Appalachia’s coalfields resemble the landscapes of dystopian science fiction. Each week, the explosive equivalent of a nuclear bomb is detonated in these mountains, leaving only black, jagged crags of upturned earth. The small communities surrounding these mining operations have suffered under corporate hegemony and oppression since the turn of the century; the region still struggles with overwhelming poverty, unsafe drinking water, astonishingly high levels of cancer and other respiratory and neurological conditions, as well as deep social tensions. Despite these problems there is hope to be found in the persistence and dedication of those struggling under coal rule. Dedicated activists continue to dismantle corporate hegemony through various non-violent tactics, making the Anti-Mountaintop Removal movement one of the strongest social movements in recent US history.

-By Nick Florko and Alexa Orndorff

Kayford Mountain, WV: Mountaintop removal sites scar the pristine landscape of Appalachia. With little regard for the diverse ecosystems throughout the region, coal companies detonate approximately four million pounds of explosives daily, exposing seams of coal hundreds of feet below mountain peaks. When the blasting is complete, the remaining rubble is dumped into neighboring valleys and streams — effectively destroying the ecosystems and poisoning the drinking water.

Signs like these litter mountaintop removal sites. They prevent coalfield residents from stepping foot on land that has been in their families for generations. The sign pictured above separates Larry Gibson from his family cemetery.

Sylvester, WV: Coalfield residents continually face the risk of disaster. Residents of Sylvester, WV live below the Brushy Fork Impoundment, the world’s largest coal slurry impoundment. Brushy Fork holds nearly nine billion gallons of toxic coal processing byproduct. With no emergency plan, the possible collapse of Brushy Fork spells disaster for those living in its shadow. Community coalitions, such as the Sludge Safety Project, continue to advocate against the creation of slurry impoundments through mass mobilizations and legislative lobbying.

Whitesville, WV: Signs allegedly reporting the safety of mining operations are often deceptive. The towns surrounding Whitesville, WV were forever changed in the wake of the Upper Big Branch disaster, which killed 29 miners on April 10, 2010. Despite numerous studies indicating that the disaster was caused by a failure to enforce federal mining safety regulations, only menial charges have been brought against the mine owner, Alpha Natural Resources (formerly Massey Energy).

Eolia, KY: Appalachians continue to fight back against the oppressive legacy of corporate control in the region. Coal companies utilized the “broad form deed” at the turn of the century to purchase the mineral rights of land — often by coercion or deceit. In modern day, these deeds, signed generations before, are used as the coal companies’ justification for surfact mining in and around private property. Kentucky Anti-MTR activists — Kentuckians for The Commonwealth — succeeded in banning the use of the “broad form deed” in 1985.

Twilight, WV: Large machines toil throughout the day, clearing debris and extracting coal from blast sites. This backhoe teeters just feet from the edge of a mountain, hundreds of feet above one of the few remaining homes in Twilight, WV — a town ruthlessly bought out by coal companies. The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition continues to raise money to buy one of the last remaining privately owned parcels of land in Twilight, in effect preventing coal companies from taking over the town.

Without a doubt, the skills students gain in AUSG and similar organizations are valuable for “real world” politics. Student Government can prepare individuals to be leaders and have meaningful discourse on controversial issues.

These skills are applicable to most workplace environments rather than to specific public service careers. Employers in many fields seek staff members that have developed skills like leadership, public communication and interpersonal interaction, all of which Student Government positions hone. Along with these marketable and valuable skills, participating in Student Government campaigns can foster more unexpected talents like managing one’s public image, which can prove useful across the job market

“I’d say Student Government helps kids to be leaders and that benefits their future regardless of their career,” Class of 2015 President Conor Siegel said.

Generally, students seem to be more interested in these broad skills and how Student Government makes them appear to employers, rather than whether it prepares them for a career in public service. As the workforce becomes more and more competitive, young people are feeling pressure to set themselves apart from the rest of the application pool. Any activity in organizations beyond the classroom can help provide that edge.

American University history professor Allan Lichtman says he believes the key is not the activity an individual is involved in, but the position they hold within that structure. According to Lichtman leadership is one of the key qualities employers are looking for.

“Any time you take a leadership position, that puts you out there,” Lichtman said.

However, being in Student Government and being captain of the swim team both show leadership. Students can demonstrate they have taken initiative, worked with a group and been responsible for others in many more venues than just Student Government, although Student Government is, without a doubt, a great place to do those things.

“I think SG helps prepare people to be members of local, state, or national governments, non-profits, businesses, you name it,” AU Student Government President Tim McBride said.

AU has already demonstrated its ability to help prepare an individual from Student Government to break into “big kid” politics. Sophomore Deon Jones served in his high school Student Government, then the Undergraduate Senate his freshman year at AU, and then went on to run for DC Neighborhood Advisory Commission, where he won a seat.

Certainly there are issues that Student Government does not address, both in campaigning and holding an elected office.

On Sunday, October 23, the Undergraduate Senate spent several minutes of the session debating policy related to the door of the Senate office being open. While the debate may not be worthwhile, it is eerily reminiscient to our current Congress.

But in all fairness, Student Government just does not cover all of the issues faced in traditional politics. AUSG does not debate the debt ceiling, national marriage legislation, social security or abortion.  Additionally students running for Undergraduate Senate do not have to worry about justifying large campaign donations, polling or phone banking.

It seems Student Government is not meant to perfectly approximate the wider government. They have different goals, different functions and a completely different constituency than any local or national governing body and are as unique in their organization as the schools and students they serve.

“When you’re campaigning for a high school or college campaign it is primarily directed toward students who share your views,” said Youth and Government President Jonathan McCreary. “You do not have to worry about broad policy.”

Student Government clearly does not mirror broader politics; rather it uses the components and structures of politics to complete both political and non-political goals within the AU community.
“At the end of the day, we aren’t a government, we’re a programming and advocacy organization,” McBride said.

“Ed Carr called,” she said. “He wants you to call him back as soon as possible.”

Ed Carr was the new Chairman of American University’s Board of Trustees, and trustees did not normally deal with university presidents directly. President Berendzen thought it was unusual but “[Ed] was new to the job, so I thought maybe he had a different approach.”

Berendzen returned the call. Ed asked him to come to his office in downtown Washington immediately.

Within the hour, Berendzen resigned as president of American University.

Berendzen grew up in a tumultuous household in Dallas, Texas. His domineering mother verbally abused his father and controlled every aspect of her son’s life. But she had problems of her own.

“My mother was mentally ill for most of her life and for all of mine,” writes Berendzen in his 1993 book, Come Here: A Man Overcomes the Tragic Aftermath of Childhood Sexual Abuse. Berendzen, who had no comment for this article, said that as a child, “All I knew was that she was wildly unpredictable. Labels like manic, paranoid, delusional and psychotic came years later. Sometimes she would be furious for no apparent reason; then, in a snap, she could suddenly become incredibly loving, supportive and fun.” His parents’ relationship was equally tumultuous due to his mother’s controlling nature.

Yet where her domination of his father was meant to tear down and destroy, she nutured young Berendzen into exactly who she desired him to be. His mother fueled Berendzen’s intellectual development, giving him all types of fiction and poetry, all of which he devoured.

She wanted to inspire Richard and to render him completely dependent on her—and she wanted that dependence to be more than emotional.

Berendzen’s mother worked an assortment of odd jobs. One of her longer-term jobs was in a darkroom processing film related to medical studies. It was there that she first raped Berendzen on a metal processing table.

Richard’s abuse did not stop there. One afternoon not long after the darkroom, his mother again asked him to ‘Come here’—a phrase which inspired the title of his book.

Dr. Wanda Collins, the director of the American University Counseling Center, says pedophiles project inappropriate thoughts onto the child. “[They] can imagine the child is provocative and may want that kind of attention,” said Collins. “But it’s not true, its only because it’s coming from their own projections—none of which is from the child’s own needs and wants.”

