2. CONTENTS
From the Editor
On June 4th of last year I
packed two suitcases, shoved
a bottle of sunscreen in a
Ziploc bag and headed to
the airport. I would fly into
a rickety runway set be-
tween sprawling Montana
mountains, and I would stay
between those beacons for 10
weeks — like it or not.
Moments after I learned
my luggage had been lost by
the airline, I found the other
summer interns for Project
Vote Smart, a non-partisan
political research retreat
housed on the Great Di-
vide Ranch, a small campus
of beautifully constructed
cabins and buildings made to
help volunteers rebuild the
structure of democracy with
factual information about
our politicians. We gathered
in a white van and began the
two-hour drive to the remote
ranch; a place where only the
office had Internet and cell-
phone service was a memory
of the outside. In that car, I
met my family.
One woman, a Baptist who
called Louisiana home, asked
a fellow intern if she was
possessed by the devil when
she mentioned her girlfriend.
Another intern, a D.C. native
with eyes that gloss when he
explains his parents run his
family like a business, believes
the world should rightfully
be run by rich men, and rich
men alone. Yet another was
fresh off a semester in Is-
rael with a disdain for those
outside his faith. And still an-
other said his thick skin came
from the taunts of school-
children and their parents to
an Arab-American after the
tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. All
the same, we all declared the
summer to be our best yet.
We called the ability to live
with our differences — and
discuss them openly — the
“magic of paradise.” But it
was more than that. It was a
willingness to hear each out,
to keep an open mind and to
move on, even when moving
on sometimes seemed like
selling out your ideas.
Working in Montana
taught me that people will
understand each other if they
know each other’s stories.
We all play our specific roles
in society and we need each
other to get by. Further, writ-
ers are the tour guides to this
new world view.
I hope to dedicate my time
to writing about the times
when our paths cross and when
we’re looking to be a part of
something more than our-
selves.Thus, “Common Paths.”
This magazine is a collection of
stories about the people who
are working to make the world
flow a bit more smoothly and
who have washed ashore in
Ithaca, NY. Enjoy.
— Shea O’Meara
FredWilcox
THEWRITER
TenzinChoesang
THE PEACEMAKER
2
4
6
9
T
hough Fred Wilcox,
associate professor
of writing, was too
old to be drafted into the
Vietnam War and didn’t set
foot on Vietnamese soil until
long after the dueling nations
ceased fire, memories of the
war’s victims drive his career.
Wilcox’s newest book,
“Scorched Earth: Legacies of
Chemical Warfare in Viet-
nam,” is the first to complete-
ly chronicle the effects of the
United States’ use of chemical
weaponry on the Vietnamese
people. With an introduction
by anti-war activist Noam
Chomsky, “Scorched Earth”
comes 50 years after the U.S.
began using Agent Orange,
a powerful herbicide manu-
factured for the Department
of Defense. Now, more than
three million people face
chronic illnesses traced to the
chemical.
Published in September by
Seven Stories Press, the pub-
lication coincides with the
re-release of Wilcox’s 1983
book on the subject, “Wait-
ing For An Army to Die: The
Tragedy of Agent Orange,”
the first book to reveal the
effects of the chemical.
Wilcox’s inspiration to
fight against the injustices of
international combat came
during a visit to a military
hospital in 1967.
While living on the streets
of New York City, Wilcox
learned his cousin was ex-
pected to die in St. Albans, a
hospital for soldiers wounded
during war. He said walking
through the ward to meet
THEWRITER
AgentforChange
Writingby
SheaO’Meara
Photographyby
PaigeKlingerman
FredWilcox,associate professor of writing at Ithaca College,recently published a chronicle of the use ofAgent Orange.
SaraFitouri
THETEACHER
OlivaRowe
THEADVOCATE
1 2
3. THEPEACEMAKER
LeapofFaith
Writingby
SheaO’Meara
Photographyby
RachelOrlow
A
t 14 years old,Tenzin
Choesang said what
would be his last
words to his parents for more
than a decade and set foot on
a three-month trek from Tibet
to Nepal.
