A Reason to Believe (7 page)

That decision carries risk. It is easier to follow someone else’s star, some well-worn and recognized path. Strangers and loved ones alike question nonconformists and often true independence itself. But I have come to love taking risks, even those that seem to defy all logic. Once you take personal responsibility for your choices, once you let your values lead you, the journey itself—be it through an unfamiliar school or on a campaign trail—can be wondrous. Eventually you’ll connect with those who share your vision. You’ll find or form a community of those with similar values. And that is reward enough. Leaping into the unknown can be enriching beyond measure if, as Poppy would say, you “remember who you are and what you represent.”

Dean Jeremy Knowles used to tell a story about a sculpture in Harvard Yard, by the renowned British artist Henry Moore, which sits on the green next to Lamont Library. “Standing in front of it on the path or gazing at it from the library, it looks pretty lumpy,” he would say to incoming freshmen. “A bunch of massive golden shapes, quite attractive, but meaningless, and mostly good for photographing small children in. But go out of the gate onto Quincy Street and turn left, and look back through the thirty-fourth gap in the second set of railings. Suddenly you will see a splendid and voluptuous work.”

He’d ask the students, “What’s the moral?” His answer: If you don’t understand something, the reason may be that you are simply standing in the wrong place. “So if you don’t understand a theorem in physics or a passage from
Ulysses
or a Schoenberg trio or your roommate’s politics, remember Henry Moore,” he’d say, “and try a new perspective.”

My move from the South Side to Milton had given me some insight into Dean Knowles’s point. Though less jarring, so had the transition from Milton to Harvard. I had learned how culture explains why people sometimes draw different conclusions from the same information, and I continued to be fascinated by the complexities of what unites us and what divides us. I’ve always tried to be a student of humanity, which required a much broader horizon, an unpredictable canvas, an exposure to disparate environments, ideas, and perspectives. I decided I needed more practice at understanding and transcending differences, and I needed it before launching a career.

I was also not quite sure exactly what career I wanted. That was not unusual for college graduates in 1978, but less so for Harvard graduates. My classmates were driven and focused, with careers and, in many cases, pathways through life that already seemed set in stone. They were on their way to medical school or graduate school or jobs in finance, industry, or the arts. I was more flexible. Business school seemed like a good option because I liked management,
but I was really not strong enough in math to be a compelling candidate. Nor was I ready to commit to law school, which one friend described as “the great sloth bin of the undecided.” I considered a calling in the clergy and even filled out an application for Union Seminary in New York. But I wasn’t certain about that path either.

Another possibility arose when a career counselor told me about the Michael Clark Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship. Michael was the son of Nelson Rockefeller, the former vice president and governor of New York. After graduating from Harvard, Michael went on to explore the anthropology of New Guinea and brought home extraordinary artifacts and information about the Papuan people. He also wrote beautifully about how the experience had affected him personally. Tragically, and under unclear circumstances, he perished on a return trip to New Guinea. In his memory, his family established the fellowship to enable an individual to spend a year in a distinctly non-Western culture. It embodied the virtues of discovery and perspective that had become important to me, so I applied. The stipend itself was just enough money to get there and back—presumably so no one could move into an Intercontinental Hotel. For fellows, the bracing realities of Third World countries would not include room service. The point was to make your way in unfamiliar settings.

Applicants had to stipulate where they wanted to travel and why. Having never been overseas, I had no frame of reference. I chose Sudan because I had written
about it when interning at banks in New York and Boston during the summers in college. More than twenty years later, Sudan, and Darfur in particular, would be known for its bloody civil war, which led to one of the worst humanitarian disasters in memory. But when I was applying for the fellowship, all I knew was that Sudan was the largest country in Africa as well as the poorest. It was in many ways still “uncharted” and a focus of increasing attention from international development lenders. I was curious about the impact of economic development on cultural and social norms and who takes responsibility for the disruption of those norms. It was enough to earn me an interview.

I met with the selection committee in a small basement conference room at the career center. The chair, a tall, distinguished anthropology professor with bushy gray brows and deep crow’s-feet that framed his eyes, seemed skeptical but amused. He quizzed me about my personal story and observed that I had already adjusted to an unfamiliar culture by coming to Milton Academy from the South Side of Chicago. True enough, I said, but I wanted to stretch my boundaries even further and was committed to exploring a truly foreign land. At the end of the interview, paraphrasing Pasteur, he said, “Chance favors the well prepared.” Well prepared or not, I got my chance.

As a Rockefeller fellow, I was responsible for creating much of my own program, and that meant finding an employer.
I wrote to everyone I knew with a contact in Africa, specifically in Sudan. Relief agencies, banks, universities, volunteer organizations—you name it. I sent scores of letters and received one reply. A man who worked for a United Nations Development Programme project in Khartoum wrote a friendly letter saying that he was not sure what I would do when I got there, but he would figure it out and I should come. I set about applying for my first passport, arranging for the necessary visas, getting the inoculations, buying a backpack, and figuring out how to fit a year’s worth of clothing and personal effects into it.

Meanwhile, Will Speers had just finished his junior year at Princeton and was making summer plans. Now that I would be taking my first trip overseas, we decided to spend the summer together, trekking around England and Scotland, before I ventured on to Africa. Will had visited England with his family a few years before and had a passing familiarity with parts of it. Its culture was different from America’s, but not radically so. At least everyone spoke a language that sounded familiar, so starting there would make a smoother transition for my year abroad.