Such was the course of many afternoons throughout Berendzen’s childhood: “It happened every few days, or once a week for a while, or not for a month.” But it happened, off and on over the course of four years.

“To experience pleasure and disgust for the same reason and almost simultaneously created overwhelming confusion and torment,” writes Berendzen.

“For someone who is abusing children, they can rationalize things for themselves but it doesn’t put the child’s best interest at the center of their behavior,” said Collins. “Children need affection but they don’t need sexual attention from adults.”

According to ChildHelp, a leading national non-profit for helping victims of child abuse, 7.6 percent of all child abuse cases are sexual abuse, and over 90 percent knew their perpetrator in some way.

Hard work, success and achievement defined Berendzen. He went to MIT as an undergraduate, then to Harvard where he completed his PhD in physics and education.

As president of American University from 1980 to 1990, Richard Berendzen accomplished an incredible amount, both for the University and for himself. He raised the average SAT score by 200 points, slashed admission rates and raised huge amounts of money. He did so with “a relentless personal PR campaign,” according to Washington Post reporter Peter Carlson. “He traveled the country, speaking to groups of teachers and students and appearing on any interview program that would have him, expounding on education or outer space or anything else that anybody wanted him to talk about.”

He shamelessly promoted American University and himself, and it produced results. Berendzen worked 100-hour weeks, and attended three or four parties every Saturday night. The effort was a good way to push the thoughts of his abuse away—he just stopped wondering about it, stopped worrying and went to work. He became so absorbed in that bubble of success that he believed he could wish away his past.

“If you work very hard, somehow you don’t remember it anymore. And I learned after a while that if you work 60, 80, 90 hours a week, 100, you don’t remember it,” Berendzen writes.
Collins agrees that it is possible to entirely repress memories throughout the course of a lifetime. “You could think of it as a degree of dissociation that would take place on a continuum,” she explains. “On one end of the continuum there is someone who has a bad weekend but then can go to class and be very present and separate the events—but you still remember what happened. But maybe on the other end of the continuum is someone who had a traumatic experience and completely represses the memories.”

On March 23, 1991, Susan Allen, owner of a home day-care service and the wife of a Fairfax county policeman, picked up the phone. A man named either Bob or John, a “gynecologist,” asked if she had an open family, if she let her kids sleep in her bed and if she let them see her naked.

“All of a sudden, it clicked: I have an obscene phone caller,” she told the Washington Post in a 1991 interview.

Allen told the unknown caller what he wanted to hear and that he should call back tomorrow.

“I answered his questions in the way I knew he wanted them answered,” she said. “So that he would be satisfied, so that he would think he’d found his true love in this world and he would call back. And he did. He fell for it, hook, line and sinker. And he asked, ‘Would we include his child in our sexual goings-on in the house?’ And I said, ‘Well, my husband’s the head of the household, and he makes those decisions, and I’ll have to talk to him. Next time I talk to you, I’ll let you know.’”

Fairfax police installed a tracking device and tape recorder in Allen’s phone before the man called back the next day. Over the next two weeks, the man called about thirty times, discussing sexual topics: incest, molestation and sex slaves. The man claimed to be keeping a four-year-old Filipino girl in a cage in his basement.

The calls were “filthy beyond your most horrible nightmares,” said Allen. “And 99 percent of it centered around children.”

The police traced the calls to American University. Public Safety traced the calls to the president’s office. The next day, the chairman of American University’s board of trustees called Berendzen.

In his original resignation letter, Berendzen cited exhaustion. A few weeks later, the allegations became public, and the police pushed formal charges against him. Berendzen had been forced to resign because of his lewd calls to home-care services like Allen’s. In less than a month, the gleaming reputation of the Harvard-educated university president had vanished.
The calls themselves were not those of a perverted man, but of someone searching for answers, someone trying to explain. The Washington Post interviewed Fairfax county prosecutor Robert Horan who said, “I don’t want to dignify the calls by saying they were sort of cerebral, but they were sort of cerebral,” he says. “They were probing. They were essentially, `We do a lot of togetherness, do you?’”

If Berendzen had addressed his abuse sooner, the calls might not have happened. According to Stop it Now, a sexual abuse mobilization effort, studies show when victims of sexual abuse receive treatment, the likelihood that they themselves will abuse is low.

Berendzen was treated at Johns Hopkins psychiatric hospital in Baltimore. Under the powerful drip of sodium amytal, he finally came to terms with his childhood; for the first time, he admitted what had happened to him as a boy.

“People who grow up in an environment where there is some type of trauma can spend their childhood and adolescence surviving it in whatever way they need to,” said Collins. “It’s often not until they get away from home for the first time—maybe when they’re in their first significant romantic or sexual relationships, or when they have kids who are the age that they were when the abuse occurred—that their own memories of abuse might be triggered.  They may also experience depression or anxiety that can motivate them to get into treatment.”

Berendzen’s fall from grace was meteoric. In his book, he writes of weeks, months, whole years of depression, even after Hopkins. Some of his colleagues didn’t return his calls. Nevertheless, his wife, Gail Berendzen, stood by him, and his children also allegedly understood. Even the AU community saw an outpouring of sympathy.
Berendzen had resigned the presidency, retreated to Virginia for a time, and it didn’t seem as though he would teach again. Until he wrote his book, until people knew what had happened to him as a child, he was isolated.

Berendzen eventually returned to American University to teach. After the media waves from the scandal subsided, he quietly continued his work at NASA—where he is currently the director of the DC Space Grant Consortium—and at AU. Though he retired from teaching in 2006, he still holds emeritus professor status.

When he returned, he was even more respected than before. One student who took astronomy with Berendzen remarked on RateMyProfessors.com in 2005, “Berendzen is a must for any person trying to fulfill their science Gen Ed.” Another student remarked, “Most inspirational class I have ever taken.” And yet another wrote: “Fabulous prof. One of a kind!”

If you believe a child is being abused, please call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-CHILD. It is staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and offers crisis intervention, information and support. All calls are anonymous.

Kelcie Pegher contributed to this article. She is a senior studying print journalism and literature. She is co-editor-in-chief of AWOL.

National Children’s Island would become a DC landmark—our very own Coney Island. Its developers promised 6,000 visitors every day.

My photographer and I meet Daniel Rauch, a wildlife biologist with the District Department of Environment. Equipped with binoculars and a clipboard, Rauch is counting birds.

“When I was hired, I thought I’d be counting pigeons and swallows,” Rauch says. But the DDOE has identified 150 bird species on two islands that might have been home to roller coasters and arcades.

To get to Kingman and Heritage Islands, we cross a vast parking lot. Semi-trucks and city vehicles sit empty below an elevated Blue Line Metro track. We walk across a wooden footbridge, where an area resident is fishing with his grandchildren.

I ask them if they know this area was almost turned into an amusement park. The grandfather tells me he wishes they had. He gestures to his grandson, “Not him, though, he’s more of a nature type.”

Fifteen-year-old Stephen tells me he has been coming here for almost eight years. Back then, he tells me, there was no entrance. He discovered the islands by pushing his bike through a line of trees. Now, he and his friends ride their bikes up and down the islands.

“Do you know about psionics?” he asks. “In two weeks, I can give you methods to train your mind to influence the world around you.” Perhaps sensing my skepticism, he went on. “I have the ability to read energies. This place has very strong energies from a lot of different people.”

Creating the Islands

The Army Corps of Engineers created Kingman and Heritage Islands in 1916. Back then, the Anacostia was a shallow, muddy river bordered by extensive marshland. Engineers lifted sediment from the bottom and dumped it in the marshes to combat malaria and open the river for shipping. In the process, they created 46 acres of dry land.

Over the next 90 years, many developers came forward with plans for the island. In the 1930s, it might have been a recreation center, complete with an ice rink and swimming pool. In the 1940s, it was to become an airport, serving something called the National Skyway. In the 1980s, it was briefly considered for a federal prison.

