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Pooja Bhatia attend-ed Harvard Unversity as an undergraduate, and later worked for

the Wall Street Journal. She graduated from Harvard Law School. In 2007, she was ap-

pointed Harvard Law School’s first Satter

Human Rights Fellow in Haiti and worked as an attorney with the Bureau des Avocats

Internationaux, which advocates and litigates on behalf of

Haiti’s poor.

My first Port-au-Prince infatuation was graf-fiti. Aba Satan! Viv Preval! We pa we, Aristide

ap tounen! screamed the walls. The graffiti was everywhere, and I tried to decode it, not just to improve my Kreyol, but also to read the city’s mood.

Last summer, while President Préval strug-gled to convince a recalcitrant Senate to confirm his nominee for Prime Minister, unknown scribes blanketed the tippy top of Petionville down to the farthest reaches of the Grande Rue with a single phrase: “Bob Manuel=Sékirite.” Despite variations on the spelling of “security,” the graf-fiti stayed obdurately on-message. It had all the uniformity and ubiquity of Starbucks.

By then I’d long known that Haiti’s graffiti is sponsored. Politicians mostly, but also Haitians nursing grudges or eyeing a prize, pay poor young men to extol their names and slander their nemeses. During the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, Haiti’s walls bore marks of genuine sentiment from the genuinely downtrodden. No doubt some still do. But since then, Haiti’s pow-

By Pooja Bhatia

erbrokers have appropriated graffiti from the masses, much as they co-opted political demon-strations by paying protestors. Therefore, graffiti is a better indicator of the strength of a campaign than of the poor majority’s disposition.

Against this backdrop of manufactured-but-

PAB-6 • HAITI • March 2009

Jerry’s World

Writing on the Wall:Useful Graffiti Terms

Spre: Grafitti or the act of making it.

Aba: Down with

Viv: Long live

Moun fou: Crazy person

Volè: Thief

Dilè dwog: Drug dealer

Masisi: Derogatory term for “gay”

Pa pipi la, SVP: Don’t urinate here, pleaseWe pa we, Aristide ap tounen: Keep watching,

Aristide is coming back

Two men, two styles, one tag: Jerry.

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masquerading-as-authentic graffiti, Jerry’s work is extraor-dinary. No one pays him. He doesn’t shill for politicians or extol a religion. Instead of scrawling exhortations, Jerry draws pictures. In fact, words are nearly absent in Jerry’s world, save these: “Spre pa la pou ekri ni aba ni vote.” Graffiti isn’t here to write “down with” or “vote.”

But that’s just one piece of his genius. His work func-

On Martin Luther King, Jerry’s graffiti projected a vision of a better Haiti—no to starvation, yes to education.

tions as social commentary and critique, and it’s by turns haunting and hopeful, earnest and sarcastic, playful and morose. In Jerry’s world, illiterate seniors wear backpacks and carry Mickey Mouse lunch pails. A man speaks into his hand and bites a cement block, as though he had a cell phone and something to eat. Overloaded buses weep at their burdens. The face of a beautiful woman cries. All the images attest to technical virtuosity.

I first saw Jerry’s graffiti in January from the terrace at Muncheez, a downtown pizza parlor that sits on a busy thorough-fare called Bois Verna. Across the street was a huge man’s head: strong jaw, craggy contours, a straw hat. His eyes seemed to look into mine. Kitty-corner, a wizened, wiry man hunched under a backpack. The first man was startlingly realistic, while the old student was cartoonish, but both were tagged “Jerry.” My dining companion and I asked passersby whether they knew who had drawn them and were told it was a young man who seemed crazy and worked fast.

Throughout February, his images slowly migrated uptown. One effort, on Avenue Martin Luther King Jr., depicted another wizened, backpacked man (“Wi!” it said) and a man with a distended belly falling back in pain (“No!” it said.). Within weeks, it had been painted over.

Finding Jerry was easier than I expected. On a Thursday afternoon I distributed business cards at the Muncheez corner, where variably employed men hang out. They claimed to have seen Jerry around and described him as in his mid or late 20s and lacking “bon sens,” or good sense. They didn’t know him personally, they said, but saw him sometimes. A small fracas ensued as they fought over the busi-ness cards. The men behaved as though the cards were money.

