Exploring our Frontiers:
2004 International Round Square Congress Closing Address

Given at Deerfield Academy on Saturday, October 2, 2004
by Tiffany Franke, Deerfield Academy Alumna, Class of 2002

Exactly three years ago, I was honored to stand before an audience of equal size, as I am honored to speak to you today, to read the closing remarks for the Round Square Conference in Alice Springs, Australia. As one of three student delegates representing Deerfield Academy, I had the privilege of spending a week meeting impassioned students and teachers from all over the world, talking about our common interests, sharing our cultures, learning about our differences -- a week that was more influential on my life than any I had previously experienced.

The timing of the conference marked a significant turning point in modern world history, as two American flights crashed into the world trade towers in New York City only seven days before our flight was scheduled to depart from Hartford, Connecticut. For days following the attacks, a silence loomed on campus and in the sky, and the two other Deerfield delegates, Mr. Thomas Adams, our teacher representative, and I waited apprehensively, fearing that our long awaited trip had been cancelled. I remember the evening that we congregated in the basement of Mather, my dormitory that year where Ms. Lyman distributed our tickets. The trip was on.

I remember thinking that there couldn't have been a more important time for such an event -- a coming together of youth from around the world, whose generation was destined to inherit the challenge of expunging the ignorance that threatens our safety. And now, three years later, considering the tumultuous international scene, the coming together of this young and positive energy could not be more appropriate or pressing.

The theme of the 2001 conference was footprints in the sand, journey to the center. A journey through the center of the earth would have been a more direct route for us, or so it seemed as I'm sure all you Aussie's out there felt just last week -- and after twenty four hours in the air, twenty four hours in six airports, five flights, an airline strike, five showings of Moulin Rouge, and lots of coffee for Mr. Thomas Adams, our bedraggled crew stepped off the plane in the red desert. I still remember the smell of the eucalyptus on the dry air that day. Maybe you all will remember the torrents of New England rain that greeted you on Tuesday.

For the seven days that followed, we did many of the same activities you have completed here -- rikas, project presentations, outdoor excursions, games, and discussions. I kept a logue of names, contact information and photographs of the friends I had met over the week. Although my communication with them has been sporadic recently, I encourage you to do the same -- your new network may open up opportunities that you never expected. The year that we were in Alice Springs, Deerfield was inducted as an official round square member, and I remember how proudly I walked across the stage to shake King Constantine of Greece's hand and accept the membership pin to bring back to Deerfield. Not only has Deerfield brought you all here, but as Ms. Lyman informed me yesterday, they have even designed a new pin! I am especially proud.

Somewhere over the Pacific on the trip home, inspired by the week spent in Alice Springs, I committed to taking a year off before continuing my studies in college, an idea that I had been flirting with since the previous year. While this is quite normal where many of you are from, it is still rare here in the states, and as most of my friends prepared for the college life that would inevitably ensue the following September, I deferred my acceptance to Yale University, where I am currently in my second year, to pursue very different plans.

Two weeks after graduation, I flew to Alaska where I spent 72 days in the wilderness, backpacking, ice-climbing, and kayaking in America's current day frontier with a group of students from the National Outdoor Leadership School.

In the fall, I worked at home to make money for the rest of my year, while volunteering in a local soup kitchen and researching international volunteer projects like the ones Round Square offers, to pursue in the following winter months. I found an organization and a project where I spent four of the most formative months of my life.

Without speaking a word of Spanish, I boarded a plane to Peru in early February of 2003 to volunteer through an organization called ProPeru in Urubamba, a village in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, high in the Andes.

Because I arrived in the height of the rainy season, phantom-like clouds perpetually hugged the fertile mountainsides, masking the white-capped peaks that loom above the village, and showering the earth at least once a day. I would walk through the outdoor marketplace in the town center wearing my red rain jacket, and soon became recognized by all of the children as the gringa in rojo, the white girl wearing red. The marketplaces -- always buzzing with energy and news -- were perhaps my favorite places to explore, with so many colors and smells -- fruits imported from the jungle, piles of fuscia onions, and fresh flowers for less than a dollar a bunch. Women with black shiny braids twisting down their backs carried their babies in folded mantas, as they would beckon me to buy their choclo, or local corn.