The name “National Children’s Island” came about in the late 1960s. That plan would have ushered in the bicentennial with several playgrounds, a museum, library, petting zoo and carousel. Meant to open on July 4, 1976, construction never began due to tight budgets and ballooning estimates.

In 1991, then-Redskins owner Jack Cooke had plans to create a parking lot for a brand new stadium next to RFK. The DC Council allowed him to pave over 19 acres on the site, but plans fell through.

National Children’s Island was reborn when Contessa Bina Sella di Monteluce, a European philanthropist, raised $6 million to form the Island Development Corporation. The Island Development Corporation contracted with Washington, DC in 1993. In 1995, Congress approved the transfer of the islands from the federal government to DC.

Local groups like the Anacostia Wildlife Corporation and the Earth Conservation Corps worried about its impact on the environment and on the stability of the surrounding community.
“No one would propose a theme park for Rock Creek Park or Theodore Roosevelt Island! Why do they target the Anacostia?” read one anti-development flier. A large segment of the community wanted to reclaim the island as parkland.

Others wondered whether DC was getting a raw deal. By hurriedly handing control of the islands to a private developer, the city would lose out on money that could include a share of parking or admissions fees. Proponents of the plan claimed the project would create as many as 2,400 jobs and generate millions of dollars in sales tax revenue.

In response to these objections, former Mayor Marion Barry negotiated a 99-year lease with developers, which the DC Council approved with a 7-6 vote. “The kids of Washington are going to enjoy this park,” said Barry in a Washington Post article from 1997. “The land over there is fallow, with nothing but snakes and rubbish on it.”

Just as it appeared that something would be built on these two islands, the DC Financial Control Board nullified the lease. Once again, the islands were thrown into uncertainty.

A Haven For Secrets

Lofty plans for airports, theme parks and stadiums obscure what actually took place on Kingman and Heritage Island: nothing.

The island became a dump site, a refuge for the homeless and a part of local folklore. In 1941, a Washington Post headline read, “Hungry Wild Dog Devours Kingman Lake Squatter.” Later that month, a follow-up article detailed an expedition to catch the “wolf-like dog whose master’s bones were found on the island Friday.”

Stories circulated about Joseph Malone, a “modern Robinson Crusoe” who for more than six years lived in a makeshift campsite on Kingman Island’s southern tip. When renovations to the island began in the early 2000s, about a dozen homeless people had made Kingman Island into a permanent home.

“We used to talk to one of them,” said John Dillow, executive director of Living Classrooms, the non-profit that took over management of the islands in 2007. “He used to say he had the best view on the island…and it was true.”

While the island has undergone many renovations, rumors about its history persist.

“Back in the ‘80s there used to be big crime and drug wars going on, so rival drug gangs used to meet out here and dispute over turf,” Dillow said. “Apparently the bridge was set on fire to stop that connection.”

During the controversy over National Children’s Island, rumors spread that the Island Development Corporation wanted to introduce riverboat gambling to the Anacostia.

Cleaning Up Anacostia

Anecdotes aside, Kingman and Heritage Islands, and the Anacostia River as a whole, are coming out of a century of abuse. Not by evil developers or big corporations, but bad planning, weak regulations, racism and apathy.

“People would clean up an alley and literally dump it here,” said Dillow. “The people who used it the most were the park police, who would do all their helicopter training on the island.”

Other than occasional police raids to evacuate squatters, the island was forgotten. The last bald eagles in the District of Columbia abandoned their nests on Kingman Island in 1946.

“From my perspective, it’s not a legacy of controversy, it’s a legacy of neglect,” said Uwe Brandes, former vice president of the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation. For three years, Brandes oversaw the implementation of the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, a $10 billion plan to clean up the Anacostia River and promote sustainable development on the waterfront.

Pollution on the Anacostia River comes mostly from storm drain and sewer runoff. A third of the District is served by a system that combines sanitary sewers and storm drains. When those sewers reach capacity—as they often do during heavy rains—a mixture of rainwater, street runoff and sewage pour out of outfalls over the Anacostia. Along with trash dumping and lingering industrial pollutants, the river is a toxic place to swim and fish.

“The river also contains a surprisingly high amount of animal waste,” said Brent Bolin, a spokesman for the Anacostia Watershed Society. Barges used to carry waste from the National Zoo to a riverfront dumping site where the National Arboretum is today. “Now they package that stuff up and sell it as fertilizer,” Bolin said.

The Watershed Society, founded in 1989, was among the first to work on cleaning up the river. Bolin told me that its goals remain much the same today.

“Right now the river is sort of seen with a stigma,” said Bolin. “We’re focused on cleaning up the river and bringing people to the river.”

One of the Society’s first projects was the Anacostia Community Boathouse. The boathouse hosts local crew teams, including American University’s team.
Earth Conservation Corps, another non-profit, is housed in a former steam-pumping station down the street from Nationals Ballpark.

“Our founder, Bob Nixon, found this building when it was buried by a mound of trash,” said Kellie Bolinder, the interim executive director of Earth Conservation Corps. With the help of Navy Seabees, Earth Conservation Corps’s first project was to redo the pumping stations.

Earth Conservation Corps hires unemployed youth from Southeast DC to clean up the riverfront and promote conservation in the community.

Earth Conservation Corps graduate Raynard Smith remembers pulling 5,000 tires out of Lower Beaver Dam Creek in one day. “People find cars, playground sets,” said Smith. “There’s a lot of stuff that shouldn’t be in the river that’s in the river right now.”

DC hopes to open the Anacostia for swimming and fishing by 2032. “Baptisms used to take place in this river,”  said Bolinder. “People in the grandparent generation can say, ‘I swam in this river, I fished in this river when I was a kid.’”

Today, swimming in the Anacostia is illegal. Fish caught in the river are high in bacteria and heavy metals. The National Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that two-thirds of Anacostia catfish have cancerous lesions. Bolin described the subsistence fishing that still takes place. “Starve to death today, or die in 10 years.”

Despite warnings, swimming still goes on. “Every day in July I’d see someone swimming in this river,” said Bolin. In June, local politicians and activists wore Tyvek suits—which look like biohazard suits—and jumped into the river, taking care to keep their heads above water.

Clean or not, the tide is turning. People want to use this river.

Seeing the Islands

Kingman and Heritage Islands are at the center of the Anacostia clean-up effort. In 2002, DC Mayor Anthony Williams launched his campaign with a boat ride in Kingman Lake. After a court battle freed the city from its commitment to National Children’s Island, a new plan could take shape.

For the first time since the islands were built, that plan is being executed. A community-driven voting process has finally paved the road to consensus. Plans are in place for new trails and a LEED platinum certified environmental education center. The first phase of trail improvements was completed last month.

In 2007, the city handed management responsibility to a Baltimore-based non-profit called Living Classrooms. Founded in 1985, Living Classrooms brings school groups, summer camps and families to Kingman Island and other natural areas around DC.

Over the last three years, 1,700 students have learned about ecology on Kingman and Heritage Islands, and 5,000 volunteers have contributed almost 40,000 hours toward cleaning up the island. The park sees over 1,000 visitors every month.

An Uncertain Future

It takes about 20 minutes to walk from one end of Kingman Island to the other. Start at the north end, where the busy Benning Road separates you from Langston Golf Course (one of the first to allow black golfers). The National Park Service owns the Langston Golf Course, which takes up the northern half of Kingman Island.

Walk south past a community garden and a construction trailer. Peering into the thick maples, you can see hints of the failed beginnings of other projects and occasional pieces of Styrofoam debris. Further down the trail, a lone dumpster sits in an overgrown lot.

Keep walking past decorative boulders and patches of fresh cement. Walk below the graffiti-ridden underside of the East Capitol Street Bridge and emerge in a sunny garden, where you find benches, birdhouses and a backhoe.