The next stop was near a park adjacent to both the Palais National and General Hospital. There, a patient with a crutch and broken leg crawled, trying to get the attention of a white-coated, imperious doctor. At a bookstand on the edge of the park—L’Histoire de’Haiti, Learn English in 60 Days!—I asked the bookseller whether he knew Jerry. A dozen students stopped browsing to weigh in. One of them told me that he knew Jerry, but refused to give me his contact information. “You’re a writer,” he said. “Jerry doesn’t want to be known.”

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I pressed my business card into his hand anyway.

Turns out, it’s not hard to find almost anyone in Haiti. By Monday afternoon, Jerry had texted and was willing to meet that night. I suggested Muncheez.

“How will you be sure it’s Jerry?” a friend asked. “You should make him draw something to prove he’s who he says he is.” I harbored fewer doubts about false identity claims; in any case, within five minutes, I knew the lumbering young man with the concentrated manner was the brilliant wall writer. When he listened, he listened. When he talked, he talked. And when he ate—two foot-long barbecue-chicken sandwiches that night—he couldn’t talk or listen.

Jerry Moise Rosembert was born in October 1984, in Port-au-Prince. He’s about 6’ 2”, tall for a Haitian, and he towers over his friends. He lives far down-town off an alley off Rue de la Reunion, in a neighborhood that was once respectable working class and now is in an advanced state of decay. “More on this later.” Most of the time, though, Jerry sleeps at his friend Junior’s house, a few streets over. Jerry’s father has worked for most of his life as a clerk in a camping-supplies shop located incongruously on Rue de La Reunion. His sister, Vicky, is 27. His mother died when Jerry was six after a long illness. What illness, Jerry wasn’t sure. No one told him, and he never asked.

Jerry finished secondary school and spent several years

A doctor-patient relationship in Haiti.

studying painting at ENARTS, the Ecole National des Arts. But he dropped out. ENARTS, the only university in this arts-mad country devoted to art, is best known for its annual teachers’ strikes, student protests, and shortened terms. Jerry wasn’t learning much. “They don’t pay the teachers enough, or sometimes at all, so they’re…not weak, I’d say, but not very good, either.”

But Jerry had an extracurricular mentor: Jean Walker Senatus. Everyone called him Katafalk, which was the name he adopted as leader of wildly popular Kreyol rap group Barikad Crew. In contrast to the popular compas bands, which produce love songs made for close dancing,

Barikad Crew created music of the masses. It sounded militant, but the lyrics usually contained some social message: respect each other, respect yourself, don’t cut down trees, kids should go to school. The members of Barikad Crew differed from most Haitian music stars in another way, too. They were dark-skinned and came from underclass neighborhoods.

Katafalk took Jerry under his wing in 2001 or 2002. He com-missioned huge, colorful murals in Port-au-Prince’s kayte popilè, or popular quarters: Carrefour Feuilles, Portail Leogane, and Bas Peu de Choses—which can be translated as Below Hardly Any-thing. Other neighborhood bands commissioned murals, too. Jerry even appeared in a Barikad Crew video. He sprayed a wall in the background, a bandana covering the lower half of his face. It faintly

Jerry received a $100 kado, or gift, to paint this mural for Patizan, a band inCarrefour Feuilles. “Jerry’s the best,” the lead singer of Patizan explained.

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recalled the appearance of another Haitian graffiti artist, Jean Michel Basquiat, in a 1982 Blondie video.

Jerry knew of Basquiat’s brilliance and speedball-in-duced early death. “That’s why I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t do drugs,” he said. “Tet mwen la,” he said pointing to his head. So my head remains here.

Along with two other leaders of the band and a driver, Jean Walker Senatus died in June 2008 in a car wreck on the way to the airport. Jerry was devastated, as was the rest of his neighbor-hood. The week afterward, it was virtually shut down as marchers filled the streets in memoriam. Tap-taps, or buses, blared Barikad Crew songs incessantly. During that week, Jerry sprayed portraits of the dead band members and the driver on Rue St. Nicholas, which bourgeois Le Nouvelliste saw as “the use of a tragic event to make profound claims of social exclusion.” The reporter didn’t try to find Jerry.

Then Jerry stopped spraying. He was immobi-lized. In October, he remem-

bered Senatus urging him to use his graffiti to promote social change. By November, Jerry had mounted his first images, on a wall of the Gen-eral Hospital. An imaginary patient tried to escape from a real window.

