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Two Poems: July 26th Update

Stephanie Fong, Zachary Fazio, Landis Masnor, and Renee Meschi are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Summer Internship Program.

 They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.  This post is from Landis Masnor who is interning with CLM, an NGO dedicated to eradicating extreme poverty in central Haiti.

Magical Powers Haiku

I have the power to end
Haitian baby tears
Must be something in my eyes

I have found that I am capable of temporarily ending the suffering of Haitian infants by gazing into their eyes.  This phenomenon was first noticed early on during my internship.  It has since been used without fail on many occasions.  

This photo took an hour to upload.

The Guilty Cat

When the cat eats the chicken
The farmer loses profit

When the farmer eats the cat
He cuts his losses

When I am the farmer’s guest
I participate in country justice

 

And now for something silly...

Stephanie Fong, Zachary Fazio, Landis Masnor, and Renee Meschi are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Summer Internship Program.  They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.  

This post is from Renee Meschi, who is studying international business and entomology at the Montezuma Bed & Breakfast and Butterfly Garden in Costa Rica.

Almost everything is open in Costa Rica; usually only the sleeping quarters are enclosed in four walls, and even then the windows (though screened) are usually open. This means we live alongside a lot of wildlife, and therefore get to observe nature up close and personal.

There is a particular species of butterfly that frequents the office in which I work. They have amazing eyes, and I am only just now beginning to understand how they see. I will post more on that later, but for now, check out this butterfly sitting on my shirt, who intently maintains eye contact no matter what!

 

 

Arthropods are our friends :-)

 

Stephanie Fong, Zachary Fazio, Landis Masnor, and Renee Meschi are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Summer Internship Program.  They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.  

This post is from Renee Meschi, who is studying entomology and international business at the Montezuma Bed & Breakfast and Butterfly Garden in Costa Rica.

On May21st, I arrived in Montezuma around 10pm after an entire day of travel via taxi, boat, bus and van from the San Jose airport.

"How are you with bugs?" asked Josh, my internship coordinator.
"Um...mind over matter, really" I answered hesitantly.
"Good." he responded.

Little did I know how much "matter" my mind would have to overcome.

Fast forward an hour. I am standing in the middle of the common area, and around me are three hand-sized tarantulas. They are reacting to my movement, and they have me cornered. There is one stark light bulb hanging above my head. Thunder rumbles in the distance, and it starts to rain. The power dips, and the light flickers. My heart pounds, and my stomach lurches as I break out into a cold sweat.

In the immense darkness, just outside of the circle of light in which I stand, I see another tarantula starting to scale the wall.

I hear a chuckle behind me.

Josh warned me that the geckos here make a sound akin to laughter, and that they have marvelously comedic timing.  "I know, I know...." I say to the gecko, painfully aware of my gringa-lack of jungle "street cred."

My sleeping bunk is pressed to a wall and a window with a broken screen. Johan, my roommate, said he's only seen a tarantula in the room once. He, however, goes to bed by 10pm and prefers to sleep in complete, pitch-black darkness. He says he is a deep sleeper, and I wager that even if they were crawling all over him and the walls, he would not be aware of it.

I decided right then and there that I would stay where I was, with all of the tarantulas in view, until day broke. I decided that as soon as the sun came up, I would tell my internship advisor that I simply could not get through this without copious amounts of Xanax, and that I was going to catch the first plane back to the US. I started to imagine how I would deal with the shame of backing out of the internship. I decided I would pay back all of the money I had received, and requesting that it be distributed to the other three Kemper Grant winners. Feeling defeated, I sat there with the spiders.

The treeline started to become visible; morning was coming. One by one, they retreated back into the darkness. Finally, it was just me and the first one I saw. Extremely exhausted after a day of particularly difficult travel, I realized that the spiders did not seem so terrifying after a while. In fact, their movements seems really cautious and gentle. I started to see beauty in them. Finally, I became bored and went back up to my room and went to sleep.

Fast forward two months.

I am sitting in the same common area, enjoying all of the gigantic bug-visitors we get clustered on the ceiling every night. On my shoulder is a praying mantis getting ready to molt. On my computer screen sits a lime green stink bug. On my hand is a jumping spider, peering up at me cuiously with two cartoonlike black orb-eyes. In the distance, just beyond the edges of the light, I see a shadow. It is a large, hand-sized tarantula.

My first instinct is to race over towards it, approaching it from behind so it does not run away. I bring a tupperware container, and coax it inside, gently pushing with the lid. I am astounded at the utter lack of fear I have; it seems all of the fear has been channeled to deep, insatiable curiousity.