Signs of the islands’ future outweigh its neglected past. From the bridge between the islands, you can spot great blue herons fishing in the muddy expanse of Kingman Lake. Walking the trail that loops around Heritage Island, the sight of stadiums, bridges and parking lots disappears. The thick trees teem with chirping birds and insects. On a lucky day, you may see a bald eagle in the sky. Since 1992, the Earth Conservation Corps has gradually reintroduced the species to the river.

John Dillow, the executive director of Living Classrooms, speaks excitedly about plans for canoe portages, boardwalks and river overlooks. Plans for the centerpiece of the restoration project, the environmental education center, were drawn up in 2005. The building is expected to cost at least $20 million. In 2009, architectural plans won an American Institute of Architects award for “Best Unbuilt Building” in the DC area.

“It’s a very cool building, a very expensive building,” said Dillow. “If someone showed up with a check it could easily become phase one.”  Until that happens, Living Classrooms and the DC government are saving Kingman and Hertigage Islands by letting them remain natural spaces.

“You come here and you’re like, ‘I’m literally a couple miles from the Capitol,’” said Dillow. “And you think, ‘This is a pretty cool place.’”

Photos by Jess Keane

My name is Audi. I was born in Cape Town, South Africa. I am 37 years old. I grew up in a township in a family of six children. I now have three children.

My name is Sarah. I was born in Washington, DC. I am 42 years old. I still live in the same neighborhood where I was born. I am married with two children.

These women are living 7,907 miles apart, unaware of their link: they are both HIV-positive.

When I think of South Africa, images that come to mind are the World Cup, tin shacks and malaria. When I think of DC, I think of power, a hub of activity and important people in suits working to change ideas into laws to transform the nation. These are the fabrics of two distinct cities with on common thread: HIV/AIDS.

I spent two weeks this past December in Cape Town as a participant in an AU alternative break, studying the rights of HIV-positive patients. I was unsure of what to expect, but I was aware of the immensity of the problem: there are approximately 5.6 million people living with HIV and AIDS in South Africa — more than any other country in the world.

For a disease to be considered an epidemic, it must affect at least one percent of the population. The frightening reality is that HIV affects 10.8 percent of South Africa’s population. It is estimated that next year, 400,000 people will die from AIDS-related illnesses.

South Africa is unfortunately a perfect breeding ground for the virus. One frustrated nurse in a local clinic, Gloria Mrwetyana, explained the plethora of problems contributing to the epidemic: “There is tuberculosis from overcrowded communities, patients may be unable to pay for the taxi or bus fare to come to the clinic and get tested or treated, they may not be able to refrigerate their medications, there is no one to bring children or the elderly to the clinic, there is poor sanitation, unclean water, poorly cooked food, unprotected sex, many rape cases and high drug use.” Doctors are pressed by the mountain of responsibilities and the inability to tackle each problem every time.

But this virus is not merely a scourge existing thousands of miles away. DC faces a similar battle: one out of every 20 adults is HIV-positive, over ten times the national average. In fact, DC has the highest HIV rate of any US city. But, unlike in South Africa, where AIDS has become a part of everyday reality, it is easy to remain oblivious to this raging epidemic in DC.

Tools and knowledge are available to combat this disease. In fact, according to Reuben Granich, an HIV/AIDS researcher at the World Health Organization, if everyone in the world was tested for HIV, the disease could be eliminated globally in 50 years. Why does this disease, which has the potential to be erased from medical history in our lifetime, still rage on? The root of the problem is the stigma associated with being tested for HIV, being HIV-positive and even for using condoms.

I experienced this stigma first-hand while observing Mrwetyana, a nurse at a local clinic in Cape Town. She took the medical and personal histories of each of her HIV-positive patients and came across some heart-wrenching stories. The first patient was a 42-year-old woman, well-dressed in a purple blouse and with a successful job in — ironically — a pharmaceutical company that produces HIV medication. Mrwetyana inquired if her family knew about her HIV-positive status. The woman told the nurse she was abused by her husband, who told her to keep her sexually transmitted disease quiet. When she finally divorced him after years of abuse, her family shunned her for bringing dishonor to the family. She is currently raising two children on her own without any support from her family.

The next patient was a pretty young woman who stopped taking her HIV medication because she was too embarrassed to do so in the presence of her family. She said she had just given birth to an HIV-positive child. Her calm demeanor as she shared this news was shocking, especially because it was preventable. There is medication available for pregnant women that reduces the risk of transmitting HIV to their infant to only two percent.

Domestic abuse perpetuates the disease further because when a woman asks her partner to use a condom, he assumes there is mistrust in the relationship. We met with an incredible group of women who formed a nonprofit organization called Sisters4Sisters, which aims to raise awareness about domestic violence and its impact on the spread of HIV. The organization offers support groups, emergency accommodation and shelter for women that need it.

Stigma and domestic abuse are part of the vicious cycle of HIV in DC, too. Dr. Sohail Rana, a member of Howard University’s Department of Pediatrics, believes the “stigma associated with HIV is now worse than the disease itself.” In an appearance on AU’s radio station, WAMU 88.5, she talked about how this stigma killed her eighteen-year-old patient, Angel. Angel contracted the disease at birth and with the proper medication, she could have lived a longer life. But her family made her feel dirty, rejected her and left her to face the disease alone. She refused to take her medication, and as a result, her HIV progressed to AIDS, ultimately resulting in her death. “There’s much talk about prevention, but almost none about the stigma related to HIV. Unless we address that stigma, it is unlikely that prevention efforts will succeed,” Rana said.

Recent survey results about DC residents’ perceptions of HIV/AIDS are shocking: 30 percent said that they would not feel comfortable sitting next to someone with HIV on a bus; 20 percent said they would be uncomfortable sending their child to a school with an HIV-positive student.

How can we acknowledge this stigma and overcome it? First, we need to realize that Cape Town and DC are not so different. The US heavily funds HIV research in South Africa, but South Africa seems to be much more active than the US in combating HIV and the stigmas associated with it. Condoms are distributed at clinics and public facilities, billboards are displayed encouraging people to get tested, and radio stations urge listeners to begin the new year by finding out their HIV status. But the US, AU sociology professor and alternative break advisor Bette Dickinson stated, “is advanced at hiding up. HIV is a silent killer that we don’t talk about. This must not be swept up under the rug.” Instead of viewing our relationship with South Africa as one of charity, the US needs to see the relationship as a partnership and learn from South Africa’s active approach to HIV awareness.

While the US has more generalized goals, conceived with the hope of helping the nation as a whole, South Africa has more specific, concrete goals with the intention of helping individual communities and people. They have more grassroots organizations that are focused on specific aspects of HIV, like creating vaccinations or helping marginalized HIV-positive groups like mothers and senior citizens. The collaboration of these groups is transforming communities, creating a strong movement against HIV. A US-South Africa partnership can serve to actually defeat the disease, with each country working together and learning from the other.

HIV is a fairly new disease — it has been around for fifty years and both Cape Town and DC have come far in fighting it. Imagine how much further we could progress in the next decade if we band together.

Illustration by Hannah Karl.

Admittedly, online activism usually revolves around more mundane issues than traditional street protests. A Facebook group to elect a student government president isn’t the same urgent social statement as the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s. Still, the potential for social networking to spark social movements is a hot topic, and technophiles have given Facebook and Twitter enormous credit for the recent protest movements in the Middle East and North Africa. In his review of Evgeny Morozov’s book Net Delusion, Lee Siegel of The New York Times wrote on Feb 4 that in both Tunisia and Egypt, “social networking allowed truths that had been whispered to be widely broadcast and commented upon.”

Others have pointed out the influence social networking has had on governments worldwide. Some say that social networking and the Internet provide convenient means of oppressing a populace. Siegel’s colleagues in China, Edward Wong and David Barboza, reported on Jan 31 that the Chinese government had enforced Internet censures immediately after news spread of Facebook groups sympathetic to the Egyptian cause. It is this kind of manipulation of technology to which Morozov refers in Net Delusion; he assures his readers that access to Internet media alone does not beget liberation.

