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In 1789, Alexander Hamilton was appointed the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.
The average person has abuot 1,460 dreams a year. That’s about four per night.
Nick Teich builds camps for transgender youth
PHOTO COURTESY OF NICK TEICH
CONSTANT SUPPORT: Teich (left) does his best to create an environment in which campers have fun and learn leadership skills. and queer camps geared toward gay and lesbian teens and some organizations that arrange retreats for transgender youth and their families, Camp Aranu’tiq is the first camp solely for transgender youth, according to Teich. “There’s nothing that distinguishes it, except for the campers, which is very intentional,” said Teich, who noted that no one spending a day at his camp would know that it is different. “What we want to give these kids is a normal experience,” Teich said. “A lot of times at home they’re constantly having to defend their gender or talk about it, go to therapy, or all this stuff that we just want to give them a break from.” Evenings are spent playing capture the flag, sitting around a camp fire or running around on scavenger hunts. “We have parents and kids who have
said that we’ve saved their kids’ lives. These kids now know that there are other kids like them, and even though the camp is only a week, they keep in touch,” Teich said. According to surveys the camp sends out to its campers, about 80 percent of campers keep in touch with one another on a regular basis during the year, and, of those, 96 percent speak on a daily basis. “They are keeping in touch yearround, and that’s a big part of what we encourage because we want when they leave camp for them to be able to go back to their schools and their home being empowered and not feeling stuck for the next 51 weeks,” Teich said. The camp has continued its success, enrolling 65 campers at the New England location this year and opening a new campsite on the west coast. Start-
ing with 36 campers in California, Teich is confident the number will be up by at least 20 for next summer. Equally strong is the volunteer list that has grown so long that many are being turned away for positions to work at the camp. While about half the staff members identify as transgender or gender-variant, the other half do not. “We definitely like the mix because we feel the kids should have role models of all different types,” Teich explained. While Teich is wrapping up the third summer of Camp Aranu’tiq, he is also beginning his third year as a Ph.D. candidate at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, where he is working on a dissertation related to the bullying of transgender youth. While his work is not focused specifically on camps, much of Teich’s inspiration has come from Camp Aranu’tiq. In addition to his dissertation work, Teich wrote a book that came out last spring titled Transgender 101: A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue. “A lot of my thinking of that has come out of seeing the kids at camp and knowing that when they go home to their schools at home they’re harassed and bullied,” Teich said. “And to think that such wonderful kids have to endure this, what does that mean for their lives ahead of them?” The word Aranu’tiq is a word from the Chugach Alaskan tribe that means somebody who embodies both the male and female spirit and is revered for it. “In that culture, people who were in between genders were thought to have natural powers and were people who were looked up to,” Teich said. “I thought it was cool to have the kids know that there are other cultures that don’t see this as a bad thing.”
Preserving familial roots Prof. Shavarini discusses her journey from Iran By CELINE HACOBIAN JUSTICE EDITOR
OLIVIA POBIEL/the Justice
WINDOW TO THE PAST: Shavarini’s book started as journal entries.
Prof. Mitra Shavarini (WMGS) says that family history is like a photo album filled with memories from birthday parties, graduations and proms. “Some of these stories evaporate,” she said in a lecture on Friday, unless someone writes them down so that they are not forgotten. Shavarini started writing journal entries for her children so that they would understand their family’s experiences, and this eventually became her book, Dessert Roots: Journey of an Iranian Immigrant Family. Shavarini gave a lecture last Friday in the Laurie Theater about her new book that depicts her family’s journey to the United States and their relationship with their homeland of Iran. The lecture was followed by Leila May Pascual’s ’15 Tagalog song about her own experiences as an immigrant from the Philippines; a historical background by Prof. Kristin Lucken (IGS); and audience reflections portrayed by a playback theatre group composed of Will Chalmus ’07, Nathan Porteshawver ’09 and Etta King ’10. Shavarini addressed the idea of writing down family histories because “we all have our own perspectives,” she said. While a family history can be a “treasure chest of stories,” howvever, it can also be “a Pandora’s box” that acknowledges instances that create familial tension. Shavarini was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to the United States when she was nine-years old. “We came as a family unit, which at that time was very rare, because most Iranians who
were coming at that time were students and typically male, so to come as a family unit was very odd,” she said in an interview with the Justice. Shavarini’s father was on a fouryear assignment with the National Iranian Oil Company. Although he went back to Iran in 1976 at the end of his four years, he wanted his children to get an American education, so Shavarini and her brother stayed in Rhode Island with their mother. The state turned out to be “a rude awakening for us, because we were dark-skinned people in a really white environment,” she said. When her father returned to his home country in 1976, Iran “was [in] a time of boom and prosperity, but then by 1978, things turned dark and then [my father] left at the end of 1978, thinking ‘it’s a temporary thing until everything is quelled,’ but then it turned out to be 33 years before he went back,” she said. In fact, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was forced to leave Iran after being overthrown. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took over as supreme leader, resulting in arrests and executions of members of left-leaning ideological parties. During the Iran Hostage Crisis of 1979, when 52 Americans were held captive for more than 400 days after the American Embassy in Tehran was taken over by Islamist students, Shavarini was able to finish her education at the University of Rhode Island because she was already enrolled, whereas due to of the lack of diplomatic realtions between the United States and Iran, Iranian students could not get student VISAs to pursue a college education in the United States.