I stayed with a host family (a mother really) at the top of the village, and for the first few weeks we managed to communicate with sign language. She fed me very well -- at least four forms of starch for every meal -- and because I always ate all of it, she loved me. She had nieces and nephews who would often come through, and I joined them in family holidays -- the water fights of carnival, the candlelit processions through flower laden streets during Semana Santa. And I loved my room -- it had yellow walls with windows overlooking the mountains, and I decorated it with the treasures I collected over my time there.

The Thursday that I arrived, a fellow volunteer introduced me to Nuevo Amanecer Andino -- New Dawn of the Andes -- a non-governmental organization that had been formed only months before my arrival to help domestically abused women and their families. The eight local Peruvian women who started and ran the group -- among them a doctor, lawyer, social worker, and psychologist -- would provide the abused women with free counseling every Thursday afternoon in a little house in the center of town. Alcoholism, as I learned over my time there, was often tied to the abuse, and presented an enormous problem in the community among the indigenous Quechuan Indian populations that dominate the Valley. While the women met in the rather abysmal living room that lacked privacy, their children, often victims themselves, played outside on the stone patio with no supervision.

Given very little initial instruction or guidance within the organization, I requested to work with these children. For the Thursdays that followed, I structured a fun and productive session for the fifteen or so kids, ages three to sixteen, while their mothers met inside. With another volunteer, I set up games and group activities, coloring, and reading stations on blue tarps. With a weekly five sole allowance (about 2 U.S. dollars) we would provide a snack of avocado sandwiches and papaya for all of the children.

A group of six older girls who would come to the meetings had a particular interest in jewelry making, and I began to meet with them twice a week beyond the Thursday meetings to help them with their crafts, and to start their own mini business. I tried to teach them about responsibility, how to make a profit, how to keep books, and how to maintain quality control on their product. I considered these skills, the ones that the abused women who came to Nuevo Amanecer lacked, important in establishing their independence as women. I learned that although these girls had more responsibilities than I did growing up, they were still little girls, and were ultimately happy making mismatched bracelets that would never sell, and being horribly late to our meetings on a consistent basis. We had fun nonetheless.

Concerned by the hardships that these girls, their mothers and families faced, I wanted to get to the root of change through education. With Nuevo Amanecer's support, I initiated my largest and most personally rewarding project in Urubamba -- a series of three health workshops to be taught in seven local high schools, and a total of twenty classrooms. I discovered paradoxes of Peruvian life -- the love of setting meetings, but not attending them; the formalities of letter writing and permission-seeking, combined with a lackadaisical approach that made accomplishing the smallest task a Herculean effort. But somehow, somewhere in my trips around town, the schedules all came into place, and the community received the workshops more enthusiastically than I had ever imagined.

With the help of another volunteer, I wrote and translated the classes addressing communication skills, alcoholism, and domestic violence and abuse, including games, skits and other means of conveying incredibly relevant information. Following the workshops, we challenged the students to a theatrical contest -- each school could develop a skit where they enacted a problem addressed in our classes, and proposed a possible solution. I approached the day with a great deal of apprehension, sure that the auditorium would be empty, and that none of the schools would show up. As it turned out, every seat was filled -- with parents, students, community members -- and all seven schools arrived with thoughtful, well-rehearsed skits. Watching the kids act out and embody the problems that afflict their community, but more importantly, figure out how to address them, made me more hopeful than I can express. My mother and brother who had come down to travel with me after my internship looked on from the audience. That day is one of the proudest I can remember.