Throughout the winter, his social-commentary graf-fiti multiplied exponentially, creeping up toward the rela-tively salubrious environs of Petionville. Just the weekend before, his graffiti had landed in Petionville proper, haunt of the wealthy and the people who provide their fruit, veg-etables, drugs and sex. Smack-dab on busy Rue Clerveaux, a prostitute confronted a dilem-ma: at her right, a john offered her money, and at her left, a child offered a book. Some blocks over a man munched

his cement block and spoke on an imaginary telephone.

Jerry had limits. A friend of mine had suggested Jerry draw police officers standing around, oblivious to their environs because they were all talking on their cell phones. Jerry demurred; caricaturing the police would be danger-ous. Driving around one afternoon, we passed a Minustah tank, and Jerry quickly sketched a soldier, a dead goat slung around his neck. (Minustah soldiers in the countryside have

Jerry’s homage to his mentor Katafalk, painted after his death. (Photo courtesy: Jerry Moise)

Beleaguered patient escapes from a window of the General Hospital.

6 PAB-6

been accused of stealing peasants’ goats.) He wouldn’t spray paint that because, “Minustah would definitely find me and kill me.” Jerry was serious. He wouldn’t even let me keep the sketch.

He planned a three-week trip to the United States. A group of former ENARTS classmates had arranged at-tendance at an arts exposition in Florida, and Jerry had a hard-won, three-week visa. But he couldn’t get cash for the ticket in time to attend. Jerry planned to go to the States anyway while he had the visa, he said, probably in the next few days. I wanted to spend as much time as possible with him before he left. It turned out to be a week.

Jerry sees his graFFiti as a kind of gift to the poor majority. “There are a lot of people suffering in Haiti, and the government doesn’t care,” he said. “When I spre, it’s to show them that someone does care, that someone notices.” That’s one reason he does graffiti late at night. “Haitians get up early, you know, and when they see it first thing in the morning, it’s like a surprise.”

The pieces on the wall of the General Hospital express sympathy toward Haiti’s poor majority. Recall the picture of the imperious doctor, back turned to the prostrate pa-tient grasping at his white coat. It sums up the attitude of many Haitian doctors toward the poor; waiting and examination rooms are microcosms of Haiti’s repressive class structure. As physician-anthropologists Paul Farmer and Catherine Maternowska have described, many doc-tors speak to their patients in French, prescribe unaf-

fordable medicines, and generally manifest impatience, rather than understanding, toward non-compliance. The patient escaping from a window testifies to the horrible conditions that obtain in state-run hospitals. Since the government pays doctors in public hospitals a pittance, they are prone to strike—as they did in November—leav-ing the sick poor without any hope of care.

In January, the government proposed a tax of four

Prostitute’s dilemma

A man fantasizes about food (Photo courtesy: Matthew Marek)

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gourdes, about 10 cents, on each cell phone call—a lousy idea and insult to the populace, half of whom live on less than a dollar a day. After complaints from Haiti’s cell phone companies, the government rescinded. In the meantime, Jerry painted a cell phone beating a human being, and a few meters farther down, a woman about to crush a phone with a cement block.

But much as they sympathize, Jerry’s images also en-tertain. A moun fou on the verge of killing himself—there’s a rope around his neck—has bulging eyes and features so asymmetrical you want to laugh even as you recognize the man’s desperation. Even his portraits of women’s faces, their eyes leaking tears, humanize misery instead of making it an object. A photographer friend who shoots the poor, sick, and mad in Haiti once told me that he aimed to make viewers curious about the people in his photos.

Jerry’s portraits do that.

Friends surround Jer-ry. There’s gentle Junior, burly Manno, insouciant Wolf, serious-eyed Rodolph and his pretty siblings James and Pierrina. There are others I don’t know as well. All of them are from Jerry’s neighborhood. You can’t get Jerry alone, and you wouldn’t want to. “They’re the air I breathe,” he told me privately when a few of us dropped him off at the airport. “I would be nothing without them.” Jerry credited his friends not only with driving and looking out for the police during his graffiti sorties, but also with giving him ideas. Junior, one of the few in the group with a decent job and a car, drives during the outings and chips in for spray paint. The day I met him, Wolf was complaining about being sore from hoisting Jerry on his shoulders the night before to spre.