***

Facebook activism hasn’t been limited to foreign crises. The upheaval in Wisconsin after the state government announced measures to bar unions’ collective bargaining abilities was permeated by social networking. As University of Wisconsin students gathered in a physical demonstration of solidarity, students across the country joined in the “Virtual Vigil,” where clicking the “Join” button turned home-bound users into active participants.

It is this sort of “active inaction” that characterizes the term “slacktivism.” Implying a degree of laziness, critics contend that an individual pledging collusion via a computer screen has serious implications for the credibility of movements for social and political change. AU sophomore Mariam Aziz was born in Egypt and was compelled to immediately react to the anti-government demonstrations there. She organized protests outside of the Egyptian Embassy in DC and has spoken out in support of the uprisings. She said social networking “played a significant role in starting the revolution, but definitely not in directly causing political change.”

Aziz believes in the role of social media in activism, but confirms its limited ability to affect true political change on its own. She does recognize social media’s benefits in organizing without overstating its effect on policy: “Activists use it to spread the word about events or an entire revolution!”

Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker wrote in October that there are two major differences between the Civil Rights Movement and today’s social media-infused activism: the “risk factor” and organization.

Gladwell contends that social media and the Internet have eliminated the “risk factor” from social activism. Rather than joining time-consuming, dangerous bus boycotts or confrontational protests, people can join a Facebook page from the comfort of their home, free from the judgment of their peers. Gladwell also discusses the importance of “strong-tie phenomena,” which he describes as the personal connection necessary for a successful, influential movement. Activism through social media, he contends, “manages acquaintances,” and isn’t characterized by strong, value-based connections between participants.

In his classic sociological study Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam echoes these sentiments: “Because of the paucity of social cues and social communication, participants in computer-based groups find it harder to reach consensus and feel less solidarity with one another.” Instead, it seems that “slacktivists” focus on general concerns more than specific issues, the protest of which would be unlikely to attract public scrutiny. In other words, online movements have begun to accommodate “fad disasters,” creating causes that will be accepted by all, while no serious gains are possible.

Gladwell offers the Save Darfur movement on Facebook as an example. As of October 2010, Facebook’s most popular group within the “Causes” app had 1,282,339 members, its second most popular group claimed 22,073, and its third most popular group had only 2,797 participants. Respectively, members had donated an average of nine, 35 and 15 cents per participant in each group. Gladwell observes, “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.”

However, the argument that Facebook activism eliminates the risk factor is directly contested by the recent events in the Middle East. Many journalists and analysts agree that social media was an important component of the protests. Had it not been for “We are All Khaled Said,” the Facebook group dedicated to the innocent Egyptian brutally murdered by police, the Egyptian organization of young people in Tahrir Square would have been fairly inconsequential. The solidarity that was established through social media over a specific event was one of the main catalysts of the Egyptian and Tunisian protests.

This mass solidarity suggests a new model of protest separate from Gladwell’s second point of distinction: the level of organization. Groups that affected serious change on social and political policy used hierarchies and structures that allowed them to efficiently pursue specific initiatives based on calculations and intense planning. Gladwell argues, “The things that King needed in Birmingham — discipline and strategy — were things that online social media cannot provide.”

How true is this claim? If nothing else, those organizations centered on Wisconsin, the Middle East and even the Save Darfur campaign have shown the ability to mobilize thousands of people for their cause. Mobilization may look different now than it did in the past; Gladwell himself admits that the focus of social activism has shifted “from organization to adaptability.” These organizations have tapped a powerful resource that can instigate both popular support over a large area, as in the case of Wisconsin state government protestors and the Save Darfur movement, and physical support at home, as was the case in Tunisia and Egypt.

While they increasingly rely on “weak-tie connections,” as Gladwell calls these associations, perhaps social media establishes a new bond, which, unlike the Civil Rights Movement and other protests of the past, exists outside of “weak” or “strong.” Perhaps social activism is helping to bring people together, regardless of their previous acquaintance, establishing a basic unity inherent in humanity.

***

This could all be wishful thinking. At AU, professors and students alike are witnessing the rise of social media. Call them “cautiously optimistic.” Professor Bryan McNeil of the Anthropology department has experienced social networking activism firsthand in his advocacy work with coal miners in Appalachia. In McNeil’s experience, Facebook has been a force for organization and coordination. “I think that communication technology in general can be used very effectively to disseminate information. Social networking, as well as old-fashioned email, is really good at keeping a lot of people in the loop with different kinds of information.”

Better organization is, undoubtedly, a benefit of using social networking as a tool for activism. Fellow Anthropology Professor Adrienne Pine agrees, to an extent. “I think it’s a really important tool, but I think we have to recognize that it’s one of a series of tactics that needs to be part of a larger strategy,” she said. Pine points out that the responsibility of an activist group is to prove that their movement can be successful. In Pine’s opinion, “what really proves the effectiveness of the movement is the results it gets in terms of the people it can mobilize and the change it is able to make.”

These “results” can’t come from Facebook alone. Pine and McNeill agree that the uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Bahrain were not “Facebook revolutions” or “Twitter revolutions.” Pine recognizes that social media was a crucial component of the uprisings, but doesn’t believe “slacktivism” is a viable alternative to real action. “If people believe that clicking on something or creating a Facebook ‘cause’ will actually make a change, then they’re becoming part of the problem. What that’s actually doing is giving them a justification for not doing something more meaningful.”

However, social media shouldn’t be totally dismissed as a force of indolence in social action. It certainly has merits: better coordination, better organization, better communication. It has helped to affect political change as a tool of movements that use it to send a message. Though Gladwell and other professionals believe social media may cater to the growing culture of laziness and a generational lack of motivation, it is important to remember that their generation — that of Woodstock, the Freedom Riders and the New Left — was also considered lazy and incapable. We need not remind them that it only takes one protest, one movement, one “Cause” to make a change, and, if nothing else, Facebook can help.

Illustrations by Max Gibbons.

During that same time, AU professor and Distinguished Diplomat-in-Residence Anthony Quainton was serving as the US Ambassador to Nicaragua — a position that eventually forced him to confront his own misalignment with the Reagan Administration’s priorities and strategy in Central America.

Students of the social sciences are likely familiar with the maxim, “where you stand depends on where you sit,” a reminder that context matters in understandings of political and historical phenomena. I spoke to Cohn and Quainton to hear their stories, which illustrate this principle in the case of US involvement in Nicaragua.

Cohn was 25 years old in 1982, when the Jesuits of Central America asked her to found and direct the Central American Historical Institute, a progressive think tank headquartered at Georgetown University. The Jesuits — active in liberation theology movements such as the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s 1979 revolutionary overthrow of the Somoza dynasty — wanted Cohn to take the lead in providing accurate, non-governmental information about Nicaragua to US policymakers, activists, journalists and academics. Soon, researchers in Nicaragua were sending telex messages to Cohn in DC, which she then compiled into reports and mailed out to a list of subscribers.

Cohn notes that even though Central America was the foreign policy issue of the 1980s, it was difficult to get accurate, in-depth information about conditions on the ground, especially if it contradicted the official position of the Reagan Administration.

The Central American Historical Institute quickly became a leading source of reporting and analysis on Nicaragua, surpassing Cohn’s own expectations of her organization’s influence. She recalls being surprised to learn that one of her reports had appeared as “Exhibit J” when Nicaragua sued the US in the World Court in 1984 for illegally putting naval mines in Nicaraguan harbors.

For Quainton, too, the media played a memorable role in his tenure as US Ambassador to Nicaragua. He remembers his initial arrival in Nicaragua after his appointment under Reagan, stepping off the plane at Sandino International Airport in Managua on March 15, 1982 and being met with a barrage of media cameras and microphones. One reporter asked him to comment on the state of emergency that had been declared in Nicaragua while he was in transit.

