A New Issue (plus a facelift for the blog)

I know what you’re thinking: “Did you guys fall off the face of the Earth?”
 
So here’s the thing. I decided one day to try out my newfound fly fishing skills on the open ocean — drove out to Oxnard and boarded one of those deep sea fishing charter boats, skeptical of the potential efficacy of the contents of my fly box. I’d been standing out on deck casting for quite a while, the heaviness in my right arm pacified only by the immense serenity of the Pacific off the Channel Islands coast, when, suddenly, something bit. I hurried to pull the slack from the line and arrange my rod at the angle once demonstrated by my instructor, but my lack of upper-body strength proved a severe disadvantage in my battle with the marine creature below. Next thing I knew, I’d been pulled into the water’s salty embrace. I flailed and attempted to call for help, but struggled to stay afloat, engulfed by my fear of such situations. Just as I had resigned myself to an unexpected ocean burial, I saw an enormous dark shadow looming in the water below me. Then, the improbable happened. I was swallowed by a sperm whale.
 
After managing to avoid the monster’s prehistoric jaws, by some anatomical miracle, I stumbled upon a cavern within the whale’s body functioning as an air pocket. I pulled the smartphone from my soaked jeans only to find it rendered useless, surprising given the droid’s impressive track record with submersion. So I sat in my dark, unpleasant grotto, listening helplessly to the sounds of the underwater life beyond my flesh container.
 
Well, after what felt like years, I perceived a change in pressure, followed shortly by a bumpy ride to a standstill. Turns out my giant odontocete friend had had a run-in with a ship just prior to having me for lunch and was well on his way to becoming a giant odontocete corpse. (Collisions with ships are among the greatest threats to this threatened species’ population.) Once it occurred to me that the vital organ network with which I was surrounded had failed and that we’d been washed ashore, I began the slimy expedition back to terrestrial life. Needless to say, onlookers were overtaken with surprise and horror as I crawled out of the dead whale’s mouth, and more than one offered to return me to the warm clasp of the San Fernando Valley.
 
And, you see, the trauma of this experience underlies the delay in Issue 42’s release.*
 
PDFs are available for download from the website. Print copies will be available throughout the Dartmouth campus beginning around Jan. 10; they can also be requested for delivery via mail, free of charge. As the academic term begins, keep an eye out for new blog posts (or subscribe in the sidebar and we’ll do it for you). Happy new year, and safe travels for those of you heading back to campus.
 


— Grace


*not a true story

Chinese Night Market at Dartmouth

By Jane Zhang

 

 

The Dartmouth Chinese Culture Society hosted its annual Legacies event, celebrating Chinese culture and bringing together students and members of the local community. The theme of the event was “night market,” reflecting the bustling street life of contemporary China. During the evening’s festivities, the Chinese Dance Troupe was showcased, performing Tibetan, water sleeve, and sword dancing to the show tunes of a Chinese television drama, gracefully merge the traditional with the more contemporary. 

In addition to the dance performance, various “street booths” had been set up. Each booth featured various Chinese treats. I came upon bubble tea, White Rabbit creamy candies, dumplings, and fish balls. Of course, there was no bubble tea left by the time I had gotten to the booth.


A group of students were playing Mahjong, engaging in traditional Chinese gambling. It brought a festive feeling to the evening, similar to the atmosphere in Chinese neighborhoods when neighbors get together to play games after dinner.

A few kids from the Upper Valley had fun writing Chinese calligraphy. Chinese calligraphy is taught in schools in China. Quite a few Dartmouth students kept venturing back to the calligraphy table, writing jokes and comparing their calligraphy skills.

It was nice to speak Chinese and to hear friends speaking Chinese. Of course, as college students, the catered food was the big attraction that got us to venture through the cold weather to the student center. But we didn’t simply stay for the food. We stayed for the company.

West African Cuisine

By Jane Zhang

Last Saturday night, I sneaked into the West African Cuisine class in McCulloch International Residence, taught by the lovely Baaba. I thought I stumbled into food heaven. I looked inside their trash can, and I have to say, I was impressed—plantain peels, burnt rice, yam skins. Baaba, who is from Ghana, though has lived in the U.S. for a while, was teaching peers to make spinach stew.