Before we left, the admissions director at Milton told us that a young student from Edinburgh would be coming to spend a year at the school, sight unseen, and asked us to stop by his family’s home and answer any questions they might have. When we arrived in Edinburgh, we contacted Ian and Esme Walker, whose son, Angus, would be the lucky new Miltonian. Though Angus was away,
his parents promptly invited us to lunch at their grand, eighteenth-century manor house in the “old” section of town, and that led to a lifelong friendship. We had six weeks like that: befriending strangers, seeing the sights, figuring out how to drive on the wrong side of the road, and managing the currency.

But at summer’s end, Will flew home, and Sudan was staring me in the face. As I saw him off from Heathrow, I suddenly realized that I was on my own, and I was momentarily overwhelmed.

“One foot in front of the other,” I whispered to myself. “One foot in front of the other.”

Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, sits at the confluence of the Blue and White Niles, and it was hard to get to in those days. The flight from London made numerous stops and was expensive. A gradual introduction to life on the African continent seemed to make more sense. My correspondent at the UNDP was expecting me anytime in September, so why not take the long way, via Cairo? The cheapest route to Cairo went through Athens. So I flew there and spent several days walking around that extraordinary city, seeing the sights and waiting for the weekly flight to Egypt’s capital. It was the first time I had been alone in a place where nothing was familiar—not the language, the signs, the food, or the surroundings. I was scared and excited at the same time. I don’t think I slept at all.

The flight from Athens was delayed, so we landed in Cairo late at night. The airport was apparently closed.
Ill-tempered immigration officials flanked by gruff soldiers with black metal machine guns checked passports and visas. On the other side of the checkpoint was pure chaos. Crowds of waiting men were screaming at the baggage handlers. The baggage handlers were screaming at the passengers. The passengers were screaming at the taxi drivers. The guards were screaming at the crowds and trying to hold them back. It was madness in at least two languages. What had I gotten myself into?

I had memorized a handful of Arabic greetings and numbers from a phrase book during the flight. When I stepped up to present my passport, I screwed up my courage and said,
“Salaam alaikum,”
the most traditional Arabic greeting. The sullen official, sitting there in his black beret and dull green uniform, complete with epaulets, looked again at my American passport and back at me with surprise and smiled broadly, revealing brown-stained teeth under his black mustache. He replied heartily,
“Alaikum salaam.”
Chattering away in Arabic, he left his post, despite the long line of passengers behind me, to help me claim my backpack and push through the crowd to the curb. He then hailed one of the decrepit taxis and spoke to the driver. He seemed to be admonishing the driver not to take advantage of me. I felt reassured. I didn’t know where I was going and had no idea what the man actually said, but gestures of kindness need no translation.

I didn’t have a plan. I couldn’t afford to check into a big Western-style hotel, and it wasn’t in the spirit of the
fellowship anyway. So, using my phrase book and a guidebook called
Africa on the Cheap
, or something like that, I asked the driver to take me to a cheap hotel downtown. At least I think that’s what I asked him. We lurched from the curb and headed to the center of the city, the springs in the shabby seat poking me in the butt, and the thin sheet metal loosely covering the old Renault’s repairs flapping with every bounce.

After a short spin on a highway, the taxi crept slowly through narrow streets with throngs of people and livestock everywhere. To say it’s hot in Cairo in the summer is an understatement, so the residents come out in the cooler evenings and stay well into the night. The cafés overflowed. The shops were open, and patrons were haggling over goods. I could smell the sweat through the open taxi windows. Every once in a while, a biker carrying sheep hides, the heads still attached, knocked into the side of the cab. Each time I jumped.

Eventually we pulled up in front of the Ambassador Hotel, a grimy, stucco, seven- or eight-story building. I paid the fare, swung my backpack over my shoulder, and walked in. Men in white
gallabiyas
, traditional full-length cotton shirts, and white head wraps lounged in the unadorned and uncarpeted lobby, sipping tea and chatting. Two fans tried vainly to stir the thick air through the crowded quarters. In my jeans, T-shirt, backpack, and brown skin, I looked at once familiar and unfamiliar. The conversation stopped conspicuously when I walked in. I was just too tired and
too on edge to engage. In phrase-book Arabic, I asked for a room, was given an ancient skeleton key from the front desk, and stepped into an obviously unsafe elevator with an attendant. I could hear the conversation in the lobby resume loudly as soon as the door closed. I checked into a filthy room with a single stained mattress on a metal frame, a concrete floor, a window that opened onto the elevator shaft, and a cold-water tap. The bathroom, down the hall, consisted of a hole in the floor over which one stood or squatted and from which the foulest stench rose without relief. None of it mattered. I was asleep in minutes.

I explored the city for a few days. The year 1978 was a good time to be an American in the Middle East. While I was in Cairo, Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president, came home from signing the popular Camp David Accords in Washington, D.C., and the United States was seen as an honest broker in the long struggle to bring peace to the region. When the Egyptians I met figured out I was American, they were especially gracious.

I got around mainly on foot, wandering for hours through little lanes and city squares. From the main square in the center of Cairo, I squeezed onto a dilapidated public bus.
Crowded
doesn’t begin to describe it. People sat on top of each other inside or hung from the windows or doors outside. The bus never really stopped so much as slowed down so that passengers could jump on or off. You paid the fare by passing money from hand to hand to the conductor, the way Americans pay for hot dogs and beer at
baseball games. I rode out to Giza and, rounding the last bend in the road, watched the pyramids and the Sphinx rise out of the desert and thrust themselves into the bluest sky. I visited the Cairo Museum, which had more priceless treasure than there was space to properly display and preserve it. I learned to negotiate for everything.