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Everybody counts, everybody deserves a chance, everybody has a responsible role to play and we all do better when we work together.
By DAFNA FINE
sically told me not to come back. They outright told me not to come back,” Teich said. Knowledgeable enough about the workings of a camp from his own experience, Teich decided to begin a camp of his own where transgender youth could find a weeklong oasis. “I knew that there’d be enough kids because I had started learning about trans kids and meeting them and working with them in different capacities, so I knew that wouldn’t be a problem,” he said. After gathering some friends and putting together a board of directors, Teich began his research on how to start a nonprofit organization. Reaching out to donors and fundraising for the camp, Teich gathered 41 campers and 20 staff members for the first camp of its kind. Though there are a handful of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2012
VERBATIM | BILL CLINTON
JUSTICE SENIOR WRITER
With days filled with sports, drama, arts and crafts and rock-climbing, a day at Camp Aranu’tiq doesn’t feel all that different from most other summer camps. But founded in 2010 by Nick Teich, a third year Ph.D. candidate in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Camp Aranu’tiq is the first camp in the world for transgender youth, according to Teich. A weeklong summer camp for kids ages eight to 15, Camp Aranu’tiq seeks to provide transgender and gendervariant youth with a fun camp experience and to foster leadership skills in a place where campers are able to express themselves comfortably, according to the camp’s website. Located in Southern New England and Southern California (the exact locations are not disclosed by Teich for the youths’ safety), the idea for the weeklong camp was conceived when Teich realized the need for a camp environment for transgender kids. Teich himself spent 13 summers at a camp before he began identifying as transgender. It wasn’t until he was older that he began to think about other kids who do, as well. Recognizing that camps are gendered for reasons including the separation of cabins, Teich, a 29-year-old social worker from Newton, Mass., realized that transgender youth had no comfortable place to go to enjoy the summer camp experience. Around the time he realized this, Teich received a call from another camp where he knew the directors and had volunteered as a girl before he identified as male. “Once I announced that I was going to transition, they ba-
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Once she graduated from URI, Shavarini moved to Massachusetts, received her teaching degree and taught at a private school. Around the time that the hostages were released, Shavarini started teaching students with special needs and then taught students with socioeconomic disadvantages. In 1992, the Iranian government asked for ex-patriots to travel to the country to help rebuild it after the revolution. “I was in my 20s and idealistic, … so I went back and I taught at a university over there, fell in love with it and then came back to this country wanting to go get a degree in education and work on women’s education in the Muslim world specifically in Iran on higher education,” she said. Because she is unable to stay in Iran for more than four months, she taught for one semester in Iran before she came back to the United States to receive her doctorate from Harvard University. For years, she went back and forth between the United States and Iran doing research and fieldwork in her homeland. Shavarini immediately recognized the differences in culture after a “draining” revolution. She found it challenging to see the youth in the society who had experienced all the atrocities of the revolution. “We were Iranians on both sides, yet we had such different experiences and they thought that … we had lived outside and didn’t go through the same suffering that they had, and yet, we did. It was really tough to survive in [the United States],” she said. Shavarini says that she realizes why Iranians in Iran were resentful of their “life of
privilege in the West.” Although Shavarini was able to adjust to the culture depending on which country she was in, her parents were not able to do the same. She said her mother had difficulty creating friendships, and while part of it resulted from the Iranian cultural norm of being reserved, part of it was also because she was not able to find a place among the residents of Rhode Island, who did not understand how to welcome her into the community. “[My parents] didn’t invite people over because I think they were really ashamed that they were going through hard times,” she said. Shavarini said that her book was not originally meant to be a book. “When I started to write, it was just journal entries,” she said. She began to write them for her children when they were born and continued when her parents decided to move back to Iran. “I was worried that we’d lose a lot of these families because I thought it was their role to give these stories to [my children], and then ... there wouldn’t even be an opportunity for them to hear them,” she said. Shavarini said that the process was sometimes spiritual because “you connect to some sort of other world that you didn’t know, … so for me to try to conjure those times up in the story meant that I had to go to a different world and really live it and experience it to describe it,” she said. Shavarini is thankful to her father for bringing her family to the U.S. despite the hardships her family endured. “[The book] really started out of journal entries and for me not to lose my parents’ story.”