"All our friends thought we were crazy," says Vashti. "'That's something you do at the end of your career, not at the beginning,' they told us. It was very hard. We love Seattle. But there is work to be done at Pine Ridge. Pine Ridge is very lacking in amenities."
The enormity of Pine Ridge residents' needs is difficult for most Americans to comprehend. Some 45,000 Oglala Lakota Sioux people are scattered across a reservation that covers 4,200 square miles. Sixty percent of the people live below the poverty level. The average dwelling houses 17 people, and a third of the homes don't have running water or electricity. Life expectancy is the lowest in the nation--lower than any nation in the Western hemisphere except Haiti.
"I'm still incredulous about the plight of the people here," says Andy Hurst. "There's something fundamentally wrong with what continues to happen here. These people have really been forgotten."
Hurst, a family physician and TB control officer with the Indian Health Service (IHS), is one of only four full-time physicians at the IHS Hospital, which is capable providing both inpatient and outpatient care to all adults on the reservation. As if that weren't challenge enough, Hurst also donates nearly fifty hours a week to the National Association for American Indian Children and Elders (NAAICE), a nonprofit charity he and Vashti founded. The organization assists the tribe in obtaining necessities--food, diapers, firewood, clothing, and blankets. In the past year, it also found homes for 25 families, furnished a senior-care center, sponsored a day-care and foster-care program, and built a playground.
Recognizing Hurst's work, the UW recently honored him with its Medical Alumni Humanitarian Award. "A lot of people will go to a challenging place to help for a short time, a week or a month," says Cliff Sanderlin, director of the UW Medical Alumni Association, granter of the award. "How many would stay for six years?"
Hurst is humble in explaining his commitment to Pine Ridge. "Gaining trust comes very gradually, which would make leaving very difficult," he says. "Besides, I like the people. I just plain like them. They're not saints, but they are remarkable. I continue to be impressed by how resilient and tough they are. They've taught us a lot about forgiveness."
Hurst hopes that his recent UW award and other publicity will draw more attention to the crisis at Pine Ridge. "We know Americans will respond once they know of these tragic conditions," he says.
Some already have responded. After the Seattle Times ran a story in 1997 about the Hursts and their work with NAAICE, contributions poured in, ranging from $20 from a welfare mother to a $50,000 grant from Stone Gossard and the band Pearl Jam to support ongoing programs. Hurst is pleased with the donations but emphasizes that much more support is needed.
"These people need everything," he says. "There's no infrastructure at all. It still staggers me."
Experiencing Kosovo in Chaos
Letty Coffin (MA, Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, '96) has been immersed in crises of a different sort. As an intern for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development (a government agency), she spent six months in Bosnia following the war that tore Yugoslavia apart. Then she headed for Kosovo as a grant writer and project developer for World Vision--just as the country was on the verge of chaos.
"At that time in Kosovo, you had a low scale war going on between the Serb army and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)," recalls Coffin. "It was really quite tense. In Pristina, where I was living, people were pretty much off the street by 8:30 p.m., since most of the population was Albanian. They could be stopped and harrassed at night, maybe taken to jail."
Coffin's work with World Vision focused on distributing essential items--stoves, clothes, and food--to local citizens and repairing damaged homes. "Often that meant weatherproofing just one room in a home to provide insulation," says Coffin. "It didn't make sense to fix up whole houses, because you didn't know if they would be damaged again."
In February, when NATO bombing of Kosovo appeared imminent, Coffin and other foreign staff at World Vision were evacuated from the country. They returned when NATO talks were extended, only to leave again a month later--this time for good.
"In between those evacuations, it was hard to get things done," recalls Coffin. "Everything was up in the air. There was definitely a showdown coming up. But I don't think any of us really expected what happened to happen. It was our worst-case scenario."
Coffin and her colleagues were required to evacuate four days before the bombing started, along with most of the other NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Kosovo. But more than two-thirds of the World Vision staff were local and had to stay behind, causing Coffin great concern. "Once there are no NGOs there to witness anything, terrible things can happen," says Coffin. "And, as we now know, they did."
World Vision shifted operations to Skopje in Macedonia, which is a mere ten-minute drive from the border of Kosovo. Coffin and a friend drove to the border one day to witness the refugee situation firsthand. "Walking up the road, we went around the bend and all of a sudden ahead of us was a huge sea of people in a valley, in the no-man's land between the Yugoslav and Macedonian borders. The Macedonians weren't letting them in. I don't even know how to describe it."
World Vision soon determined that it could be more effective in Albania and relocated once again. "Day to day, everything would change," says Coffin of her time working in Albania. "We had to keep assessing what was going on. We were barely getting a handle on what we could do effectively when the majority of people began heading back to Kosovo."
Coffin was astounded by the mass return to Kosovo. "It really was a moving sight, watching them all head back up the road," she recalls. "They didn't care if they had anything to go back to. Everyone wanted to go back. They really are pulled to their land."
Coffin's six-month contract with World Vision ended soon after the Kosovars returned to their homeland. Coffin returned home too--to Seattle--and finally had time to absorb all that she had witnessed in the prior six months.
Will she head back to Kosovo? "I have to admit I don't know," she says. "A part of me wants to go back. I feel personally involved now. I have friends there. I feel drawn to it. But I haven't decided.
"I don't feel like I have a noble reason for doing what I've been doing," she adds. "I just think it is important to learn about the ways other people live. And if I can help along the way, that's great."
Building a Strong Region, Board by Board
Most of us are not willing--or able--to relocate as Coffin and the Hursts have. But there are plenty of worthy causes to support closer to home. Just ask Maggie Walker (BA, History, '74; BA, Communications, '87), whose list of volunteer activities runs the gamut from children's health to the arts to higher education.
