olivia Pimm ’10 ended her CA career with a one-game total of twenty-nine points, ten rebounds, and seven steals. Olivia earned her fourth All-League recognition (the other three in field hockey) and was selected as one of the top fifteen players in Eastern New England to compete in the NEPSAC East-West All-Star game.

The boys squash team finished the season 7–2 and competed in the New England Independent School Squash Association (NEISA) championship, with especially impressive performances by Matt Styles ’12, Daniel Coppersmith ’11, Sean Pathawinthranond ’12, and Andrew Kelliher ’12.

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ATH LETIC S

Dan Sanford

WINTER HIGHLIGHTS

AT H L E T I C S

EIL A LL-S TA R S Girls Basketball Olivia Pimm’10 Maia Johnstone ’10 (honorable mention) Boys Basketball Andrew McCue ’10 (honorable mention) Girls Squash Hailey Herring-Newbound ’12 Becca Imrich ’10 (honorable mention)

CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

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Volleyball Ashley Brock ’12 Kendall Tucker ’10 Steff Spies ’12 (honorable mention) Eileen Yung ’10 (honorable mention) Boys Wrestling Dylan Awalt-Conley ’10 (EIL champion) Sam Miller ’12 (EIL champion) David Do ’10 Henry Kim ’11 Jeremy Owades ’10 Max Samels ’12

CMSL H ONORS

NEPSA C HONOR S

Boys Alpine Skiing Stephen Sarno ’11 (first place) Peter Benson ’11 (second place)

Girls Alpine Skiing Hadley Allen ’12 (second place Class B giant slalom)

Girls Alpine Skiing Alexandra Urban ’10 (second place)

Girls Basketball Olivia Pimm ’10 NEISA H ONOR S Boys Squash Andrew Kelliher ’12

Suzanne Parry

Coach John McGarry

Photos by Dan Sanford

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nbridled euphoria” is how John McGarry describes the start of the ski season. “The first day of dry-land training each year still feels like the last day of school when I was a little kid.”

McGarry, head coach of Concord Academy’s boys and girls alpine ski teams, has led CA to nine Central Massachusetts Ski League (CMSL) titles and three New England Preparatory School Athletic Council (NEPSAC) championship titles in the past six years. His enthusiasm is key to the teams’ success.

“John always brings an impressive amount of energy to practice, whether it’s a fifteen-degree day of dry land training or an afternoon of skiing in the rain,” said girls team captain Alexandra Urban ’10.

“More than that, he keeps pushing us all to do our best throughout the whole season, no matter our skill level.”

In 2010, the boys, girls, and combined teams were undefeated in the five-school CMSL, powered by a combination of relaxed confidence and fierce determination. “They put on an easygoing Bode face to outsiders, but in the starting gate, they were all Lindsey,” McGarry said, referring to Olympic champions Bode Miller and Lindsey Vonn.

McGarry became head coach in fall 1998, shortly after joining CA’s Admissions Office, where he is director of financial aid. Prior to CA, McGarry taught economics and math, and coached baseball, volleyball, basketball, and soccer at a school in California. “When I arrived on campus, there was no CA faculty member coaching the team,” said McGarry, who lives on campus with his wife Suzanne, sixyear-old Tyler, and five-year-old Annie. On most winter weekends, the McGarrys are schussing down

slopes at Killington in Vermont; both kids skied a Black Diamond slope before their fifth birthdays.

Growing up in Lincoln, Massachusetts, McGarry learned to ski when he was three. “My dad and four older siblings were all avid skiers and capable instructors,” he recalled. McGarry raced competitively into his early teens, but a family move to Houston during high school essentially ended his racing career. He attended the University of Vermont and managed its ski team, which then regularly won Division I NCAA championships. “I worked with the coaches, learned from some of the best skiers in the world, and stayed connected to ski racing,” said McGarry. Following college, McGarry spent two years as a ski instructor at Crested Butte and Breckenridge in Colorado.

“Skiing is a lifelong sport, and the approach I bring to practice and competition is a dedication to enjoy each day and a willingness to take advantage of and maximize each student’s physical gifts — to help all of them become fitter, stronger, more proficient skiers.” he said. “To be able to share my love for skiing with great kids is a pleasure.”

McGarry describes his coaching personality as “upbeat and high-energy.” But that wouldn’t translate to championships without a keen ability to instruct and strategize. “Skiing is about disciplined and controlled aggression. Good ski racers are thoughtful, plan ahead, and take carefully considered, calculated risks,” he said. “Most importantly, they thrive on the adrenaline-fueled thrill of skiing really fast, competing — and winning!”