Spinach stew consists of a primary ingredient that, excuse my ignorance, I had never heard of before: palm oil. Palm oil is actually widely used for cooking in West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Brazil. For cooking enthusiasts, the rest of the ingredients were bouillon cubes, tomato paste, diced onions, diced green pepper, diced garlic, and smoked turkey.
While the stew was simmering, students in the class patiently peeled plantains and yams using knives. The plantains and yams were cooked in water and salt.
Then, mushrooms and spinach were heated in a pot before combining with the rest of the stew.
Other students opened containers, happy to discover that the leftovers smelled just as good. I had never seen so much food in a dorm kitchen at Dartmouth before. My mouth was watering from just looking at all of the food scattered throughout the kitchen. Such a gluttonous person as me really shouldn’t be covering food events.
Overall, it was a wonderfully lighthearted atmosphere. We drank Malta Goya, though I wasn’t such a big fan of the syrupy texture. Unfortunately, I had to leave before the food was ready, but I’m sure everyone who stuck around got to eat several helpings and go home with new recipes and plenty of leftovers!

The Other Side of War: A Lecture by Zainab Salbi

By Tausif Noor
Courtesy of The Economist


To summarize British journalist Anthony Loyd, the event of war can be regarded as the final frontier of mankind. That is to say, once man has established civilizations and settlements and a system of order to control these civilizations, he seeks to acquire more territory and resources through conquest. This realist notion of the mechanisms by which war is undertaken has been propagated and contested, but its pragmatism neglects the more human dimensions of violence. Zainab Salbi, founder of Women for Women International, has made it her duty to face the rippling effects of violence that touch the lives of ordinary citizens, in particular women and children. The nonprofit humanitarian organization, founded in 1993, works with women in eight war-ravaged nations in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Through a one-year training program, the organization give women access to knowledge about their rights and resources to establish their own agency and independence from domestic violence and economic disadvantages. Thus, the organization centers on sustainable development. Its goal is to facilitate a process whereby women can stand on their own feet and establish businesses.


Salbi’s Filene Hall discussion stressed the importance of approaching humanitarian aid and development through a system of mutual respect and empathy. Inspired by her meeting with the Dalai Lama, Salbi stresses that in order to help others, you must respect them. In the words of the Dalai Lama himself, “If you can’t respect those you are serving, better not to serve at all.” In her experiences working with rape victims in Bosnia and Iraq, Zalbi has learned that approaching situations with the intent of being a savior or a completely knowledgeable human being is inherently flawed. In order to serve, one must accept that privilege does not create the full picture of knowledge and ability. She stresses that most of the time, the people whom humanitarians are serving know the solutions to their problems and simply need help realizing these solutions. She relates an anecdote of how a woman from Bosnia wanted a microcredit loan in order to start a chicken farm. While Salbi was able to calculate the costs of maintaining the farm and benefits, she did not know how many eggs a chicken laid in a day. When she asked the Bosnian woman this question, she was met with a look of incredulity. How could this woman expect to help in a meaningful way when she didn’t have even basic knowledge that everyone in the community would? Salbi states that what she has learned from such humanitarian missions is that you must approach situations with an open mind and seriously take into considerations the knowledge that the people in the community already possess.


In order to take the advice that Salbi so urgently stresses, one must embrace the importance of personal development and personal commitment. Having an outlook of openness, and having the conviction that one can learn from others increases the likelihood that those whom one is serving will tell their stories. This is at the heart of Zainab Salbi’s discussion. For Salbi, who is a refugee and survivor of rape, personal narratives are the key to understanding development. She has documented the narratives of women from Southern Sudan, Congo, Iraq and a host of other spaces and collected them in the hopes that other women can live free from fear and believe in their own ability to better their lives. She urges that we cannot conflate the material benefits, like food and money and jobs, with sympathy. When she asked a Rwandan woman who had suffered from hunger and rape during the years of genocide what women truly want, what the agent of change truly could be, the answer was both simple and powerful: all women want is inspiration.


What can we take away from this simple story is that humanitarian efforts are much more complex than we often realize. Though structural adjustment programs from multilateral corporations and microfinance endeavors are implemented to assuage the flawed top-down approaches of development, there is much more to be said about the ethical and philosophical implications of aid. From the perspective of a feminist, war is brutal in a gendered manner: though the front lines are led by men who enact the actual violence, women play an equally significant role in maintaining the home and ensuring that there is relative stability for children. When women are excluded from the negotiations of a war’s aftermath, it becomes impossible to achieve peace in the midst of the destroyed, chaotic zone. And if Salbi stresses the importance of personal commitment and openness in addressing humanitarian aid, she calls us also to consider the human aspect of women and their agency and significance in international crises. 