Blame it on parenthood. Walker quit her job in the interior design business after the birth of her daughter but realized she missed working two years later. "I was ready to do something," she says. She started by volunteering for ARTFAIR SEATTLE, an event promoting the work of visual artists.
"A friend asked me to raise funds for the four regional museums involved in ARTFAIR," Walker recalls. "I ended up overseeing the non-profit portion of the event for the next five years."
During those years, Walker was in frequent contact with the staff of the UW's Henry Art Gallery. Impressed with her skills, Henry Gallery director Richard Andrews asked Walker to join the Henry's board; she is now the board president. Almost simultaneously, she joined the board of Seattle Children's Home, which provides services for children with serious mental health issues.
"I didn't really have expectations," explains Walker. "I just went into these things to learn something. I figure that the best way to find out about an organization is to throw yourself in and feel your way around." Before long, Walker had added more organizations to her list, including the Washington Women's Foundation and the Woodland Park Zoological Society, which seemed a perfect fit since her family spent "practially every Saturday afternoon at the zoo." She is now co-chair of the zoo board.
Walker has never been a volunteer in name only. When she joins a board, she rolls up her sleeves and gets to work. "I'm not interested in institutions sticking with the status quo," she says. "I'm more interested in institutions going through changes. That's where I feel I can make a contribution."
That's good news for the College of Arts and Sciences, which is in the midst of a major self-examination. Walker recently joined the College Board as well as the UW Foundation Board. "I'm a fanatic about the importance of an arts and sciences education," she explains. "If you know enough about certain basic ideas and you know how to write, you can do just about anything."
Walker agreed to join both boards because she is concerned about the University's future. "Right now the institution is at a turning point," she says. "It is facing a funding crisis. It needs to bring the private sector in to guarantee the excellence of the institution."
Walker knows a thing or two about encouraging private philanthropy. She and her husband Doug, president of Seattle software company WRQ, are among the founders of Social Venture Partners, a charitable foundation that pools donations from high-tech entrepreneurs to provide grants to nonprofits in the arts, social services, the environment, and education.
As for her personal involvement with nonprofits, Walker has no idea where she will direct her energies next. "It will be interesting to see where my participation takes me," she says. "Things just continue to open up if you are willing."
Encouraging the "Natural Philosopher" in Children
Like Walker, Jana Mohr-Lone (MA, PhD, Philosophy, '90, '96) followed a new path as a result of parenthood. In her case, the destination was K-12 schools. Her mission: to introduce students to philosophy. "When my oldest son was four, he started asking me questions that I recognized as deeply philosophical," recalls Mohr-Lone, a former attorney. "It reminded me that I was also asking questions like that at an early age."
That realization led Mohr-Lone to set up a program in her son's preschool. She met with the children each week, guiding and encouraging them to think philosophically. "It was just wonderful," she recalls. "We talked about things like what it means to be alive, and whether you can be someone's friend if he or she doesn't think of you as a friend. I started thinking about how philosophy could help school-age children develop their critical thinking and reasoning."
Mohr-Lone created a nonprofit organization, Northwest Center for Philosophy for Children, and explored possible approaches to introducing philosophy in the schools. "At the beginning, I thought a lot of the work would be workshops for teachers," she says, "but teachers are totally overloaded. So it seemed better to bring people already trained in philosophy to visit in class once or twice a week."
For the past three years, that's what she and a handful of fellow philosophers--including UW doctoral student David Shapiro--have done. The results, Mohr-Lone says, have been gratifying. "Teachers who observe our sessions say that they've seen students quite differently watching them be engaged in these discussions," she says.
Mohr-Lone recalls one child who had shown little academic promise in class but became animated--and demonstrated exceptional analytical skills--during the weekly philosophy discussions. "It changed the way the teacher and other students viewed him," she says.
One reason young people find the dialogues compelling is that there are no set answers to the questions being examined. Mohr-Lone describes the resulting discussions as "an intellectual adventure." She explains, "Students are encouraged to ask and construct relevant questions, to develop their own views and articulate their reasons for them, and to listen to and learn from one another. To put together a good theory, you need reason but you also really need to use your imagination. That can be exciting for kids."
What do children ask? That depends on their age. At a very young age, says Mohr-Lone, students are most interested in metaphysical questions like what it is to be alive. Older elementary school students often focus on questions of ethics, such as what makes something fair. From middle school onward, students frequently are interested in the difference between knowledge and belief. Whatever their age, philosophical questions are relevant to students' daily lives. And that, says Mohr-Lone, is what many adults fail to realize.
"The challenge has been to demystify philosophy," she says. "Some people are intimidated by the idea of philosophy. That would be distressing to Socrates and Plato. Philosophy is not separate from the world; it is a way of being in the world, of seeing possibilities for inquiry in the simplest things."
Recognizing that many parents do not know how to engage in a philosophical discussion with their children, Mohr-Lone has added another dimension to her work: parent workshops. Being able to talk philosophically "creates a new dimension in your relationship with your children," says Mohr-Lone. "There's a place where you are equal inquirers. That can be really interesting and fun for parents."
In the parent workshop, the leader and parents read a story that is philosophically suggestive and start discussing it--modelling what parents can do with their own children. "The key," explains Mohr-Lone, "is to develop an ear for where a story or a question might lead to a philosophical discussion."
Although Mohr-Lone is pleased with the progress her organization has made in the past three years--with sessions at 15 Seattle-area schools and more than a dozen parent workshops--she's now ready to expand the program to reach even more children. "One of my goals is to get more people with a philosophy background trained for this, because there has been a strong response," says Mohr-Lone. Is she at all surprised by the positive reaction from schools? Not really. "When you love something the way I love philosophy," explains Mohr-Lone, "you can't imagine how anyone wouldn't think this is the most wonderful thing."