—Tara Bradley

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Racing to the Bottom, Landing on Top

David R. Gammons

ARTS CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

CA’s winter mainstage production was Bat Boy. The offbeat musical, about a half-bat, half-boy discovered in a cave in West Virginia and the townspeople who struggle to confront what they cannot understand, allowed CA’s singer-actors to showcase a wide range of musical styles, including rock ’n’ roll, gospel, hip-hop, ballads, and traditional show tunes.

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Cultural Immersion n February, the giant field trip known as Gund Museum Day allowed every Concord Academy student to visit one of several museums and to experience firsthand Boston’s vast cultural community.

They visited the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the MIT Museum, the Museum of Science, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Peabody Essex Museum, Harvard’s Sackler Museum, and the Worcester Art Museum.

In several places, students took “insider” tours, including one at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) led by CA trustee Ann Gund P’08, who is also a trustee of the MFA. The day is named for Gund and her husband Graham, in gratitude for their support of the arts and their generosity to Concord Academy.

Gund shared some of her favorite stories from the MFA collection: the twelfth-century

David R. Gammons

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oncord Academy’s Dance Company performed Triptych in March, a collaboration with Eton College in England. The original work, a dance and music event in three movements, was choreographed and directed by dance teacher Richard Colton and featured seven CA dancers. CA’s Dance Company performed Triptych at Eton over spring vacation.

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Spanish fresco, Christ in Majesty with Symbols of the Four Evangelists, which arrived at the MFA packed with a layer of Parmesan cheese for protection; the dismal social lives of the daughters of Edward Darley Boit, shown in the renowned John Singer Sargent portrait.

In a music room, Gund insisted students look at the back of an ornate banjo, revealing an intricate design that most museum-goers miss. She told of the MFA’s surprise to learn that a filthy, broken statue in storage since 1950 turned out to be a priceless St. John the Baptist by Giovanni Francesco Rustici.

Gund also gave the group a glimpse of the MFA’s new Art of the Americas wing, opening in November. “It made sense to us that Boston should be the center of American art in the United States,” she said. In a small room, behind the scenes, she showed a model of the new wing, its tiny galleries pasted with replicas of the art that will hang there.

Gund Museum Day and its counterpart, Gund Studio Day, happen every other year and are intended to encourage students’ art appreciation and help them embrace the wealth of local cultural offerings.

Commendable Clay

CA trustee Ann Gund P’08 leading students on an insider’s tour of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts

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$500 for Partners In Health’s work in Haiti. About seventy bowls and vases were sold during intermission at the winter mainstage production of Bat Boy in February.

Gail Friedman

ceramic work by Mandy Boucher ’11 was accepted into the annual show sponsored by the National Council on the Education for Ceramic Art. More than 1,150 artists applied for the K–12 show, seven hundred of them in grades eleven and twelve.

Only 162 pieces were selected, including Mandy’s piece (right), which she created for her Ceramics 1 class.

In other ceramics news, students once again this year donated their handiwork for a charity sale, raising more than

Lisa Kong ’10

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Lisa Voll

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ummer Stages Dance (SSD) at Concord Academy will explode with even more CA talent than usual this summer, including performances by two of the school’s most acclaimed alum-dancers.

Rashaun Mitchell ’96, called “the most riveting” of Merce Cunningham dancers by the New York Times, will perform with poet Anne Carson at the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) on July 20, in “his Boston debut and his first work as a major new, young choreographer,” according to SSD codirector and CA dance teacher Richard Colton.

In another Boston-area debut, the new dance company that Zack Winokur ’07 codirects, The Troupe, performs July 17. Winokur will be

dancing — back in CA’s studio, just like old times.

Forging a CA parent connection, internationally recognized artist Jenny Holzer, parent of Lili HolzerGlier ’06, will collaborate with choreographer Miguel Gutierrez July 28 at the ICA, adding her text-as-art projections to the Summer Stages palette. SSD has more performances at the ICA than in years past because CA’s Performing Arts Center will be closed this summer for fire safety upgrades.

Behind the scenes, dancers Marissa Palley ’04 and Lily Susskind ’04 will work with SSD choreographers, Justin Samaha ’94 will be back once again as resident designer, and Emma McCormickGoodhart ’08 will be artistic liaison for SSD’s series, “Co Lab: Process + Performance at the ICA.”