Unbeknownst to Quainton, CIA-backed Nicaraguan rebels had blown up two major bridges during his flight there. “I was completely blindsided,” he recalls. “Our relationship with the Sandinistas pretty much went downhill every day from there.”

As evidence, Quainton points to the framed political cartoons from Nicaraguan newspapers on the wall of his office in the School of International Service, caricatures of him with Sandinista leaders. Quainton remembers Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega as “aloof” and “hard to know.”

“Ortega is not,” Quainton says with diplomatic understatement, “a very nice man.”

Cartoons of a different kind illustrate one reason for the tense diplomatic relations, according to Cohn. In 1984, a member of the advocacy group Witness for Peace approached her with a comic book-style “Freedom Fighter’s Manual,” which encouraged Nicaraguans to sabotage the Sandinista government by cutting power lines, throwing Molotov cocktails at police stations, damaging automobiles and stealing government food supplies. An Associated Press reporter confirmed that it had been published by the CIA for the rebel group. Over 85 newspapers picked up the story and severely undermined the credibility of the Reagan Administration’s official position that the US did not seek to overthrow Ortega. Investigations into the first manual revealed another CIA manual, this one advocating assassination.

After the publication of the comic book story and Reagan’s landslide re-election, the political climate changed. “It became a lot more difficult to challenge the administration,” Cohn says. And challenging the administration became the goal of her organization. “I wouldn’t say the information we provided was neutral. Things were so politicized,” she recalls, “it was important to provide information that was more accurate, less one-sided. I saw myself as an honest broker, a patriot.”

Meanwhile, Quainton too was beginning to understand the stubbornness of the White House’s position on Nicaragua. Strongly influenced by CIA Director William Casey’s preference for regime change, Reagan’s position, according to Quainton, amounted to: “As soon as Ortega goes, we’ll talk.”

Quainton said, “They figured — correctly — that I was somewhat more sympathetic than Washington.” This was partly due to the State Department’s general preference for negotiation, and partly due to what Cohn jokingly refers to as the “Sandal-istas” — American groups, often religious, that traveled to Nicaragua to demonstrate in opposition to the poorly concealed US support for the contras. Quainton recalls these groups as being “very outspoken, very emotional.”

Despite perceptions by such visitors that Quainton was too much of a hard-liner, by 1983 it was clear that he and Reagan were not “on the same wavelength.” Quainton had been contacted by a senior White House official, who told him to report more bad news about the Sandinistas. “I can’t do that. We report all the news,” he replied. In October, a bipartisan commission on Central America, led by Henry Kissinger, visited Nicaragua on a fact-finding mission, culminating in what Quainton calls “a disastrous day for diplomacy.” After asking Quainton if he had to “shake hands with that son-of-a-bitch,” Kissinger went into a meeting with Ortega in a foul mood, and, after listening to Ortega deliver a long diatribe against the US, walked out of the room without saying a word.

Having been pressed repeatedly by the commission on whether Reagan agreed with the State Department’s attempts to negotiate with Ortega, Quainton was not entirely surprised to receive a call from the Deputy Secretary of State a few months later announcing that the president was going to make some changes in Nicaragua. Six months after learning he had lost the president’s confidence, Quainton left Nicaragua and became the ambassador to Kuwait. Being given another appointment after being fired is unusual in the State Department. “More typically, when you leave, you’re done,” Quainton said. But Secretary of State George Shultz argued that Quainton had done nothing wrong and did not deserve to be punished. In Quainton’s words, it was a matter of Reagan “looking for a different style of ambassador, someone who was going to be much more hard-line.”

Despite traveling to Nicaragua a dozen times between 1982 and 1988, Cohn does not recall ever meeting Quainton there, though they are now friendly colleagues, both teaching in SIS. The Central American Historical Institute was not very interested in the official US position that they would have gotten from the embassy, she recalls dryly, noting that their research interests lay more in the direction of the border regions with Honduras where the contras were based. She is still angry about Reagan’s covert and, she argues, impeachable support for the Nicaraguan contras.

Quainton is more sanguine. He says his experience in Nicaragua didn’t change his perception of representing US interests abroad. In his subsequent ambassadorships to Kuwait and Peru, there was much less of a gap between public opinion and White House policy. No cheerleader for either Ortega’s government or the US backing of the contras, throughout his time in Nicaragua Quainton remained dedicated to making sure both the good and bad aspects of the Sandinista governance made it back to the States.

A commitment to communicating the nuanced truth guided both Quainton’s and Cohn’s experiences in Nicaragua. Far from being content to toe the Reagan Administration’s line — and despite considerable pressure to do so — each sought to present the complexity of the situation to the US government and the public. The experiences of these AU professors remind us to be critical of official policies and the way they are remembered and to be sensitive to the context and source of information.

Photo by Colin Crane.

Seeing a way to potentially unite and mobilize all the Togolese people standing in opposition to the government, a message that reaches beyond a single political party, Nabourema decided to take action. “If they recognize the victory’s only going to profit that group, it’s not going to change anything,” she said. “That’s why we launched the group ‘Faure Must Go! Togo Libre.’ We said that this is a national cause, it’s not a political party cause, it’s a national cause of all the Togolese who feel that government is wrong [and] that the president shouldn’t be our president in the first place.”

Despite being abroad at AU for her education, Nabourema has played a substantial role in this movement. She created a Facebook group on Feb 24, 2011, which has grown quickly, gaining over 2,000 supporters in one month. Two days after its launch, Nabourema posted a letter she wrote with a friend, Woali Ahlijah, demanding President Faure Gnassingbe step down by April 26, one day before the 51st anniversary of Togo’s independence.

“I think we have the right to dismiss him,” she said. “We have the power to dismiss him if we don’t want his rule anymore. We can join our forces and ask him to go.”

Nabourema’s letter was initially approved by 11 Togoloese activists in the US. The dismissal has since been approved and adopted by the ANC (the main opposition party), FRAC (the opposition coalition), PSR, ADDI and Sursaut Togo with the support of the workers’ union, according to Togolese opposition newspaper L’ALTERNATIVE. Nabourema said more groups have signed on since. This declaration dismissing Gnassingbe was read during the March 12 protest and approved by the 7,000 protesters in attendance. According to Nabourema, 5,000 people signed the letter that day to dismiss the president.

The opposition decided to make the letter a petition to democratically legitimize the dismissal to the rest of the world. The head of the workers’ party, Claude Ameganvi, is currently heading this effort and hopes to get between 500,000 and one million signatures.

Since publicizing the statement of dismissal, Nabourema has received attention from the Togolese government. She said that the Prime Minister of Togo, Gilbert Fossoun Houngbo, asked her to attend a meeting with him while she visited France over spring break. She refused, saying that the government might destroy her image by photographing the meeting and creating the perception that she had been bought off. Shortly after, the meeting was cancelled.

***

According to Nabourema, Togo is the oldest dictatorship in the world. Officially, though, Togo is recognized by the international community as a republic. In 2010, the presidential election was deemed fair for the first time in over 40 years. Despite this, the Togolese opposition coalition — called the Republican Front for Change — has protested this election every Saturday since its occurrence, claiming fraud and demanding that the government recognize the victory of their candidate, Jean-Pierre Fabre.

“[The elections] were significant in that for the first time, the opposition rallied around one leader, whereas before they really split their vote because the opposition didn’t come together,” said Dorina Bokoe, a research associate for the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention. “I think that there was a feeling that they would fare a lot better than they did.”

The State Department’s profile on Togo suggests that division between the opposition parties played a major role in the loss by putting forth seven candidates. However, less than six percent of the vote went to other opposition candidates — not a negligible number, but not quite the 17 percent Fabre needed to win. While the international community deemed the election fair, it conceded irregularities like the government having “clear control” over the electoral commission. Bokoe explained that some of the opposition actually withdrew their membership from the commission because they felt the government had too much control of the process.