“Our area didn’t have any
schools, most students my age
didn’t have an opportunity to
study,” he said. “I wanted to
learn something, but in my
area, there was no chance to
learn anything, so I decided to
escape.”
While leaving his family
was difficult, Choesang said
stories of India and a chance to
meet the Dalai Lama drove his
decision to get away.
He came across the Namg-
yal Monastery in India, a Bud-
dhist center constructed by the
second Dalai Lama in Tibet
in the 16th century that was
abandoned in 1959 when the
Chinese government caused
the Dalai Lama and 100,000
monks to flee Tibet. Later,
the refugees reestablished the
monastery in India.
Choesang began the tradi-
Tenzin Choesang,head monk of the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies,stands in the monastery’s main room.
FredWilcox holds a child suffering from chemical warfare in Ho Chi Minh City,Vietnam.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FREDWILCOX
his cousin was like walking into a Walt
Whitman creation. Soldiers were tied to
beds with ropes and cloth and screamed
in agony. After listening to the stories of
the mentally ill veterans in the ward and
being asked not to join the war effort by
his cousin, a soldier of 19 years, Wilcox
became an anti-war activist.
“At that point, I made up my mind
and decided that as long as I lived I
was never going to stop talking about
the Vietnam War,” he said. “I was never
going to stop trying to get the United
States to admit what it did. This book is
the outcome of that vow that I made.”
Wilcox said he wrote the book to
raise awareness about the effects of
Agent Orange on soldiers from both
sides of the conflict and to show the
damage war has on the environment and
public health. The real solution, he said,
is to understand the lasting implications
of releasing biological weapons into the
air.
“Look at Vietnam and look at the
pictures in my book, because by not
looking at these people you’re in denial
about your country and the peril you
face,” he said.
For his first book, Wilcox traveled
around the U.S. to speak with doc-
tors and veterans to gather research.
To complete “Scorched Earth,” which
focuses on the Vietnamese people rather
than mostly American veterans, he spent
time in Vietnamese towns and children’s
hospitals.
His son Brendan Wilcox, a profes-
sional photographer and writer, joined
him in Vietnam to take the pictures
featured in the novel.
Brendan said he wanted to be a part
of the project, but seeing the deformed
and sickly children in Vietnamese hospi-
tals often made him physically ill, and he
sometimes missed interviews because he
had trouble dealing with the suffering.
“One of the hardest things for me
was a photograph of this kid who looks
like a skeleton,” he said. “He’s laying
on his bed and he was the same age as
me. All I could think was this kid could
never leave the house. He’ll never have
a girlfriend, he’ll never have kids, he’ll
never do anything.”
He said he continued working on the
project because he believed in the cause
and thought it could help people under-
stand the lasting effects of war.
“We have this view that we’re these
great liberators, that we go to places and
we liberate them and we’re done,” he
said. “But it’s much more than that.”
Jeff Cohen, associate professor of
journalism and director of the Park
Center for Independent Media, was
asked to review “Scorched Earth” for
Seven Stories Press. He said the book
is a crucial addition to the discussion of
Agent Orange.
“People should react by saying to the
government in Washington, ‘What are
we doing to make up for what we did to
the Vietnamese?’” he said.
Seven Stories Press is known for its
literature on human rights and social
and economic justice. Assistant Editor
Gabriel Espinal worked with Wilcox
to complete the novel. Espinal said this
book can help bring more attention to
the issue.
“Before I read ‘Scorched Earth’ I had
images of sick people, but I didn’t have
a very concrete idea of what that sick-
ness entailed or that it was ongoing,” he
said.
Wilcox said this book isn’t the end of
his research on the effects of chemical
warfare because of people like his friend
William Crapsur, a veteran who was
crippled by exposure to Agent Orange.
“I’ve met these people who refuse to
give up,” he said. “They inspired me to
keep going.”