Jerry was on a spre spree that week, trying to get some of his and his friends’ ideas on the wall before he left. One afternoon, Jerry, Junior, Wolf, James, Rodolph and I drove around Port-au-Prince, photograph-ing the previous night’s graffiti. They took obvious pride in Jerry and pro-jected a sense of ownership over the graffiti. Wolf offered unceasing pho-tographic advice: “Zoom back! You’re not getting it all in the frame!”

Yon ede lot is what we live, Jerry told me, citing a Haitian peasant prov-erb that translates as “One helps the

other” and expresses an ethic of sharing everything, burdens and bounty.

At a Total gas station eating sandwiches—a few gas stations in Port-au-Prince make the city’s best sandwiches, and for the equivalent of three US dollars—Jerry, his friends, and I chatted and looked over CD’s filled with Jerry’s graffiti and paintings. Earlier I had asked Jerry what he wanted to do in the future. He told me he wanted to go to art school abroad, preferably in the United States, for a few years, and find ways for his friends to come to the United States. Then he wanted to come back to Haiti to work for change. At the gas station he asked, “But don’t you want to ask nou tout”--all of us-- “what you asked me, what we want to do in the future?”

The boys had a short debate and decided to give indi-

Humans fight cell phones and vice versa. (Photo courtesy: Matthew Marek)

� PAB-6

vidual answers, not a collective one. We went around the table. Rodolph wanted to build a business in Haiti. He had dropped out after two years from a university specializing in diplomacy, for lack of funds. His brother James intended to be a millionaire by the time he reached 40. Junior, gain-fully employed, had relatively sedate plans: he wanted to continue to work here and to travel to the United States only for vacation. But Wolf wanted to go to the States permanent-ly, complaining (accurately) that Haiti’s jobless rate—more than 70 percent lack formal employment—means that nearly everyone depends on the Haitians in the United States for money. “After secondary school, I looked for a job,” Wolf said. “I’ve been looking for seven years!”

Junior and Rodolph were murmuring to each other and smiling as they looked behind me to the sandwich counter. They had written notes to the uniformed sandwich maker. “This is just to say, nothing else, that I think you are very pretty,” Junior had written in French, in a careful cursive. He’d put his phone number and email address below the note. Rodolph wrote something similar on the other side of the paper. I delivered the note to the girl, who accepted it with seriousness. Later I teased Junior about his sandwich god-dess. “No, I gave up my claim. Rodolph can have her.” He paused and gave a cheeky smile: “Yon ede lot, you know.”

We had been sitting for hours. James and Junior an-nounced they were going to buy drinks from the coolers. “What do you want?” they asked me. I said I was fine and

didn’t want anything. “Not even ice cream?” Junior asked. (The gas station is truly a culinary wonder.) I demurred. “But you have to get something! It’s not right if you don’t. At least water.”

These young men with such precarious material ex-istences had insisted on walking on the street side of the sidewalk. They had called me after our gatherings to ensure I’d arrived safely home. So I asked for water.

Jerry and his Friends called me at mid-night one night to invite me to watch Jerry do more graffiti. They were nearby, on Rue Capois, so I changed out of my pajamas and went to watch.

For long bouts of graffiti-making, Jerry usually wears a bandana over his nose and mouth, gloves, and glasses, mostly to protect himself from the spray paint’s noxious fumes. He’d prefer a full-on gas mask, but they’re expen-sive. That evening, though, he wore nothing.

The wall was gray and blank one moment; almost the next, two men appeared, fighting (with forks) over a roasted chicken. Actually, it took Jerry about 10 minutes to spray the image, including a break while a police car drove by. Jerry’s friends/helpers moved to the sidewalk and talked in a clus-ter or crossed their arms, feigning nonchalance, while Jerry moved away from the image and pretended, like so many men in Port-au-Prince, to be taking a long leak. The police didn’t stop. Junior surmised they were en route to a nearby roadblock to monitor the late-night dancehall and drinking

Jerry and his friends pose in front of one of Jerry’s murals in Bas Peu de Choses Jerry’s in back with a bandanna covering his face.

Wolf is on the far left, James with a bandanna-d head, Junior squats, Manno wears a baseball cap, Pierrina is the girl, and

Rodolph, on the right, displays a Jerry-original t-shirt.

Jerry grins during a stop on our city tour. That’s Rodolph next to him.

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activity. He revised: “Or, probably to go drinking themselves.”

