Presidential Scholar

Hey everyone,

I arrived home last week in Huntsville, Alabama after many a close encounter at the airport(s).  My family moved to Huntsville, Alabama from Spartanburg while I was abroad which has been an interesting adjustment to yet a new environment (and trying to figure out what light switch does what in the house), but the transition has certainly been made easier by the enormous amounts of good homecooked food, and having my parents around!

My awkward conversation with border control lady:
Lady: So you were traveling?
Me: Yes ma’am
Lady: Okay, and now where are you headed?
Me: Home!!! (big smile)
Lady: Okay, what’s your home address?
Me: Er…well…about that.  Um…my family moved while I was gone but I think it’s on that sheet you have there…
Lady: ….?
Lady: ….Okay, go on through.

I also learned a valuable lesson about airline companies after I arrived at my gate to catch my third and final flight of the day, and was told that though I paid a couple hundred dollars for the ticket, I did not in fact have a seat on the flight(!)  Fortunately someone was willing to give up his seat for me and take a voucher, and I was able to make it home in time for my Mom’s birthday!

It has definitely been an adventurous five months, and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at Wofford in a few short days.  A quick recap of Ecuador:
*Transitioning into the final country proved tougher than I thought having little to no contacts in the city.
*This was compounded by a strange food illness that affected me for almost half the time I was there.
*I was able to meet with GIZ, a German government organization involved in international development (the same organization I wanted to meet up with in Chile), and got some info about a cool biofuels project they are implementing in the Galapagos.
*I got to see some really cool views of Quito and the surrounding area from the top of Pichincha and the volcano Cotopaxi! (see photos)

This semester was incredibly challenging but ultimately an unforgettable experience and I will always hold these five months dear to me.  As my semester was drawing to a close, I couldn’t help but reflect on two poignant reminders of an adventure that is drawing to a close.  The first has to do with a Portuguese word that truly encompasses all of the emotions that I felt when getting on that final plane, saudade.  Much has been made about how to translate this word into English, and the best explanation I can find is here:

http://bystander.homestead.com/Portuguese_saudade.html

The second reminder came when I was re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby.  I’m not sure what compelled me to upload this of all books onto my Kindle at the time (especially when I’m several thousand pages behind in the Game of Thrones books), but this passage struck me as entirely too relevant for anyone who has fallen in love with a place, a person, a memory, or all of the above.

“The track curved and now it was going away from the sun, which as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.”

Lastly I just want to say farewell and good luck to all the great people I met along the way, and I’m sure we will see each other again some day.  South America is a fantastic place with beautiful landscapes, friendly people, and an interesting array of different cultures, and I hope to return again someday.

Cheers,
David

At 5000 meters elevation, Cotopaxi

The love of my life in Quito, Ecuador

Home with the parents! Birthday lunch for my Mom–Happy birthday!

Hey guys,

Another country, another blog post named for the lyrics of one of my favorite songs (OK, OK, I like the Dixie Chicks).  I am writing this post in the Harare International Airport, sipping on a Coke from a glass bottle and watching planes prepare to take off from a wet runway.  My Kenya Airways flight has been delayed four hours, and I figure this was a better way to spend my time than watching episodes of the Simpsons or the Big Bang Theory on my laptop.  What can I say about Zimbabwe?  For years Zim was nothing more to me than a prime example of an African country that had sadly taken the wrong direction.  Wrecked by hyper inflation, severe economic recession, and a controversial government land grab policy that lead to the misuse of countless acres of farmland, Zimbabwe was once a shining example of a successful transition to democracy and was even called “the bread basket of Africa” at one time.  All this being said, in ignorance I wasn’t expecting to find any sign of order when I came to Zimbabwe, let alone people living normal lives and actually considering themselves optimistic about the future.

My introduction to Zim entailed flying in over the mighty Zambezi (I eventually experienced firsthand why it is called mighty when some friends of mine from South Africa and I attempted to go white water rafting.  Each rapid has a terrifying name like “The Gnashing Jaws of Death” and yes, your pants will be wet by the end of the trip) and seeing what appeared to be smoke rising from the largely flat landscape.  I would soon find when I arrived in the town of Victoria Falls that this smoke also had a constant rumbling sound accompanying it.  In an attempt to avoid misspelling the native word for the falls, I will simply say that this is why the name translates into “the smoke that thunders” (Isn’t that cool?).  While I’ll let the pictures of the falls do the talking for themselves, the town of Victoria Falls is very touristy.  You can’t walk down the main street without having at least five people try to sell you everything from carvings to Zimbabwean dollars (You can buy a whole stack for one US dollar.  The US dollar has been used for a few years here in place of the old currency and yes, using it makes me a little homesick every time I open my wallet).Yet among these merchants are really cool people.  Prince, one of the nicest guys I’ve met here, actually took my friends and I to his township where we visited with his family one afternoon.