“Look atVietnam and
look at the pictures in
my book, because by not
looking at these people
you’re in denial about
your country and the
peril you face ”
—FREDWILCOX
3 4
4. The Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist,a Buddhist retreat,onAurora Street in Ithaca.
COURTESY OF THE NAMGYAL MONASTERY
THEADVOCATE
InLovingMemory
Writingby
SheaO’Meara
Photographyby
RachelOrlow
I
n April of her junior
year of high school,
Olivia Rowe brought
a plastic bag into a hallway
bathroom and tied it over her
head to stop her breathing.
She thought she wanted to kill
herself.
“I had my hand on the stall,
so if I passed out the door
would open,” she said. “I real-
ized I didn’t really want to die.”
After nearly 20 minutes of
waiting in the stall, she left to
seek help.
Rowe had emailed her high
school guidance counselor for
help earlier that year, but felt
her therapy program wasn’t
helping her overcome her de-
pression quickly enough. She
continued to battle depres-
sion and began cutting herself
after watching an episode of
Ithaca College junior Olivia Rowe works to help prevent youth suicide through new youth-based outreach programs.
tional path to becoming a monk: long days
of studying scripture and philosophy that
began in the morning and ended at 9 p.m.,
unless a monk was behind in his studies. In
that case a day could last until 10:30 p.m.
“When we joined the monastery we
had more than 40 or 50 students, so every
day was competition,” he said. “I really put
in too much effort. Sometimes I woke up
around 2 o’clock in the morning to start
class and memorize scriptures,” he said.
After more than two years and two
months of intense study, Choesang gradu-
ated from the monastery. He wrote his
parents a letter to tell them he had become
a monk in India; they had lived without
communication for more than 10 years.
Without a modern postal service, it took
that letter about seven months to reach his
parents, who were still living in Tibet.
“When they got my letter they said it
was like a dream,” he said. “My father is
really sensitive, very emotional. He was
crying. My mother is very tough. She
never cried.”
Choesang became a teacher at the mon-
astery in India. He said most monks don’t
have outside connections Tibetans who live
in the country are very poor, so the monas-
tery didn’t have television or radio.
“Most of us had a difficult time,” Choe-
sang said. “We don’t have any parents or
relatives; we just focus on our studies.”
Before he traveled to the United States,
Choesang learned to speak English from
a New Zealand native who worked at the
monastery. She refused to teach the monks
to write in English because, Choesang said,
“maybe the monks would write love letters.”
Two years ago, the board of directors in
India told him it was his time to travel to
the Ithaca branch of the monastery to teach
Buddhist philosophy and guide the
monastery’s members to lead a better life.
Choesang is learning to write in English,
but promises no love letters are in his future.
Now, Choesang is the head monk of the
Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist
Studies, the North American seat and per-
sonal monastery of the Dalai Lama, located
on North Aurora Street in Ithaca.
At the center, he begins each day
with an hour of Buddhist practice, leads
meditation at Cornell University and then
works with the residents who have sought
his spiritual advice. A monk’s life isn’t easy,
but he says it’s worth it.
“I help people generate more compas-
sion [and] lead a happy life,” he said.
“Ngawang Dhondup, administrator
of the Namgyal Monastery in Ithaca,
organizes the teaching schedules for the
monastery and plans the monks’ days. He
left Tibet with his family in 1959 to escape
a likely death at the hands of the Chinese
government to become a refugee in India.
His family left with other Tibetans to
preserve the Tibetan culture and traditions.
Tibetans living near Ithaca gather at the
monastery to keep their home culture alive.
“Right now Tibet is being occupied by
the Chinese,” he said. “Inside Tibet people
are not allowed to speak; there are no hu-
man rights.There is no religious freedom.
We heard three days back, more than 32
people have been shot by Chinese police.”
The monastery serves as a place for
people to come together to express their
desires for Tibetan independence.
“It is the responsibility of the Tibetan
people, who are staying in a free country,
to voice their rights so that the world’s
people — especially the United States’
people — can know what is being done by
the Chinese government.”