Next was a tableau James had dreamed up. Jerry painted a person standing up, his side toward the street. Then he painted a person in front of him, then another, then another, until there were four. Then he set to work on a desk and a woman sitting behind it. “What’s the woman doing?” Jerry asked his friends, who were standing in the street, watching. “Have her filing her nails,” James said. She filed her nails. “And now put up the sign,” Junior shouted. Jerry drew a rectangle: “Too low!” came a chorus.

It was too late, but the sign’s positioning looked perfect to me. It’s one of my favorites in Jerry’s oeuvre: a line of people—including a pregnant woman with sagging breasts, and a man clutching his back in appar-ent pain—waiting in front of a desk marked Ijans, or “Emergency,” while a smartly-dressed woman, legs crossed under her desk, ignores them.

Bon, bon, bon, bon, bon teknik! exclaimed the director of studies at ENARTS, who claimed to remember Jerry fondly. Jerry had organized—and won—a city-wide speed-drawing con-test, Professor Policarpe recalled when I visited him in his office a week later, after Jerry left for the states. The school was a block or two from Jerry’s house, on chaotic and dirty Rue de la Reunion, and it looked small and worn—un-kempt courtyard, peeling paint. But there was a bright, busy library across the hall, as well as a large performance space with a barre and wall mirror. A drumming circle was having at it.

Professor Policarpe hadn’t known his former pupil was the “brilliant” person behind the graffiti, which he professed to love. Jerry’s work was unprecedented, he said. Jerry later seemed astonished that the professor remembered him at all.

aFter Jerry leFt, i visited his father, to whom Jerry had briefly introduced me at the Coleman shop. On a Sunday morning, the slight, graying Mr. Moise met me on Rue de La Reunion, and we walked together toward his house. Sundays are calm in the Moise neighborhood. The rest of the week, brightly colored tap-taps inch their way

Jerry creates… …a Haitian food fight

down streets, nearly shaving the double-parked cars and pedestrians. The sidewalks crowd with sellers sitting before woven baskets of spaghetti, tomato paste and bouillon cubes; students en route to their substandard university classes; sick people begging at pharmacies; matted-haired moun fou sitting on corners. Getting anywhere requires weaving, bumping, stopping and occasional pushing. I always fear I’ll hit a pedestrian.

The two-room, tin-roofed house was in an alley off Rue

10 PAB-6

de la Reunion. The alley served as a communal kitchen, and women were cooking big vats of the traditional Sun-day-morning pumpkin soup, soup jumo. In the front room, a curtain partition separated a bed from the parlor, which contained a television, fans, a Coleman cooler, and a TV stand stuffed with books and sheaves of paper. It was more cramped and less furnished than Junior’s house, where Jerry slept. Mr. Moise and Jerry’s sister, Vicky, found a couple of chairs.

Mr. Moise conceded that he was “a little opposed” to Jerry’s graffiti. He didn’t see it as defacement—“they never paint on private property,” he maintained, incorrectly—but he worried that the police would arrest or abuse Jerry. “I wish he could find a job drawing for a newspaper,” said Mr. Moise. Unlike graffiti, published cartoons could pay.

Mr. Moise had married Jerry’s mother when she was 19. She had Jerry at 24, the same age as he is now. She had worked at a factory hand-stitching baseballs: Haiti was once a prime destination for baseball manufacturing, thanks to its proximity to the United States and the willingness of its workers to accept meager wages for painstaking work. It was a typically Haitian job. She died a typically Haitian death, too—tuberculosis, when she was 30. She died on the eve of Mardi Gras, and Mr. Moise didn’t tell his children

of their mother’s death until after Carnival was over. He wanted them to enjoy the holiday festivities.

Mr. Moise showed me photographs of her, some taken after the disease had set in. She looked like a female version of Jerry. He has her eyes and upright bearing. The plastic sheets covering the photos had long ago lost their stick, and the photos were now shoved between pages. Most were of Jerry. Jerry at his baptism. Jerry with a basketball team. Jerry posing against a space-age backdrop with a friend. Jerry escorting a girl to a dance. Maybe there was another album devoted to Vicky.

It was hot. The house’s tin roof and cement walls trapped heat, Mr. Moise explained. The neighborhood’s only perk was its proximity to the huge alabaster Palais National, which meant that the public electricity company usually provided electricity. Not that day, he apologized; otherwise he’d start the fan. Vicky grabbed a couple of pieces of thin wood and started fanning herself with one. On the other side of mine was an impressionistic picture of a red horse, painted by Jerry.