Although I found my time in Peru enriching, it was not always fun or easy. Seeing the living conditions that much of the world endures, and understanding the great disparity of wealth between the haves and have-nots, knowing that these people would never be as rich in opportunities as I am, by no fault of their own, was hard for me to come to terms with. But I was continuously humbled by the strength of character of the people who I met -- who evoked in me not a sense of pity, despite their dire circumstances, but a common humanity, and a particular appreciation for life.

I became friends with one such woman, Feliciana, who would often come to Nuevo Amanecer. She allowed me to interview her for articles that I planned to write to raise funds for the organization. I took a combi to her house in the poorest rural outskirts of Urubamba and sat on the dirt floor of her one-room windowless cement home as she voiced her lifelong struggle with being crippled by polio, a succession of abusive partners, and concerns for her mentally challenged daughter who she became pregnant with after having been raped. It was not anger at the hurtful words of her husband that inspired me into action, but instead, the brilliance of spirit that shined through her eyes. If this woman could face life with a kindness and a love that touched others so deeply in the face of seemingly insurmountable hardships, what might I be able to do? What are my limits? Do I have limits?

I had a hard time leaving Urubamba where I had spent such a full and intense period of time, not knowing when or if I would return. My host mother made me promise that I would bring my fiancé back for her to meet. I told her that I would have to meet him first, and then I would come back.

After leaving Urubamba, I hiked the Inca Trail with my mother, brother, and his girlfriend. My mother returned home, and I continued to travel with my brother for a month. We hiked in canyon lands, stayed on an island in the middle of Lake Titicaca, saw white capped mountains, deserts, salt flats, cities, and remote rural towns. Peru and Bolivia are so culturally rich and biodiverse -- I recommend an extended stay there to anyone.

For one of my last weeks, I trekked in the jungles of Bolivia where I contracted an infectious disease from a sand fly bite, and faced very painful medical complications in the year that followed my return. Although my immune system is still compromised, I am better now and have a better understanding that no, I am not invincible as I would like to believe, and that travel (especially in developing countries) has several risks involved.

The summer following my return, I wrote for my local newspaper until heading off for Yale in late August. A lot of people told me that after having taken time away from school, returning would be nearly impossible -- but I found the opposite to be true - I had more focus and energy entering Yale than ever before. I found people who had done similar things as I, classes that were particularly pertinent to my new areas of interest, and clubs and groups that shared my ideas.

Realizing the importance of health education for students, especially in communities with at-risk youth, I decided to join the Community Health Educators, a Yale group that formulates and teaches a health curriculum for high school students in New Haven -- a city that receives no public funding for such programs. Knowing that we are their only source for reliable life-skills information is quite powerful. I have realized that 15 year olds here in Connecticut need just as much guidance and education as they do in rural Peru.

At Yale, I also work with the College Council for CARE -- CARE International works in seventy developing countries, and is one of largest international development and relief non-profits in the world. When I recounted my experience in Peru to the college council's founder and president last year, she invited me to become the outreach coordinator. I am currently working with the chief lawyer at headquarters to formulate the first college council spring service trip to Mozambique this upcoming March.

This past summer, I worked for a similar non-profit organization based out of Boston called World Education that helps communities in about 30 developing countries address local problems through sustainable, non-formal educational initiatives. I have been talking to one of their directors about working on one of his project sites in India next summer.

I am not telling you all of this to give myself praise or accolades -- I feel I have been incredibly lucky in the opportunities that I've had, and have merely taken advantage of the resources available to me. I've shared with you a handful of my experiences to show you a path, a progression that I have chosen, that I trace very sincerely, back to the week that I spent in Alice Springs, Australia, 2001. And for this reason I look at all of you with so much excitement and optimism. Whether this conference represents one of many similarly impactful previous experiences, or an inspirational starting point, as it was for me, it is an invaluable opportunity. Your individual energy is remarkable, but collectively, it is astounding. I congratulate you on your accomplishments thus far, and challenge you to cultivate the connections that you have made here as you explore your personal frontiers.

Thank You