I take the spider back into the light, and start a photo session (see the picture at the top of this blog post). I immediately upload the photos online and try to identify the species. My roommate pulls the legs off of a cricket and finds a dead gecko, giving both to the tarantula to eat. We officially have a sort of 'pet.'

This transformation has been amazing, for me. I expected to find cultural divides and gaps and clashing worldviews, but the largest gap I found was not between cultures, but between humans and arthropods. To truly live with nature, be ecologically friendly and over all "walk our talk" where "being green" is concerned, we have to accept the presence of arthropods in our space. Beyond acceptance, we must appreciate them, as well, as they make up the vast majority of life forms on our planet, and are far more necessary than we are to the ecosphere.

Which brings me to my Youtube video, and its caption: "Touch a bug...you won't regret it!" :-D Needless to say, my internship has taken a turn towards biology and namely entomology. Enjoy!

 

ShimerBlog2011.SF3, or Let Me Tell You About What I Do

Stephanie Fong, Zachary Fazio, Landis Masnor, and Renee Meschi are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Summer Internship Program.  They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.  

This post is from Stephanie Fong who is interning with the Women and Leadership Archives.

So, you might be wondering what I've been up to.  What is an archives, and what does one do there?

Well, let me tell you.

At the most basic level, an archives is a place where historical records are located.  The Women and Leadership Archives (WLA) where I work collects and maintains the records of organizations and papers of individuals that relate to feminism and women's leadership (you can see the inventory of collections here and browse by subject here). 

In addition to accepting materials from donor-initiated gifts, the Director actively solicits records and papers in the interest of preserving valuable historical documents that might otherwise be thrown away or lost.  It is the mission of the WLA to provide academic researchers and the public with the kinds of materials that are underrepresented elsewhere, like the records of a grassroots feminist group or the papers of a local business owner.  Many of the collections housed in our archives connect directly to Mundelein College, the last all-women's college in Illinois that Loyola absorbed in 1991, and the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM), the religious community that conducted the college from its founding to its close.  The papers of activists, artists, and educators also make up a large part of the collection, as well as the records of organizations dedicated to serving women.  

The WLA is small, but growing, which is one of the reasons I like interning there.  Since I started mid-May, I've had the opportunity to work on many different kinds of projects, from processing small collections to building online exhibits, to rearranging office furniture.

What follows is a summary of what I've done so far, in roughly chronological order:

1. Dealt with the madonnas.  One of the very first projects I tackled was a discards issue.  The WLA a while back received boxes of displaced madonnas that had been cleaned out of a building on campus during a remodelling project. As interesting as some of the statues were, they were not appropriate for the WLA collection so we needed to find a new home for them.  They eventually found a place at the Gannon Center (the second floor of the building I work in) and in a different, non-archives storage room.                          
2. Assisted with a donation pick-up.  The Director and I went to Lincoln Park to pick up a gift from a Mundelein alumna.  The donation turned out to be a scrapbook with photographs and other souvenirs from her school days (I believe she attended Mundelein in the 60s).  We talked with her for a while and she shared some of her memories with us.  It was great.           
3. Processed my first collection!  I received a banker box filled with the organizational records of Women & Children First, a feminist bookstore in Chicago, and, after sorting through the papers for sensitive, duplicate, or potentially hazardous materials, I took the basic steps to preserve documents (unfolding things, removing staples, etc.), rehoused papers and photographs into their respective types of folders (their pH levels differ to prevent deterioration of the different materials), placed oversized materials like posters into an oversized box, prepared digital materials for research access, organized everything, and now it's researcher-ready!  I enjoy processing, but I'm happy to be working in an archives where I can do other things because typically, processing is all that archives interns ever do. 
4. Added photographs to the ever-growing Mundelein College Photograph Collection.  I scanned dozens of photos, mostly of College-sponsored visitor events, and learned how to use a digital management software called CONTENTdm to upload the images with descriptions, copyright, and other information.  The photo below is an example of the photos I added which you will soon be able to view online.         
   