Philippa Kaye ’87

Karen Sterling

ARTS

Home Grown

PHILIPPA KAYE ’87 is artistic director and choreographer for Philippa Kaye CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

Company, a “laboratory for movement invention” based in Brooklyn. Kaye has danced with choreographers including

Summer Stages Dance held "A Winter’s Cabaret" in February, which raised $10,000 for scholarships to support the program’s young dancers and emerging choreographers. Among the performers was Zack Winokur ’07, below.

When did you start dancing? What inspired you when you first began?

I started ballet classes at Miss Neubert’s in Carnegie Hall when I was six. I was swept up by the music, the mystique of old NYC art institutions, and the expressive personalities. It was the 1980s, so all the defections to the U.S. from the USSR added to the drama.

What sparked your move from classical ballet as a child to modern dance?

I experienced my first memorable rejection at age fourteen when I was not asked back to the School of American Ballet. The rotation of my femurs in my hip sockets was not considered flexible enough to achieve the lines necessary for a professional. Although I remember feeling devastated, I was already kicking my legs every which way in theatre dance classes and in nightclubs. I began to explore the range of dance vocabulary.

Scott Wells, Sara Rudner, Laura Staton, and Pat Birch and has created works for organizations including the CooperHewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, the 92nd Street Y, and the DC International Improvisation Festival.

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What is the appeal of modern dance over other forms?

Maybe the appeal of modern dance is its connection to the individual voice and its earnest striving for purity. I am in this lineage, however I call what I do contemporary dance. This may be semantic

quibbling to some, but I find historians’ distinctions helpful. (The Modern Era for dance is roughly 1890–1960.)

Modern dance masters such as Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham, and Lester Horton codified their movement practice in order that dancers could embody their form. I am not interested in making a total theory of movement or impressing my movement preferences onto other bodies. Like contemporary artists or contemporary composers, I’m discovering what methods are most relevant now.

What inspires your choreography?

For example, you have developed dance for the Prospect Park Zoo, reflecting on animals’ courtships.

How do you get yourself into the mind of an animal?

I am inspired by nature and science. (I loved AP Biology at CA.) To make the work in Prospect Park Zoo, we studied other species’ behavior, anatomy, and metabolism as a way to get more fully into our own animal minds and bodies.

Our activity in the zoo was a mirror encouraging people to watch their own animal behavior. (There were occasions when I had to pull us back, reapply learned social conventions, in order not

Photos by David R. Gammons

ewcomers to CA took to the stage in January for the ninth annual FroshProject, a midwinter welcome to freshmen, who are given parts at random, with no auditions required.

This year’s theme was Dynamic Duos, and skits featured pairs ranging from Shaggy and Scooby-Doo to Lewis and Clark; all were written by upperclassmen. Above, from left: Transformers: The Battle Between Good, Evil, and Foxy by Casey Barth ’10, Andrew McCue ’10, and Will Watkinson ’10; The Magical Adventures of Dorothy and Toto by Emma Starr ’12 and James Wyrwicz ’12; and Tay-Tay and Kanye by Jamie Fradkin ’10 and Liza Comart ’10.

At right, FroshProject posters by Oliver Bruce ’11.

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How has the mix of ballet and modern techniques prepared you for your work today?

I can quickly recognize a body’s training and have a good idea of what that person is capable of technically. It’s useful to speak the shared language(s) with dancers in order to choreograph, and I usually avoid reinventing the wheel.

You have been commissioned to create several outdoor works.

How is it different to prepare for an outdoor performance, versus an indoor one?

Outdoor site-specific performance requires twice as much energy, patience, and hydration. There is always the threat that the weather will interfere, and then there are varying quantities of bugs, guano, rocks, sun, and dirt. However, I like the informality. I like that the process is usually public, which means there is often immediate feedback on what you are making. In the theatre or studio, the audience assumes you have

control of everything they experience, so there is more pressure to actually attempt to have that control.

As far as lifestyle goes, what are the hardest and easiest things about being a professional dancer?

In the United States, the financial rewards of dancing in artistically fulfilling new work so rarely support any kind of living that you are always juggling multiple jobs with your usually inconsistent rehearsal schedule. This is tiring.

The easiest, or most consistent, part of the profession is finding community.

There is always someone to massage your shoulders or stretch your back out.

The same goes for being a choreographer; you are always looking to find the next gig and figuring out how to schedule and pay the dancers, so uncertainty is constant, but you also have an emotionally supportive community and can enforce a strict ritual of massages and stretches during rehearsal, if you choose.

Did you take dance at Concord Academy? How did dance at CA influence your growth as a dancer?