For all its cool people and free roaming warthogs and baboons, though, I thought that Victoria Falls had to be an exception.  Surely the rest of Zimbabwe had to have been nothing but chaos.  The next town I visited was Bulawayo, the country’s second largest city located near the western border.  It was here that I met Steve Shirko, one of the contacts for my project who also turned out to be a great guy.  Steve and his entertaining family eventually treated me to Sunday lunch and drove me out to the Matopos, which was the most beautiful place in Africa I’ve visited besides the Cape (Again, I’ll let the pictures do the talking).  From Bulawayo I travelled to Masvingo by a packed beyond safety guidelines chicken bus (so called because in the rural areas chicken cages are packed on top of them, leading to the bus leaving a trail of feathers behind it).  It was here that I met Justice, a young Zimbabwean who helped me get transport out to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe simply because “he felt like helping me”.

It was people like Steve and Justice who eventually led me to seriously question my previous perceptions of Zimbabwe, and they would only be further tested by a trip to Mutare, where Africa University is located and Dr. Abercrombie and Dr. Davis have worked at one time.  It was here that I met Petra Krumpin, a German immigrant who was teaching at the university (There are so many Germans in Africa.  I visited the ruins of Great Zimbabwe with a great couple named Inca and Torbin).  Petra not only let me stay in her home for two days, but also is the foster parent of five very cool African guys around my age.  Did I also mention she gave me a ride back to Harare, a four hour trip?

Thus, I come to the end of an unusually long blog post sitting in the airport of Harare wondering how Zimbabwe has so effectively blown my mind (Harare is big by the way, the biggest city I’ve visited since Johannesburg.  It is also very well developed with several buildings built within the last decade, unlike those of Bulawayo, which admittedly look old and run down).  In seeking an answer to this question, my mind naturally drifts to my last interaction with an incredibly interesting Zimbabwean.  For now, I will just call him Trevor to protect his identity.  He had at one time been a ZANU-PF congressman and knew Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela, and Queen Elizabeth (I don’t know how or why Trevor agreed to meet with a little old American like me.  I’m just glad he did).  Being a member of ZANU-PF (the party of Robert Mugabe), Trevor and I certainly had differing viewpoints regarding Zimbabwe and America.  Yet somehow, toward the end of the conversation he and I simply focused on the future of the world and how we both undoubtedly wanted to make it a better place.  I am proud to say that Zimbabwe, therefore, has given me one of those quintessential revelations everyone seeks when studying abroad.  This seems to be that no matter how chaotic a country’s situation appears to be, simply travelling there and finding that it is full of humans with the same hopes and concerns as anyone else will do you a world of good.

Enough said.

The sun was in my eyes, but look at the rainbow!

Before rafting. So young, so ignorant of what lies ahead.

Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

The Matopos.

At the top of World’s View. I wore the orange shirt on purpose.

Yeah, I could build a house there.

In front of the Great Enclosure, the second largest ancient stone structure in Africa (if you count all the pyramids as one site). I’m a geek when it comes to ancient ruins.

Mutare, on the border of Mozambique.

Street shot of bustling Harare.

Hey guys,

Yes, while it’s the name of a Dixie Chicks song which I have totally never listened to, it’s also the name of my official blog post on Botswana, more specifically Gaborone, where I spent most of my time.  After travelling into the night on a packed bus from Joburg, I would eventually cross the border and enter the limits of the one-time trading station turned capital city around midnight.  The trip had been seven hours from the rocky Gauteng Province to the largely flat, outer Kalahari.  My first impression of Botswana would be delivered by none other than the friendly family of a member of the Botswana Parliament, Odirile Motlhale, with which I would be staying my entire time in Gaborone.  Living in a beautiful two story house with satellite TV and air conditioning, the Motlhales immediately painted a picture for me of an African country on the rise.  While I understand that this was obviously the privileged family of a member of parliament, Odirile Motlhale was a Botswana success story before pursuing political office, having worked his way up from almost nothing to being a managing director at Mascom, a local cell phone company.  It would be this feeling of a country and a people on the rise that largely permeated my experience in Bots and Gabs (as the locals call them).

That being said, Gabs is pretty small for a capital city, about the size of Greenville, SC, at least for now.  Walking its streets can almost be surreal, as there can be a beautiful, modern government building on one block and then thick, undeveloped bush occupying the next. Except for the immediate downtown area around Parliament, the city from the air must look almost like a checkerboard of urban construction in some spaces and wild, open real estate elsewhere.  Yet Gabs is officially one of the fastest growing cities in the world.  Everywhere one looks a construction crane can be found with what are most likely Chinese contractors developing the spaces beneath them.  Bulldozers help make the brownish-red earth flat as the city population mostly walks to work on wide, endless, and unmarked streets that almost remind someone of those old antebellum American paintings where the human figures seem to get impossibly small as the eye is drawn toward the city centers of Boston or Charleston.

Gaborone and Botswana are not without their share of problems, however.  While the capital city is fast-developing, the country as a whole is suffering from one of the fastest desertification rates in the world as the Kalahari, like the Sahara and many other deserts, expand.  Mr. Motlhale informed me upon arrival that Botswana had been getting less and less rainfall for the past ten years.  Moreover, although Bots consistently ranks as one of Africa’s top countries in terms of economic and political performance, many of its citizens often get frustrated with the fact that this can cause the world and indeed their own government to overlook problems associated with human rights and, like many African countries, a massive problem with HIV-AIDS.  Finally, Botswana is largely dependent on its neighbors, with most of its businesses coming from South Africa (stores like Pick ‘n Pay and Wimpy) and much of its professional workforce coming from Zimbabwe.