5. Helped curate a book collection.  There is a small case in the Gannon Center with books, much of which would be classified as women's studies literature, that might be donated to charity at the end of the summer. For a short period of time, I did research using WorldCat Local to identify rare and out of print editions within that collection that are not currently circulating in the Loyola library system.  In the next few weeks, the identified books might be added to the WLA monograph collection.
6. Shifted and assessed the entire collection.  This project demanded the participation of everyone on staff for more than a week and was a much more physical project than you might expect.  The literal archives on the lower level had been (unauthorizedly) reorganized about a year ago and wasn't meeting the needs of the collection very well, so it was time for something new.  The week of June 6-10, we closed the reading room and spent our days in the stacks on the lower level, first moving everything around and then cross-checking each collection's content against the collection's finding aid in order to identify potential issues.  All archives carry out assessments on parts of their collections periodically, but because of our small size, we were able to assess everything.  During this process, I learned about the different approaches to collection management.  At first I was surprised by how certain approaches to organization can differ so much, but it makes a lot of sense; the overall collection's uniqueness should inform how it's organized, the same as an individual collection.  After we completed the shift and the collection assessment, we updated the master inventory location guide and started fixing the collection problems identified (e.g. reboxing materials, fixing labels, removing broken material, reprocessing poorly organized collections, etc.).  Yes it was tedious at times, and yes, it will be a long time, long after I complete my internship, before all the collection problems will be addressed in full, but it's good to know about the existing issues so they can be resolved and the overall health of the collection can be improved.  
7. Rearranged the third floor furniture.  In the spirit of the collection shift, we decided to rearrange the furniture to improve work flow and reading room ambiance.  It worked!
8. Redesigned templates and wrote technical instructions.  So, after processing a collection, one of the last things we do at the WLA is create folder and box labels.  Some archives have an adhesive-free policy and instead label directly on folders and boxes with pencil, but because we don't own anything extremely old or delicate--the very oldest objects in the collection are less than 150 years old--we use foil-backed labels, the least corrosive kind, to keep our collections organized.  The process for creating labels using the Microsoft Office Suite can get complicated, so years ago someone at the WLA created templates and wrote up accompanying instructions. However, the documents were difficult to use and full of attitude, so I created new templates and significantly edited the instructions to make them clearer.  Making labels, a process that used to take 20 minutes or more, now takes less than 10.
9. Processed another small collection.  I processed the papers of Lindsay Obermeyer, an artist and educator who lives in Chicago.  I really enjoyed working with these materials, which included slides and exhibit cards, and finished this collection so much faster than my first!
10. I am currently working on building an online exhibit from scratch that will join these once complete.  I have been carefully selecting, scanning and uploading photographs, programs, playbills, yearbooks, prayer cards, newspaper clippings, and many other objects from the Immaculata High School collection into CONTENTdm.  Immaculata was a Catholic, all-girls high school in operation under the direction of the BVMs from 1921-1981.  You can still visit the campus buildings, which belong to the American Islamic College, at Irving Park and Marine Drive in Chicago.  I'll post the link when the exhibit goes up!

 

What I've Learned

Stephanie Fong, Zachary Fazio, Landis Masnor, and Renee Meschi are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Summer Internship Program.  They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

    Since beginning my internship, the question I've been asked the most is: " Where is the bathroom?" F.Y.I., on the second floor of City Hall, when you are walking towards the Aldermanic offices, the men's room is to the right towards the Council Chambers, and the women's room is to the left. The problem is that there are no visible signs. I've lobbied to have larger, more visible placards installed, but my efforts have been in vain.

The question I've been asked the most after the aforementioned question is: "What have you learned?" the most honest answer I have is, I have a lot to learn. To be able to draft legislation, or develop policy and have said legislation passed, takes a lifetime of amassing knowledge in various fields, i.e. mathematics, rhetoric, finance, history, etc.  Once you are able to develop sound policy, you must be able to influence other people to make them believe that your policy is beneficial to a majority of the people. I'm reminded of a phrase coined by Tip O'Neill, the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives:  "All politics is local." O'Neill had introduced a $1-billion jobs bill in the House of Representatives. House Republican Leader Robert H. Michel, whose district encompassed Peoria, Illinois, was vehemently opposed to the bill. So, Tip O'neill took his message directly to the people of Peoria. In a taped broadcast, O'Neill argued that the people of Peoria would benefit from the infrastructure improvements included in the bill.

I've been able to see how Tip O'Neill's wise words are of the utmost importance while watching the politicking of  Chicago's City Council. I'd even attempt to take his phrase a bit further and say that all politics is personal. Let's say you're an Alderman who voted against one of the Mayor's appointments to be Commissioner of X. It's well within your implied powers, as an Alderman, to do so. However, lets say the Mayor remembers your antagonistic vote, so he decides to run a candidate against you in the next election cycle. This can make your life very difficult, because now you have to raise more money, you have to campaign harder, and your voting record is going to be under scrutiny, which will require you to be on the defensive more often than you would like to be. These are but a few of a plethora of other problems that can arise from being on the Mayor's bad side. This sort of situation arises all the time. I will leave you with a recent example:    http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/6019230-418/moreno-mayoral-aide-made-threats-before-choi-hearing.html

Week in Kada, Micro Post

Stephanie Fong, Zachary Fazio, Landis Masnor, and Renee Meschi are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Summer Internship Program.    They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Landis Masnor who is interning with CLM, an NGO dedicated to eradicating extreme poverty in central Haiti.