First, let me say that I am thrilled with what Amy [Spencer] and Richard [Colton] have been doing at CA with

dance. When I was a student, CA allowed me to stubbornly defend my identity as a dancer—as a noncompetitive mover. Except for the day of Hurricane Gloria when a bunch of us played soccer in the gym, I never did a sport. (I rather regret this now.)

However, I didn’t grow much as a dancer at CA, but I did grow as an artmaker. I took many art classes and was in the dance company—directed by Christine Campbell and then Patrishya Fitzgerald and Daphne Cimino—which is where I began choreographing and collaborating.

How did your intellectual experience while at CA influence your path to becoming a choreographer?

I realized the joy of understanding how things relate to and inform each other.

For instance, what I was learning in biology or history might help support my analysis of Irish literature. It helped that teachers like Janet Eisendrath, Gary Hawley, and Bob Bellinger taught holistically. During my current rehearsal process, for “Miraculous Arms, an ART by the Spinnerets,” a fertility dance for three women, ideas about pregnancy and assisted reproductive technologies

(ART) led to researching spider behavior. We’re navigating this tricky web of the personal and the universal, this “mystery” of conception. Things arise during the artistic process that you can’t predict, and then you have to see whether they are distractions, or whether they warrant more research— whether they are too self-indulgent or could enrich the imagery and provide more openings for an audience to engage.

What interests besides dance take your time?

I’m interested in training of all kinds, so I look at juggling, hula-hooping, animal training, and corporate training. I’d like to be a mom, so I’ve been doing a lot of research on that lately.

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to offend the multicultural, multigenerational zoo audience.) I am interested in making structures that encourage people to interact and in which there is space for improvisation.

joanmudge.com

Catalina Mountains

by Joan Weidlein Mudge ’65

IN MEMORIAM

Helen Russell Allegrone ’39 Robert Allingham, husband of Mary Leonard Allingham ’47 Louise Ansberry, mother of Hale Ansberry Krasne ’73 Russell Berry, husband of Alice Hawkes Roberts ’58 Ethel Buckland, grandmother of Brendan Buckland ’10 Anthony Chapin, husband of Daphne Heath Chapin ’53, brother-in-law of Cynthia Heath Sunderland ’51 Susan Child ’70, sister of Mars Child ’74 Catherine Comegys, daughter of Adelaide Eicks Comegys ’48, sister of Lee Comegys Chafee ’74, stepniece of Nancy Bird Nichols ’48 Theodore Cross, stepfather of Stuart Warner ’77 Catherine Maguire Cumpston ’42 Shirley Davison, husband of Lucy Faulkner Davison ’52 C. Frederic Edgarton, father of Patricia Edgarton ’65, brother of Polly Edgarton Lanman ’48 Anna Ela, mother of Nancy Ela Caisse ’58, cousin of Elizabeth Sears ’39 and the late Leila Sears ’37 Sophie Hunt French ’32 Clarence Galston, father of Linda Galston Fates ’65 R. Nicholas Gimbel, brother of Victoria Gimbel Lubin ’66 CONCORD ACADEMY MAGAZINE SPRING 2010

Augusta Howes, mother of Frances Howes Valiente ’64, grandmother of Abigail Howes Craig ’88, cousin of Patricia Aldana ’64 and the late Charlotte Kidder Ramsey ’59 John Lukens, husband of Mary Monks Lukens ’54, brother-in-law of Olga Monks Kimball ’55 and the late Ann Monks Barry ’57 Samuel Mygatt, father of Elizabeth Mygatt ’99 and Catherine Mygatt ’01 Henry Rathbun, father of Sheila Rathbun ’73 Joan Lee Rosen, grandmother of Aliza Rosen ’10 Myra Blanchard Rucker ’47 John Stillman, father of Linda Stillman ’66 Marian Wolf, mother of Cathrine Wolf ’73

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Deborah Gray

and transparencies on projectors to graphing calculators, powerful computer software, and clickers for voting on conceptual questions.”

Today Gray still looks forward to every class. “Maybe one student will ask a question I haven’t thought of before, or another will solve a problem in an entirely new way. Maybe they’ll all revel in the intellectual satisfaction of mastering a particularly challenging concept,” she said.

“Former students sometimes visit on break from college and report that the math and study

skills they learned in class are helping them thrive. That’s so good to hear!”

What inspires Gray most are CA’s students.

“Their intelligence, creativity, energy, wit, and candor never fail to energize me. Even if math is not their favorite subject, they love learning.

Year after year, CA produces an astonishingly rich academic, cocurricular, and extracurricular program in a creative, nurturing environment— and on a tight budget.”