Brown at the Big Green

By Alison Flint

Courtesy of The Dartmouth

The former Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Gordon Brown, came to Dartmouth College on Tuesday afternoon to give a speech on global economics. Cook Auditorium was packed; Dartmouth’s weak attempt to deter spectators did not stop dozens of students from sitting on the floor and in the auditorium’s doorways. I was still nervously counting the fire exits when our own Carol Folt introduced the Right Honourable “Mr. Brown.” I had seen Brown earlier that day. He had been walking with President Jim Kim and they both seemed to be having a good time. They were laughing, although the two men trailing them weren’t (bodyguards?). At the lecture, Brown seemed to be just as jovial as before, kicking out a few jokes before commencing with anything of the economical sort.


The substance of the lecture was a reminder of what the world economy looks like after the financial crisis of 2008 and vague recommendations of what we should be looking towards for the future. Brown described the world of today as a strange limbo where 60% of manufacturing is in the East and 60% of consumption is in the West, and he gave an estimate of ten years before the numbers are geographically balanced. I think we all know this, and I would even guess that the transfer of consumerism would occur a bit earlier. His main point on this subject was that there will be vague opportunities as this transition is made and that an Asian middle class is growing that businesses can take advantage of.  Not only would clever businesses prosper but the economy would recover faster. The only thing in the way of a full recovery from 2008 is a lack of confidence to invest in the East, which we should face, according to Brown, by forming “trade agreements.” What kind of agreements, Brown did not go into great detail, but he also pushed for agreements on environmental progress.


Brown bounced from story to story, loosely connecting them with subject matter, but the apparent theme of the afternoon was interdependency. The wave of new leadership across Europe comes from the people’s impatience with the slow economy, but the slow economy comes from people who think the issue can be solved nationally. Gordon Brown is explaining this to the room, and it’s true, but unoriginal. I wanted to know what he thought was needed to get every nation to approve of a plan. As a self-admitted slippery politician, he would probably say cooperation. Oh, Gordon Brown, you know what I meant.


I’m sorry, Right Honourable Dr. James Gordon Brown, but I would’ve liked the details. I suppose it’s obligatory for an hour lecture to leave me unsatisfied, but I felt that Brown only skimmed the top of what could have been brought up. As a politician he probably saves his controversial talk for cameras. Or should I say Cameron? Sorry, bad pun. But he knows that his audience has been told this lecture before. The difference is that Gordon Brown is saying the words and he’s throwing in jokes. I don’t mean to be overly critical, I was in awe of his ease with speech and the crowd, but he could have given us more to think about.


Admittedly, he tried to. He talked about places in Africa where there are no schools or funds for education and how developed countries should seize the opportunity to invest in human capital. I agree completely. Used correctly, the world has the resources to make everyone everywhere smarter and healthier. This dilemma is as old as humankind and in a way, although I was hoping for more, it’s nice that Gordon Brown is reminding his audiences of its presence. He ended his speech with a Robert Frost allegory, highlighting decision-making and destiny, which was cheesy but in a charming way. Overall, the former prime minister was a blur of cordial anecdotes and good intentions, leaving me and 350 others unfulfilled but entertained.

Witness to History

By Grace Afsari-Mamagani



As the lights dimmed in Filene Auditorium on Wednesday afternoon, photojournalist James Nachtwey ’70 took community members in attendance on a visual and emotional journey. Influenced by images from Vietnam and the civil rights movement during the 1960s, Nachtwey said he began to consider the potential of photography and media to change the course of history and engrain pictures within a cultural collective consciousness.


“At its best, journalism is social intervention,” he said. Journalism, and powerful photography in particular, puts a human face to the abstract issues negotiated by world leaders; documentary photography interprets the stories of citizens on the ground, who feel the real and daily impact of the implications of policy. Photography, according to Nachtwey, is not the end in itself, but a means to the end, a tool for social awareness and tangible results.