However, the case is made here that it is still in the hands of the Botswana people to decide the fate of their rising country.  One of the coolest people I have met on this trip was Kago Motlhale, the thirteen year old son of Mr. Motlhale who was already almost as tall as me and was a local champion at the hundred meter dash and basketball.  Kago and I not only bonded over Monday Night Football on satellite TV and our love of all things Drake, but also his future plans as I filled out my own law school applications.  One day, when walking to the local petrol station to get a new supply of groceries and discussing whether Usain Bolt had ever actually tried his hardest in any world race, Kago decided that he wanted to race to the end of a street, to see if he could beat me (he had been noticing that I was loosely training for the 1500, since it’s really hard to practice shot put and discus in an African urban environment).  Reluctantly, I agreed, knowing that this kid, much like a young Usain Bolt himself, had much more sprinting power than me.  When he had beaten me by a smaller than expected margin (a positive for me), Kago congratulated me on a good race and told me, “that’s the thing about Tswana people (in Botswana, there is no official policy of multiculturalism.  If you are a citizen of the state, you are automatically a Tswana), even if you had beaten me, it’s the competition that we love.  It’s how we get better”.  For now, I can only hope that this attitude is shared by many young Tswana as the country faces more challenges.  If it is, Botswana has a lot of room to move even faster in the future.

A typical street in Gaborone.

The Attorney General’s Building. Typical of the new architecture popping up around the city.

Parliament and the House of Chiefs. (No photos inside, sadly).

Shops near Parliament and downtown.

Kago and I.

Why, hello there Chris and Brian.  This blog just got all kinds of international!

It’s been almost a month since my last post, so I’ll hit you guys with the highs and lows of Argentina and my start in Chile.  First off, Argentina:
*Met up with fellow Wofford student Sandra!  It was awesome seeing someone from back home, and even better on Election Day.
*Made some really great friends.  Missin’ my hostel buddies Team Sweden and Thile (Germany)!
*Learned that the quickest means to achieving world peace is actually quite simple.  Just serve empanadas everywhere and at low prices.  This I am sure of.  I titled my blog after Empanadas because I was averaging about two or three a day in Argentina…(>_<)
*Got pick-pocketed on the subway.  *sigh.
*Set a new personal best for extended travel time taking the bus to Iguazú (it ended up being around 20 hours).  P.S.  Don’t go with Expreso Singer.  Just trust me on this one.
*Visited the hydropower facility Itaipu (and was temporarily in Brazil and Paraguay).  This means that within a span of several hours I visited three countries!  An interesting Thanksgiving Day to say the least.
*Said sad farewells to my host family in Buenos Aires.  I lived with a couple and their daughters/grandchildren.  When I first arrived the granddaughter (2 years old) was terrified of me, which made for some hilarious situations at the dinner table.  Alas, had to say goodbye just when she had mustered up enough courage to say “hola” to me.

And now Chile:
*Got to see two  more Wofford buddies (shout-out to Kirsten and Ashleigh)
*Overcame initial awkwardness with the host family due to language barriers
*Trying to get in touch with some companies here, preparing for a trip south to Patagonia, and preparing summer applications.  To all the math/science undergraduates out there…it is officially application season!

Side note:  There are a lot of great paid internships available for math and science majors interested in getting some research experience over the summer.  I have had the opportunity to complete projects in Washington at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as well as at South Dakota State University.  I wouldn’t trade any of those experiences for anything, and met a lot of cool people along the way that I still keep in touch with.  For more information, contact me directly or check out these links:

Most deadlines are around mid-January, but professor recommendations are needed and should be requested as soon as possible.

http://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/reu/reu_search.cfm  : NSF REU Site
http://science.energy.gov/wdts/suli/  : Department of Energy funded internships
http://www.daad.de/rise/en/ : Internships in Germany (how cool is that?)

Photo time.

Anyone want to ride the subway today?

Iguazú Falls! Definitely worth a 20 hour bus ride.

Blue World – Brazilian Side of the Falls

Woco nation!

Itaipu! I would need three more photos to get all of the dam.

Welcome, Santiago.

Cheers,
David

Hello and thanks for checking out my blog. My name is Chris Bourean, a 21 year old senior majoring in Biology & Finance at Wofford and an inaugural Presidential Global Studies Scholar for the upcoming year. My project for Presidential Scholar hopes to examine the differences in public health infrastructure in developing countries with a comparison of the effects of public vs. private contributions in improving overall health for citizens. In short, given the current delicate nature of economies the world over, I’m hoping to discover how NGOs are working more efficiently and effectively to maximize their change with such minimal budgets. While this task is certainly formidable, with enough patience and persistence, I’m sure I will get some answers.

My project has already taken me to India and I’m currently in Cape Town, South Africa. In time, I will catch up everyone on my travels through the Indian subcontinent but rest assured the data coming out of my interviews has certainly been enlightening and this trip has been an eye-opening experience so far and it’s only just beginning…