Choesang meets with other local
spiritual leaders to help find a connection
between the faiths. He said promoting
religious harmony in Ithaca and working
with people outside the Buddhist commu-
nity is important because it is one of the
Dalai Lama’s messages.
“If we look closely, there are no big
differences between Buddhists, Christians
and Muslims. We’re the same,” Choesang
said. “Every religion tells people how to
lead a good life, how to care for other hu-
man beings.”
Amy Spenciner, a student at the mon-
astery, said finding the Buddhist com-
munity and monks at Namgyal helped her
overcome the stress and emotional distress
caused by her career as a social worker
specializing in emotionally troubled youth.
“I got kind of a sense of peacefulness,
but the way Buddhism works is that you
really work with your mind and your
thoughts,” she said. “It felt very non-judg-
mental being here, and it felt like what I
was looking for.”
Dhondup said the mission of the
monastery is to educate rather than
change peoples’ opinions, and everyone is
welcome.
“To study at the monastery, one should
not be a Buddhist,” he said. “It’s not
important to change your religion. What
is good is to study Buddhism and be good
to you friends, your community and your
neighbors.”
5 6
5. Olivia Rowe and Brittany Helton pose together the summer before she passed away.
PHOTO BY RACHEL ORLOW
Degrassi, a popular teen drama, which featured a character who
struggled with cutting. Now a junior at Ithaca College, Rowe
continued to struggle with cutting during her first years as a col-
lege student.
Rowe said she thinks people tend to cut themselves for two
reasons: Either they have emotional pain they need to get out,
or they are trying to distract themselves by thinking about
physical pain instead. For her, deciding to cut came from a
desire to do both.
“There was one point freshman year [at IC] that I ran laps
around my building because I had all this anxious energy,”
she said. “I tore up magazines to try to get it out, and nothing
worked. I had always known that cutting was harmful, but I
didn’t care.”
Rowe said leaving her troubles at home to go to college and
having the freedom to act on her own helped her realize that
she wasn’t trapped in her difficult day-to-day life.
“The thing that I got stuck with in high school was that I
never really saw the better part of life,” she said. “That’s where
people who contemplate suicide get stuck, because they don’t
think things get better and that they’re always going to live like
that.”
Now, Rowe works with the Suicide Prevention and Crisis
Service of Ithaca to raise awareness about suicide and preven-
tion in the community.
“People who are considering suicide often feel very much
alone,” she said. “If you know of other
people in that situation, or there are other
people around who have gone through
that same thing, it helps.”
According to the American Foundation
for Suicide Prevention, every 14.2 min-
utes someone in the United States dies by
suicide. In 2009 about 36,909 people took
their own lives, 4,371 of those dead were
between the ages of 15 and 24 years old.
But for Rowe, her own suicide attempt
isn’t her only connection to the issue. On
Aug. 4, 2010, Rowe received a phone call
from the sister of her best friend, Brittany
Helton, telling her that 19-year-old Brit-
tany had killed herself. At the time, Rowe
had been waiting for Helton to text her
back so the friends could spend the day
together.
“I didn’t know my friend had struggled
with anything I had struggled with at all,”
she said. “She would make anyone happy,
which I found out later was one of the
reasons why she didn’t tell anyone — be-
cause she felt too much pressure to act the
way everyone had always seen her and to
be the one who was always full of life and
the one who makes everything better.”
Christie Helton, Helton’s adoptive
mother, said Rowe and her daughter were
like the Olsen twins growing up, “funny
and carefree.” Helton was a dean’s list stu-
dent in college with a family and group of
friends who loved her. Helton did not fit
the stereotype of a suicidal teen, Christie
Helton said.
“It doesn’t just happen to kids who
come from a broken home or kids that
come from ‘lower class society,’ as they call
it, or kids with drug problems,” Christie
Helton said.
After their daughter’s death, her parents
founded the Brittany Helton Memorial
Foundation, an organization that promotes
awareness about suicide and honors Hel-
ton’s life.