Gray said she has always wanted to give back to CA for the positive professional and personal experiences she has enjoyed at the school, but she is not in a position to make a large outright gift from her current funds. She chose a creative solution by making Concord Academy one of the beneficiaries of her taxdeferred retirement fund. “Unlike individuals, nonprofits can receive tax-free proceeds from such funds,” she explained. “And this allows me to contribute to a place I love without compromising my resources.”

In explaining her sustained devotion to CA, Gray cited these Baha’i principles, which have long guided her life: — Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.

— . . . [W]ork, especially when performed in the spirit of service, is [accounted] a form of worship.

“I’m privileged to have found a community that so closely embodies the principle of unity in diversity,” she said. “CA deserves the best I can give.”

For information on how you can make a difference, contact the Advancement Office at (978) 402-2240.

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eborah Gray began teaching at Concord Academy in 1977. She had met Bill and Susan Adams two years earlier, when she and Bill taught in a summer program at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. Bill was head of CA’s Mathematics Department at the time, and when a position opened up, he invited Gray to apply. “Concord Academy seemed a younger version of Oberlin College, which I have loved since my days as a student there,” said Gray.

“I felt instantly at home.” Except for a hiatus from 1983 to 1993, Gray has been teaching at CA ever since.

“During my time away,” she said, “I wrote some unique graphical statistics software and tutored at New England College’s learning center. But each time I visited CA, I realized how much I missed classroom teaching. The head of school at the time, Tom Wilcox, would ask me, ‘When will you be coming back to teach?’ And I’d always reply, ‘When will you have a position open?’ So when an opening did occur for the fall of 1993, Gray received an offer to rejoin the CA faculty and “accepted with pleasure.” In his letter confirming receipt of her contract, Wilcox wrote, “Welcome home.”

“I’ve always loved math,” said Gray, “the beauty of the patterns, the elegance of a concise, logical argument, the connections, the applications, the counterintuitive results, the open questions. And there’s always more to learn: the field of chaos, fractals, and dynamics, a subject taught in CA’s Advanced Topics course, did not even exist when I began teaching. There’s always something new in the pedagogy, too.

We’ve gone from chalkboards, purple dittos,

Tara Bradley

She Makes the Numbers Work for Her—and for CA

Non-Profit U.S. Postage PAID Hanover, NH Permit No. 8 Concord Academy 166 Main Street Concord, MA 01742

Address service requested

Upcoming Special Events

Summer Stages Dance at Concord Academy

Ryutaro Mishima

May 28

Commencement Speaker: Don Henley, musician and founder of the Walden Woods Project Chapel Lawn, 10:00 a.m.

June 11–13

“Sintesi” The Troupe, directed by Zack Winokur ’07 and Michelle Mola Dance Performance Space at Concord Academy 8:00 p.m. $15, students $10

June 11

Reunion classes of ’00 and ’05 at Fenway Park Red Sox vs. Phillies, 7:05 p.m.

Reserve at concordalum.org June 12

July 20

Memorial Service Elizabeth B. Hall Chapel, 11:00 a.m.

“Bracko” (inspired by the works of Sappho) and “Nox” (a work in progress) Featuring choreographer/dancer Rashaun Mitchell ’96 and poet Anne Carson Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 7:00 p.m. $25; ICA members, students $20

Joan Shaw Herman Distinguished Service Award 2010 Recipient: Paul Santomenna ’85 Elizabeth B. Hall Chapel, 2:00 p.m.

June 21

Concord Academy Summer Camp opens

July 28

A performance of text and movement featuring visual artist Jenny Holzer p’07 and choreographer Miguel Gutierrez Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 7:00 p.m. $25; ICA members, students $20

August 31

First day of classes September 4

CA at Fenway Park Red Sox vs. White Sox, 7:05 p.m.

Reserve at concordalum.org

July 31

October 8–9

Parents’ Weekend October 23

Watch for upcoming alumnae/i events in your area at concordalum.org.

“A Life in Dance” featuring Dan Wagoner Dance Performance Space at Concord Academy 8:00 p.m. $15, students $10 July 17

Reunion Weekend Complete schedule at concordalum.org

Alumnae/i Association Meeting with Head of School Rick Hardy Ransome Room, 9:30 a.m. to noon

July 15

Rashaun Mitchell ’96, above, performs July 20. All performances at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston are part of “Co Lab: Process + Performance,” a joint project of Summer Stages and the ICA/Boston.

Choreographers’ Project Showcase Featuring new work by Daniel Charon and Choreographers’ Project fellows Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 3:30 p.m. $25; ICA members, students $20

For tickets and information, call (978) 402–2339 or visit summerstagesdance.org.