Fabre explained in a video interview with the BBC that the military raided the party’s headquarters, taking all of their equipment as they were going through the election results to prove fraud. According to the BBC report, the spokesperson for the special election commando unit said the raid was a response to an opposition march that went ahead despite a government ban, not an attempt to destroy evidence.

Nabourema believes the results of the election shattered the Tologese people’s hope for change, and the betrayal that followed devastated many. Gilchrist Olympio, who was once a leader in the opposition movement, joined the government just after the election, justifying it as an effort to move Togo forward.

Nabourema’s disillusionment with Olympio, a venerated figure in Togo, was a turning point for her.

“I just realized, why are we waiting for a messiah to come and deliver us, awaiting a leader to come out and help us?” she said. “Why can’t we be our own leaders? And that’s how I started to see that I could be a leader myself.”

Nabourema may not be a messiah, but her unwaivering commitment to spreading freedom in her home country reveals an uncommon courage.

***

Recently, the Togolese government proposed legislation that would require permission from the government to hold demonstrations. Many have speculated the inspiration for the proposal came from the recent uprisings in other countries.

“I think a lot of governments are looking at how they might — especially governments that might not be particularly popular or have a long history of repression as the Togolese government has — be able to prevent this kind of large, popular uprising,” said Bokoe, who works for the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention.

CNN reported that Togolese Interior Minister Pascal Bodjona denied that the proposed legislation intends to suppress uprisings, commenting that a piece of paper would not stop a revolution.

The restrictions on protests may reach beyond just requiring government authorization, though. Nabourema said the government wants the power to send an informant to planning meetings for protests.

The ANC called for a protest of the proposed legislation on Thursday, March 17, a risky decision since after the 2010 election, protests were restricted to weekends. The military used tear gas and rubber bullets on the protesters. No reports mention any deaths, but Nabourema says a close friend of hers was killed.

Since then, the government has suppressed several other weekday protests in support of the movement to dismiss the president. Nabourema believes it is important not to give the government legitimacy by abiding by their restrictions.

“As soon as people come out, they fire on them or they beat them or they arrest them to kill it from the beginning,” Nabourema said. She later explained that the military was arresting people in their homes who were not protesting, for no other reason than living in neighborhoods known for having anti-government sentiments.

Attempts to reach Togolese government officials for comment were unsuccessful.

***

Nabourema became interested in politics after seeing her father arrested for the first time. As a political activist, he had been arrested previously and even tortured, but not since Nabourema was born.

“The military came into our house and they broke everything, pretending to be looking for guns,” she said. “They said that my father is a rebel and they searched our home. They had no arrest certificate to show [or] the legal document to search [our] house. They just came in.”

The experience shocked her. “I knew he’s not a delinquent or somebody who stole or things like that,” she said. “I was shocked to see my father being arrested.”

When her father returned a few days later due to pressure for his release from the US and German embassies, she started asking him questions about what he did and why he was arrested, which sparked her interest in politics.

“He talked to me about everything: why we are so oppressed, what is going on, and he told me stories that were so awful. I never knew things like that were going on in the country since I was a child,” she said. “I wanted to fight with him. I wanted to enter his political party and he said ‘No, you are too young. You cannot be a member of my political party at age 13.’”

While Nabourema’s father refused to let her openly participate in political activism, he encouraged her interest. One by one, he gave her illegal books and opposition newspapers to read before hiding them away again.

***

Nabourema hopes the popular revolts of the Arab Spring will come to her home of Togo. The widespread support of the Saturday opposition protests suggests the Togolese people crave change, according to Farouk Banna, one of the 11 Togolese living in America who approved Nabourema’s declaration. He is the spokesman for the Committee for Motivation and Action for Freedom in Togo, which he described as an association fighting for peaceful change.

Some question whether the revolutions will translate to the rest of Africa. “I’m not convinced that this is the right way of thinking about it, but you see a lot of arguments [saying] African politics are too fractured — especially fractured along ethnic lines — to have a broad-based support,” said AU Professor Niklas Hultin, a political and legal anthropologist specializing in West Africa.

Togo consists of 20 to 30 different ethnic groups. Nabourema explained that there are ethnic issues in Togo, but sees them as minor in comparison to Gnassingbe’s dictatorial rule.
Hultin also explained that a lack of a strong civil society may make a successful revolution more difficult. One element of a civil society is a free press, which according to the Freedom House’s 2010 report, Togo lacks.

Perhaps the largest barrier, though, is the threat of violence.

“The only factor that is holding the change is the brutality of the army, which has never hesitated to pull the trigger on the people protesting peacefully for change,” Banna said. “However, with recent events in the Middle East, there is hope that the international community will finally step up and ask Gnassingbe to step down as they have done in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.”

Without much media attention, international intervention may not materialize in the low-profile country of Togo. “I don’t think Togo is alone in crying out for greater attention from the international media,” said Emira Woods, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. “I think it is more likely that countries that are francophone, even though the protests have been ongoing and sustained, don’t have the same type of exposure to the Western media as other countries.”

Another barrier to intervention may be looming on the horizon. Current oil speculation in Togo could potentially raise the stakes of political instability and quiet lingering questions of the government’s legitimacy. Several oil companies recently discovered oil off the coast of Ghana, making Togo’s shores a promising prospect for reserves. Oil notoriously accompanies corruption, and how the government chooses to use the oil revenue — for itself or its citizens — could have a significant impact on the country. “I think we cannot underplay the role that oil and oil interests play in determining the political economy and, overall, the progression of events,” Woods said.

***

From the beginning, Nabourema knew that fighting for her people would have serious consequences, but she is ready to risk everything to bring democracy and freedom to Togo.

“My father told me before I started this, ‘You are going to lose friends, you are going to lose family members, but you just have to know what you want,’” she said. “‘Are you ready to sacrifice everything for this?’”

In mid-March, Nabourema got her first taste of this reality when a friend was killed during a protest.

“What we told ourselves before fighting was that if one of us falls, it means we have to double our energy, we have to be more strong for two reasons,” she said. “The first reason is because we don’t want any of our friends to die for nothing. You have to make their death worth it. The second reason is that because they’re no longer with us, it means they have one less person on board and we need to strengthen our group.”

Nabourema stays strong, holding back her pain.

“This is a revolution,” Nabourema said. “This is what it’s supposed to be. Some people have to fall for others to lead.”

She hopes to return to Togo soon to show her people she cares for them and wants to take a more active role in the movement.

“I will go back,” she said. “And I know if I go back I might not come back for many reasons. I might not come back alive, I might be thrown in jail, I might not come back because things have changed. I will risk my life to go because I know it’s worth it.”

Mike Lally contributed reporting to this story.

Photo by Ashley Dejean.

Port-au-Prince — home to over two million people — has hardly a square foot of unused land. It is a densely-packed maze of rubble, unpaved streets and fields of refuse through which Haitians must navigate.

All participants in Fonkoze’s Chemen Lavi Miyo (CLM) program graduate living in houses with cement floors, sturdy walls, tin roofs and portable water purifiers. In the rural Central Plateau region, a CLM client and her children examine the construction of their new, improved shelter.

A CLM Case Manager, responsible for measuring clients’ progress and facilitating their education programs, makes his weekly visit to a woman’s home in the Central Plateau. The lesson of the day was family planning.

The migration of Haitians to the nation’s urban areas has hurt the agriculture sector, ensuring that much of Haiti’s arable land goes uncultivated. The lack of credit available to farmers diminishes their ability to improve farming technology.

The CLM program — catering to Haiti’s ultra poor women — is headed by Gauthier Dieudonne, pictured here. His goal is to help destitute rural families become empowered through education programs, access to health care, improved housing and start-up microenterprises.