“College kids and high school students
relate to younger people,” Christie Helton
said. “With the work she’s doing we’re able
to utilize her to get through to the kids,
telling her own story and telling Brittany’s
story.”
Rowe said the shock of losing her
friend and standing by as Brittany’s family
and friends mourned their loss helped her
overcome her own thoughts of suicide.
“Watching everyone go through that
pain and thinking, ‘How could she have
done this?’ just turned me around,” she
said.
Rowe recently developed the proj-
ect “Unspoken Stories: The Tragedy of
Suicide,” a series of photographs posted on
Facebook that shows her struggle with los-
ing her best friend to suicide. She said she
and her colleagues at the Ithaca prevention
center were inspired by a series of Tum-
blr blogs that told stories of people who
thought they had no voice to express their
personal hardships through photo strips of
them holding signs.
She said the project is part of an ef-
fort to make resources more accessible to
young people that includes an expanded
social media presence and online chat
forums.
“People don’t really call on the phone
anymore and talk to people,” she said. “So
how many are really going to want to call
the crisis line?
Lidia Bernik, associate project direc-
tor of the National Suicide Prevention
Lifeline, said the lifeline has 152 crisis
centers across the United States and works
to connect people considering suicide to
local resources. Part of this mission is a
partnership with Facebook that makes it
possible for users to report content they
think represents signs of suicide. Facebook
administrators evaluate a reported post
and send the user information about the
lifeline if the content is shown to warrant
that action. Currently, the lifeline is run-
ning a pilot program that offers profes-
sional assistance to people by online chat
“We feel that there is certainly a role
for technology in assisting folks in need,”
Bernik said. “It’s just become a very
normal means of communication.There
is some evidence to suggest that people
feel more comfortable disclosing sensitive
information via electronic means.”
Though talking about Helton makes
some of her friends uncomfortable,
Rowe said it’s important that her friend’s
memory be preserved and used to prevent
other people from making the same pain-
ful decisions.
“[My friends] don’t talk about her that
much because they’re like, ‘It makes us
sad to even talk about the good things,’”
she said. “But it’s helpful, and I think she
should be remembered.”
To learn more about Rowe’s work
with suicide prevention, visit facebook.
com/pages/Suicide-Prevention-and-
Crisis-Services/361595137186509.
Olivia Rowe created a Facebook album of photos to tell her story
and reach out to young people who struggle with suicide.
7 8
6. PHOTO BY RACHEL ORLOW
THETEACHER
LessonsfromtheWestBank
Writingby
SheaO’Meara
Photographyby
RachelOrlow
Palestinian girls make cards for their mothers at with aTeach for Palestine school.
PHOTO COURTESTY OF SARA FITOURI
A
s then-junior Sara Fi-
touri stood in front of
a class of Palestinian
girls, a sudden explosion shook
the windows and made her ears
rattle.The students continued
their work. For them, it was
normal.
Fitouri spent the spring of
her junior year in Nablus, Pal-
estine, as a volunteer for Teach
for Palestine, an organization
that provides free English
language and sports lessons to
Palestinian youth. In that time,
she learned to ignore the sound
bombs hitting the streets.
She was offered a job with
the organization through
friends she met visiting Nablus,
but wasn’t sure she could do it.
As a child in Colorado, she was
taught to believe Palestinians
were her brothers and sisters
by her father, a Muslim born
in Libya. But turning away
from the traditional path of an
American student — getting a
diploma, then a job or a higher
degree — was difficult because
it wasn’t what was expected of
her.
“I wasn’t going to have
another opportunity to do
this,” she said. “Even though it
meant telling my mother that
‘Hi, your daughter’s running
off into a conflict zone,’ it’s
something I knew I wouldn’t
have been happy with myself if
I didn’t do.”
On her first day of work at
the girls’ high school in Nablus,
she saw a 20-foot wall with an
additional 10-foot-high chain-
link fence decorated with
ivy surrounding the school
building and yard. A security
guard stood watch outside. Only women
are allowed inside the gates, so the 12- to
15-year-old girls could escape the burdens
on Muslim women in the city.
