“ I magine 3,000 soaking wet, terrified people showing up on the beach every day.”
wounds, stomach viruses, and hypertension; providing prenatal care to pregnant women; entertaining children and cleaning — whatever needed to be done. “There was nonstop need,” Frenzen says. After finishing their shift, they’d go down to the shoreline, where boats packed with refugees were coming in from Turkey. “Imagine 3,000 soaking wet, terrified people showing up on the beach every day,” Frenzen says. “We’d help get them into dry clothes, hand out blankets and juice boxes for the kids, and make sure there were no immediate medical problems.” Then the volunteers would load the refugees onto United Nations buses that, at the time, were running shuttles between the beaches and the Moria camp. Much of the volunteer work on Lesbos was nonmedical, Frenzen says; in other words, anyone could do it. Besides helping refugees as they came ashore, volunteers collected all the wet clothes and life jackets left behind on the beaches, working with small grass-roots groups in Greece that “are pouring their heart and soul into their work,” according to Frenzen. After eight days on Lesbos, Frenzen returned home to her young son and her job, to the “guilt of privilege” she says is the byproduct of doing service work. She remains connected through email and social media with other volunteers who are still working on the island, and hears stories like that of a 5-year-old girl who died of hypothermia just before her boat made it to shore. “Every single one of us has the opportunity to choose compassion when it comes to this crisis,” Frenzen says. She hears about boats coming ashore without any volunteers or aid workers available to meet them. “Some of the refugees don’t even know where they are. They just pick up their children, find the nearest road, and start walking.” [NMH]
BRIGHT LIGHT
REVIVING THE VILLAGE VOICE When Peter Barbey ’76 (below) heard The Village Voice was for sale last year, it took him about five minutes to decide to buy it. Three reasons. First, he could afford it: His family owns The North Face, Timberland, and Lee Jeans. Second, as CEO of the Reading Eagle in Pennsylvania, Barbey knows publishing. He had a hunch he could breathe life back into the iconic Voice, which had tumbled far from its peak in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. Finally — perhaps most important — he’d been a fan of the weekly ever since he’d begun reading it as a teenager at NMH, as he told students during a visit to campus in April. “I was a Boston kid, and The Voice was a window into a world where I wished I was,” Barbey says. Now he wants to restore The Voice to what he sees as its rightful place in American journalism. “It’s an amazing historical newspaper, but it’s also a wonderful journalistic brand,” he says. “I want to take it forward, while also recapturing some of its old zeitgeist — the political voice, the strong defense of arts and culture. I want it to do more than just tell people, ‘Hey, here’s a great show.’” Soon after Barbey bought The Voice last October, the calls came in from business reporters, not just those in New York but also from some in Milan and London. “It was heartening to realize, ‘Wow, people really do care about The Voice.’ It’s like a bonsai tree that’s been cultivated over many years, and it has a lot of meaning to a lot of people,” he says. In January, Barbey brought back former Voice editor-in-chief Will Bourne ’83 (they realized their NMH connection during the job interview), and is shoring up the business end of the paper. He’s convinced his vision of a print and digital publication can succeed in a media world dominated by entities such as BuzzFeed and Gawker. “There are two camps in publishing today,” Barbey says. “One says that content is king, that good writing is good writing. The other claims that the digital revolution is forever altering the landscape of thought, that everything’s got to be a few hundred words or less and adaptable to an app. I love technology, and I’m an early adopter, but most of all, I like good writing. I like places where people are batting around really interesting ideas. I think publications like The Voice have a big role to play.” [NMH]
PH O TO : G L E N N M I N S H A L L
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