In rural Fondwa, a coffee bean processing plant stands empty, abandoned long before the January 2010 earthquake. Community members do not expect it to reopen any time soon.

The second step of Fonkoze’s microcredit program, called Ti Kredi or “little credit,” empowers women by providing them with business know-how and continued health and education services. The women pictured here had gathered to repay a loan with the proceeds of their individual enterprises and to receive a lesson in literacy from their Credit Agent.

For more information on Fonkoze’s operations, visit www.fonkoze.org. To learn about AU’s commitment to sending alternative break groups to Haiti, search Facebook for American University Haiti Compact: Higher Education with Haiti.

Shoshanna Sumka contributed to this article. Sumka is the Assistant Director of AU’s Center for Community Engagement and Service.

What started as a hip-hop conference at the University of Maryland in 2000 has since evolved into a DC non-profit that aims to use hip-hop to strengthen communities.

Today, it’s graffiti. A potential student, about 12 years old, sits at a table looking over some forms and asks a staff member how to spell graffiti.

“Is it G-R-E-…”

“No, it’s G-R-A-F-F-I-T-I.”

A couple moments later, he asks again.

“You said it was G-R-E-F-F-I-T-I?”

“No, G-R-A-F-F-I-T-I. You should get your ears cleaned.”

“I did,” the student jokes in his defense. “Last week.”

The idea of hip-hop culture being used to teach spelling might be a novel one. But it’s only part of the latest chapter in one of the greatest success stories ever told: the story of hip-hop. What started in the late 1970s as a counterculture movement in the South Bronx has grown into a multifaceted global phenomenon. Hip-hop has landed in South Africa, South Korea and just about everywhere in between. It has endured corporate commoditization and media denigration; it has challenged politicians and struggled with sexism.

Hip-hop has always been controversial. Civil rights activist Delores Tucker lambasted it as “drug-driven, race-driven and greed driven,” while rapper KRS-ONE has lauded what he calls “Edutainment,” hip-hop’s blend of education and entertainment. It may have taken over 30 years, but now hip-hop is reaching the academic world, becoming both a subject of study and a tool for education.

***

AU recently hosted a panel titled “The Falsehoods and Misconceptions about Hip-Hop,” which illustrated the ground hip-hop has gained in academia.

“It’s not the scary thing that you can’t have in the classroom,” said Paige Hernandez, one of the panelists. As both an artist and educator, Hernandez has helped curate workshops on the incorporation of hip-hop into the classroom. Her choreography has been featured in multiple shows, most recently in DC/NYC’s Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, and her one-woman show, Paige in Full: A B-girl’s Visual Mixtape, is back in DC for a second run.

One point the panel raised was that for a youth culture, hip-hop isn’t that young. Its originators are middle-aged. Kool Herc has health problems. Snoop Dogg is pushing 40. Rev Run and his teenaged kids have a reality show.

The movement has grown up. The people who’ve been educated by hip-hop are now the ones teaching it. As it has matured, hip-hop has expanded to new mediums like literature, theatre, film and academia.

“It wasn’t my first English teacher,” said panelist Kyle Dargan, “but it was the first English teacher that I ever listened to.”

Dargan, a professor of literature and creative writing at AU as well as editor and founder of Post No Ills magazine, was on the advising board for a book that came out last year called The Anthology of Rap. The anthology is composed of over 300 rap lyrics from the last 30 years. In his review for New York Magazine, Sam Anderson, a self-proclaimed hip-hop illiterate, called it “the English major’s hip-hop bible.” The anthology also made his Top 10 Books of 2010.

Like Dargan, many are finding that hip-hop and academia are not that different.

Current WBL editor Simone Jacobson spoke to the panel about her experience witnessing how hip-hop can help bridge education gaps.

In 2010, Jacobson led a group of eight international hip-hop dancers on a four city US tour sponsored by the US State Department. A year earlier, she co-founded Sulu DC, a monthly showcase of DC-based Asian and Pacific-Islander American artists.

Jacobson now works as director of The Cipher, a part of WBL that focuses on networking with other hip-hop-based organizations. The Cipher hosts teach-ins designed to develop programs and curricula based on hip-hop culture. The teach-in titled “Remixing the Art of Social Change: A Hip-Hop Approach” has plans to travel to Chicago by the end of 2011.

Jacobson is also editor of Words. Beats. Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture. The biannual publication is the world’s only peer reviewed journal on the subject of hip-hop culture.
The latest issue — “The Sex Issue” — addressed gender and sexuality. It featured work from Holly Bass, a poet-in-residence at Busboys & Poets, Kelly Zen-Yie-Tsai, a world-renowned spoken word artist, as well as other scholars, artists and poets.

The DC Urban Arts Academy, the other side of WBL, has a more local focus. The Academy offers classes based on the four elements of hip-hop, challenging students to work both creatively and academically. Students learn skills such as DJ-ing or emceeing while also learning how to market themselves through portfolios, applications and resumes — skills that could be applied to either a record deal or college application. Hopefully both.

Another DC based organization, H.E.L.P., Hip-Hop Educational Literacy Program, uses lyrics from artists such as Lauryn Hill, Common, T.I. and Rakim to promote literacy. Recently, Patrick MacMahon and Jeff Williams, AU students and DC Reads tutors, hosted a workshop about the program, focusing their presentation on the work of Nas.

“Sometimes younger kids — and ourselves included — feel like we lose our identity in schools,” said Williams. “H.E.L.P takes what the child already loves and embraces it.”

The H.E.L.P. program has been praised by both artists and scholars, including Raekwon, Cornel West and Barack Obama.

In St. Paul, Minn., David Ellis, former Paisley Park Studio producer and Prince collaborator, has integrated hip-hop and education in the form of a school. The High School for Recording Arts, nicknamed Hip-Hop High, is part recording studio and part traditional school. Students are rewarded for good behavior and grades with time in one of the school’s recording studios, where they can champion and record their own music.

The school is a safe haven for troubled students. Many have dropped out of other schools and are behind in credits. In 2010, about half of the students did not live with a legal guardian and one-fourth lived with a legal guardian with an addiction.

“My vision initially for the school was to solve a problem that I saw in the community: a lot of young people were dropping out of school,” Ellis said in a video for the Minneapolis City Pages. “I knew through their passion with the music industry and what they wanted to experience that it would be a great motivator.” When it opened in 1998, the school had 15 students. It now has more than 220 students and has sparked sister schools in Los Angeles, New York, and most recently, Portland, Ore.

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As hip-hop and formal education begin to intertwine, some remain skeptical. What does it mean when a rebel culture begins to integrate with the institutions it was created to rebel against?

Hopefully, as people begin to see hip-hop’s value in the classroom, it won’t be reduced to just another teaching tool.

Stephen Vassallo, a professor in AU’s School of Education, Teaching and Health, spoke to how Paulo Freire’s theory of critical pedagogy could possibly be applied to hip-hop’s growing role in education. Freire was a Brazilian educator who viewed conventional education as a way of reproducing and reinforcing cultural and social hierarchies. Rather than reproduce a “dominant culture,” Freire believed that education should draw upon the lives of the people being educated.

For instance, in the classrooms of urban DC, Freire would probably argue that the poetry of Tupac would resonate with students much more than the poetry of Shakespeare.

“Hip-hop is used as a means to teach an end point, a better end point,” said Vassallo, “but when does it become the end in itself?”

As hip-hop finds its way into teaching curricula, it has the potential to build some common ground between teachers and students. It’s an uncultivated medium that can help create a dialogue between both groups.

Educators might go through Tupac to speak about Shakespeare or Style Wars to get to Van Gogh. Education could be on the verge of a much-needed revamp.

While this might be enough for now, it begs this question for the future: if Tupac can be used to teach Shakespeare, when will Tupac be used to teach Tupac?

Instead of hip-hop being used to teach other subjects, when will other subjects be used to teach hip-hop?

Illustrations by Max Gibbons.