“It’s this incredible free zone where I
didn’t have to be worried about what guys
are watching me on the streets,” she said.
“On the streets, [women] have to be very
poised and covered.”
Helen Brooks, assistant director of
Teach for Palestine, said some of the
female volunteers struggle with being
harassed on the street because women are
expected to be either at home or work.
“Girls around here, particularly high
school girls, are discouraged from play-
ing sports and being confident — all the
things Sara really likes and encourages
them to do,” she said.
For Fitouri, teaching wasn’t about help-
ing the students build language skills —
most of the girls won’t be allowed to leave
the country or be able to afford a college
degree.
“I had some concerns with what I
was teaching them,” she said. “It wasn’t
my place to go in and say, ‘Yeah, liberate
yourselves,” Fitouri said. “I just wanted to
understand, and I wanted them to under-
stand me.”
She said part of getting to know her
students was seeing the violence they lived
with every day. While traveling outside
of the city, she saw 18-year-olds car-
rying rifles, and the people around her
didn’t think twice. She flinched as fighter
airplanes roared above of her school, but
her students didn’t look. Martyr post-
ers plastered the walls of buildings, and a
nearby cemetery was constantly filled with
fresh flowers and pictures of children.
“Nablus was hit the hardest during
the last intifada,” Fitouri said. “They were
massacred, so it’s like you don’t meet
someone who doesn’t have somebody dead
in their family.”
She said seeing how the money the
U.S. sent Israel as foreign aid was used
to oppress her students and their families
made her question the importance of her
work in the classroom.
“It seems so contrite and fake to be like,
‘I taught them English,’” she said. “Who
cares? My tax dollars, my own personal tax
dollars, have undone any good that I could
have done.”
In the classroom, Fitouri taught her
students the few American songs she
could find that were appropriate for
her Muslim classroom. She decided her
students would learn “I Am Woman” by
Helen Reddy.
“Every time they were singing ‘I am
woman, hear me roar,’ I was forgetting
for a few moments the pain I was in or,
for a few moments having a connection
with them,” she said. “I was the big, strong
teacher who would never fail and never
fall, and was there to hug them when they
needed to cry. I needed that class more
than they ever did.”
The day before her three-month visa
expired, Fitouri left Nablus. One student
gave her a pouch with a Palestinian flag-
shaped necklace, and letter that read, “I
love you so much, I know you’ll probably
forget me, but I’ll never forget you. Always
remember Palestine.”
Fitouri said her co-workers, like her,
wanted to do something in Palestine other
than simply teach English. Some came to
escape student debt, some were looking
for a distraction after a personal disaster
and some were so disillusioned with their
country’s policies they chose to leave.
“It wasn’t the satisfaction of volunteer-
ing and the ‘self sacrifice’ we could claim
out teaching,” she said. “They needed to
get away from something or they needed
to find something.”
Fitouri’s father, Ezzedin, noticed she
had changed when she came home. He
said she was more mature and grateful for
what she has.
“I can see it in her face that she really
loved them,” he said. “I’m so proud of her.”
Fitouri continues her Palestinian
adventure on campus as a teaching as-
sistant for Beth Harris, associate professor
of politics. She helps to facilitate Skype
conversations and shares blogs between
students at the college and students from
a university in Nablus next to where she
lived.The initiative is part of a partner-
ship between Harris and Peyi Soyinka-
Airewele, associate professor of politics,
which focuses on connecting classrooms
around the world.
“When we’re learning, we make as-
sumptions about the given understand-
ings that our knowledge is based on,”
Harris said. “Reaching beyond borders
creates a greater self-consciousness
among the students, both individually
and collectively.”
Fitouri said working in Palestine made
her see the conflict as more than a policy
debate or a foreign issue.
“It’s not this abstract Jews versus
Muslims, and Palestinians versus Israelis,”
Fitouri said. “As much as people want to
declare themselves neutral, if you’re not
speaking out against the occupation, then
you’re, by default, supporting it.”
9 10