Nachtwey — whose first book, Deeds of War, was published in 1989 — began his career as a war photographer in Ireland, documenting the everyday battlefield of Belfast. From there, he went on to photograph soldiers fighting the Central American proxy wars resulting from Cold War politics, car bombers destroying Lebanon in the heat of civil war, and the continued “conquest through… bible and sword” of European oligarchy in Guatemala. When the Berlin Wall fell, he traveled to Romania to document the AIDS epidemic in orphanages, bribing officials in the country with cigarettes, chocolate, and bottles of brandy, he said. “What I witnessed in Romania was nothing less than a crime against humanity,” he explained, his work motivated essentially by the hope that the world would respond.


His second book, Inferno, is a chronicle of crimes against humanity. In the case of his coverage of Somalia, the New York Times ran the story on the front page; the following day “the phones were ringing off the hook with people wanting to know how they could help… I believe that people will care if journalists will give them something to care about.” In the wake of Nachtwey’s photographs, the U.S. government, U.K. print media, and soon the entire world seemed to be paying attention: the UN came to the rescue, and the largest-ever International Red Cross mission saved approximately 1.5 million lives. 

“That’s the power of the press,” he said.


Nachtwey photographed a range of other humanitarian crises, from southern Sudan to Chechnya to Rwanda (the last of which, in the immediate aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s election in South Africa, was akin to “taking the express elevator to hell”).  He traveled to Kabul at the end of the Afghan war, was assigned to an American platoon in Baghdad following 9/11, explored the field of military medicine for National Geographic, photographed hundreds dying of tuberculosis, and documented crime and punishment in America.


“Photographers go to the extreme edges of experience to show a mass audience things they can’t see for themselves,” he said. His craft, despite the horrors he encounters regularly, is one of empowerment, of retaining the dignity of subjects who have nothing left to lose but continue to fight for life; his art, he said, is one contingent upon the sense of right and wrong, an ability to identify with others, and a refusal to accept the unacceptable. For the international community, the war photography produced by Nacthwey constitutes an invaluable service. It compels organizations to offer aid, attracts attention to the horrors we would otherwise forget, and, ultimately, seems to convey some basic humanity. It offers a voice to the marginalized and oppressed and can enact real political change. And it operates under the finally humble reminder to the journalist — and to the individual in the vast immensity of time — that “the stories we work on are far bigger than we are.”

A Note from the Editor

Every term or two, a group of World Outlook staff and senior editors meets around a Haldeman Center conference room table. We’re usually equipped with a stack of folders and a Google Doc full of submissions we’ve received from the best and brightest at Dartmouth and at schools nationwide. The task before us requires careful consideration: we’ve read the documents that have flooded our email inbox, outlined their strengths and weaknesses, considered their logical fallacies and the clarity of their authors’ styles. Deciding which undergraduate work deserves publication seems to become more difficult with each journal we publish. 

The truth is, “international affairs” doesn’t always lend itself to a process of peer review. Whether traveling abroad for leisure, debating comparative politics in the classroom, or heading to a fusion restaurant for dinner, we are compelled daily to take on a “world outlook” and to situate ourselves within a broader community. 

In its mission statement, our organization echoes the words of late Dartmouth President John Sloan Dickey: 

“Today we use the term ‘the world’ with what amounts to brash familiarity. Too often in speaking of such things as the world food problem, the world health problem, world trade, world pace, and world government, we disregard the fact that ‘the world’ is a totality which in the domain of human problems constitutes the ultimate degree of magnitude and degree of complexity. That is a fact, yes; but another fact is that almost every large problem today is, in truth, a world problem.” 

Both “the world” and “international affairs” are fluid concepts, composite organisms built of  billions of individual stories. These stories — yours and mine — work synergistically. They produce discussion and change on local, national, and international levels. They fuel innovation and peace-building, but also conflict and anxiety. And they are always ultimately part of a whole that is becoming (perhaps) more whole over time, both cause and effect of a network that wants to teach us to be “global citizens.”  

Yes, we like commentary on international affairs to be well-researched and well-articulated, in neat .docx form complete with Chicago-style footnotes. But “the ultimate degree of magnitude and degree of complexity” is hard to trap within these confines, which don’t provide space for the tangents, tensions, or fervent debates that seem inherent to international affairs. It is with this understanding that we’ve sought to create an online forum. The experiences and opinions expressed here belong to their respective authors and are not necessarily representative of World Outlook as an organization: they are stories, individual but connected. We call on you to engage with us, and we hope to offer a new lens on familiar (and not-so-familiar) things. Welcome to the blog.