Another chance to flourish Becoming a Felsman Fellow was life-changing for alumnus Hardy Vieux.
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that with a master’s degree in public policy and a law degree from the University of Michigan. As fellows, Vieux and Doggett focused on the problems of safeguarding and educating children in the camp. The Felsman Fellows website provides links to their blog posts, reports, pictures, and video. Several of Vieux’s thoughtful posts also appear on the Huffington Post website. In one post, he describes in vivid detail the plight of two single mothers. One lives in a tiny cave-like apartment with no windows, running water, or protection from the elements. The other lives in a converted storeroom with five children. Vieux describes their situations to make a point. He writes that he was shocked when he learned shortly after arriving in Jordan that the government had passed a new rule: Aid agencies were required to make Jordanians beneficiaries of 30 percent of all projects aimed at helping the Syrian refugees. The requirement struck Vieux as selfish and unfair—until he spent more time in the field. That’s when he discovered that the Jordanians were suffering as badly or worse than the nearly 600,000 Syrian refugees the Jordanian government had allowed into the country. The situation reminded him of when he volunteered with a medical relief organization in Haiti years earlier. The medical organization had begun charging nominal fees for its service. They didn’t do it to be cruel to the impoverThe requirement struck Vieux as selfish and unfair—until he spent more time in the field. ished Haitians, he said. They did it because if ’13 spent half of last year working with Save the Children at they didn’t charge, the Haitians would wait for free medical Za’atari refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. The camp was for care to be provided by foreign aid organizations, which would families fleeing the civil war in neighboring Syria. end up putting local health-care workers out of business. “In The plight of refugees resonates for Vieux. He was born in addressing one problem, we ran the risk of creating another,” New York to newly arrived Haitian immigrants who were largeVieux writes. ly uneducated and spoke little English. His parents were so When Vieux was in high school, he was accepted into an experimental initiative of the Catholic Church, the Bishop’s Leaddoubtful about their ability to provide for him, they sent him ership Program. The two-year program aimed to create leaders back to Haiti to be raised by his paternal grandmother for a few for the African-American community. Vieux says the rigorous years. His first words were spoken in Creole and French. curriculum of readings, meetings, retreats, and other enrichFrom such unlikely beginnings, he earned his bachelor’s degree with a major in public policy from Duke, then followed ment experiences dramatically changed the direction of his life. ardy Vieux ’93 has never been in anything resembling a rut. As a young lawyer, he chose to enlist in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps, where he handled criminal appellate defense in cases that sometimes involved homicide. Later, in private practice, he would provide legal assistance on a pro bono basis to an Army soldier facing court-martial for blowing the whistle on abuses at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He also began serving as a volunteer attorney for refugees seeking asylum in the United States. And he was a human-rights observer at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during pretrial proceedings involving prisoners alleged to have plotted the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 2010, the D.C. Bar recognized his efforts by naming him Pro Bono Lawyer of the Year. Vieux also became a go-to source for commentary on military justice issues for NPR, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among other news outlets. On top of all that, he served on the Duke board of trustees from 1999 to 2013. He is a past president of the Duke Alumni Association, and he remains a member of Sanford’s board of visitors. And yet, a year or two ago, he was longing for change. He says he simply found trial work less satisfying to him professionally than it once had been. He wanted to take more of a leadership role in human rights and development efforts. Along came Duke, with an offer he could hardly refuse. He was selected as one of the university’s first Felsman Fellows, an initiative of the new J. Kirk Felsman Program on Children in Adversity. The program pairs a public policy scholar with a documentary filmmaker or photographer, both of them with connections to Duke. The pair spend up to ten months in the field working with a humanitarian organization. The goal is to generate reports and imagery that raise awareness of issues affecting vulnerable children and, ideally, that lead to solutions. Vieux and visual artist and educator Laura Doggett M.F.A.
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