I recently travelled to a CLM base in a town called Kada located in Tit Montay.  I spent about 5 days there entering data (400 files) from CLM’s poverty scorecard, Kat Evalyasyon, into a program on my computer.  CLM uses the poverty scorecard to illustrate a household's poverty prior to working with CLM.  Kat Evalyasyon asks questions about the condition of the members house, what their toilet situation is like, where their income/ food comes from, and how many profitable animals they own.  This information is initially used to ensure that candidates qualify for CLM, that they’re the poorest of the poor.  The data can be used secondarily as a way to quantitatively measure how members’ financial and food security has strengthened. 

Attempting to cut down extra weight added by my laptop and imagining a week of Kreyol data entry as less than photogenic, I decided to leave my camera in Sodo.   Huge mistake.   I may as well have ridden that donkey into the promised land.

I found a partially constructed school, a tin roof with benches and a desk, under which I worked throughout the week.  My office space had no walls and it looked out on to a broad green hill, thick with tall grass and limestone outcroppings.  Restricted by daylight, I began work early and could often watch the moon sink into the ridge of the peak.  To my left was a view of the entire mountain valley, the plain, and the river I crossed to get there.  Last summer I was doing data entry also, but inside of an air conditioned cubicle for a gulf coast oil company.  Data entry is never fun but my week in Kada had a special blend of peaceful contemplation, familiar computer-screen boredom, and utter enchantment.  

The rain came every afternoon as the temperature began to cool.  I enjoyed working in the rain with the tin roof over my head.  Afterwards the water vapor from the valley rolls up the mountain and over the peak. 

During the morning return trip I walked into a cloud.

I will post photos (taken with my camera and laptop) here when I have the bandwidth to do so.

My Ass- A Micro Post

"Stephanie Fong, Zachary Fazio, Landis Masnor, and Renee Meschi are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Summer Internship Program.  They regularly post updates about their internship experiences.

This post is from Landis Masnor who is interning with CLM, an NGO dedicated to eradicating extreme poverty in central Haiti." 

You have a lot of time to think when you’re riding on the back of an ass.  I have always found it easier to think deeply while riding on a bike, car, the lawn mower.  The ass is new one, but it worked just fine.  I should admit, however, that the ass I received was the most unruly of all three asses my party rode into the mountains.  Although he carried close to 300lbs, myself included, he trotted quickly, butting the other mules out of the way, until he came to the lead, where he slowed his pace considerably and routinely grazed at leisure.  

His unruly nature dictated not only his speed, but his path.  Where the other donkeys would proceed up a smooth path as directed, my ass chose to pioneer a new way, his own way.  Indeed a free, entreprenureal spirit is not to be desired in an ass.  When his newly forged route brought problems, like when we approached a large break in the rock filled with sludge, rather than rejoin the group and admit their superior foresight, like we all thought he would, he dared to maintain his autonomous flare, thinking  to himself, “I’m gonna jump it.’ 

A snapshot of that moment would reveal my panick stricken face beginning to fill with a fearful kind of joy and confusion.  My shoulders are beginning to rise, my hands letting go of the rope.  It’s almost as if the rodeo in my blood is finally getting its chance.  But in this moment, before we make it over the gap, I understand the depth of the dire hilarity in which I'm prancing.  I’m in the middle of rural, mountainous Haiti.  I have no idea where I am or where I’m going.  I don’t even know how long of a hike it is and my arms are turning Coca-Cola Red.  The people I’m with, we’ve just met.  No one told me how to ride the donkey and now we’re doing tricks.

After touchdown, I recall the Kemper lunch at the Pritzer Club on the IIT campus where the four interns were briefed on networking techniques.  I now wonder, as respectfully as possible, if that wasn’t a total waste of time for everyone there (excepting Zack Fazio. Go-get-um Zack!).  

 

Jungle Adventures...aka My Walk to Work

Stephanie Fong, Zachary Fazio, Landis Masnor, and Renee Meschi are Shimer students participating in the Shimer Summer Internship Program.  They regularly post updates about their internship experience. 

 This post is from Renee Meschi, who is interning at Montezuma Gardens Bed & Breakfast and Butterfly Garden in Costa Rica, and because of music licensing issues, you may need to watch it directly in YouTube.