Situating Jerry’s family on the spectrum of economic class was difficult. Eighty percent of Haitians survive on less than two dollars a day and one percent are filthy rich.

Rodolph becomes part of a freshly painted picture.

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Jerry’s family wasn’t in the bottom 80 percent—Mr. Moise had a stable job and a sister who sent money from West Palm Beach—but calling them “middle-class” would mislead. Lower middle class? Working poor? Jerry’s father had good way to put it. “Sa a se mize, men pa mize enfer,” he said. This is misery, but not the misery of hell. Vicky wanted to show me the misery of hell, just a few blocks toward the sea.

While we walked, 27-year-old Vicky explained that she had graduated from the hotel school and found work making pastries at the Hotel Montana. When V.I.P’s come to Haiti, they stay at the Montana. Bill Clinton recently did. Vicky worked seven days a week and earned $80 per month at a place whose smallest room, Vicky knew, cost $120. She quit, feeling cheated. The family had paid for her education, even sending her to post-secondary school, but she found few returns.

We walked along the Grande Rue. Vicky pointed out the fat Dominican prostitutes, flies on meat, people buy-ing the festering meat, a man fishing through a streaming gutter for scraps of food. She hadn’t seen Jerry’s prostitute deciding between school and her john but, she disagreed with the idea that prostitutes had a choice. “This,” she said sweeping her arm, “is not a choice.”

Jerry overstayed his visa by about a week. I don’t know why: some combination, perhaps, of a desire to see more of the United States, a cheaper return ticket, and

his 24-year-old recklessness. He asked me to write a letter for him explaining that he delayed his return to help me with this newsletter. Not wanting to lie to the Department of Homeland Security, I refused. His dossier is now smudged. Studying in the United States, emigrating, and even visiting will be more difficult. So I worry about him. I’ve promised to take him to an information session on Fulbright scholarships, but applicants need a bachelor’s degree, and Jerry dropped out of awful ENARTS. Maybe I am overly optimistic, but I think he’ll find something else. o

Jerry and his father pose at the camping-supplies store where Mr. Moise works.

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Elena Agarkova • RUSSIAMay 2008 - 2010

Elena is living in Siberia, studying management of natural resources and the relationship between Si-beria’s natural riches and its people. Previously, Elena was a Legal Fellow at the University of Washington’s School of Law, at the Berman Environmental Law Clinic. She has clerked for Honorable Cynthia M. Rufe of the federal district court in Philadelphia, and has practiced commercial litigation at the New York of-fice of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP. Elena was born in Moscow, Russia, and has volunteered for environmental non-profits in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia. She graduated from Georgetown Univer-sity Law Center in 2001, and has received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Barnard College.

Pooja Bhatia • HAITI September 2008 - 2010

Pooja attended Harvard as an undergraduate, and then worked for the Wall Street Journal for a few years. She graduated from Harvard Law School. She was appointed Harvard Law School Satter Human Rights Fellow in 2007 and worked as an attorney with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, which advocates and litigates on behalf of Haiti’s poor.

Eve Fairbanks • SOUTH AFRICA May 2009 - 2011

Eve is a New Republic staff writer interested in char-acter and in how individuals fit themselves into new or changing societies. Through that lens, she will be writing about medicine and politics in the new South Africa. At the New Republic, she covered the first Democratic Congress since 1992 and the 2008 presidential race; her book reviews have also appeared the New York Times. She graduated with a degree in political science from Yale, where she also studied music.

Ezra Fieser • GUATEMALAJanuary 2008 - 2010

Ezra is interested in economic and political changes in Central America. He is an ICWA fellow living in Guate-mala where he will write about the country’s rapidly changing economic structure and the effects on its politics, culture and people. He was formerly the deputy city editor for The News Journal (Wilmington, DE), a staff writer for Springfield Republican (Spring-field, MA) and a Pulliam Fellow at The Arizona Republic.

Current FellowsHe is a graduate of Emerson College in Boston.

Suzy Hansen • TURKEYApril 2007 - 2009

A John O. Crane Memorial Fellow, Suzy will be writ-ing about politics and religion in Turkey. A former editor at the New York Observer, her work has also appeared in Salon, the New York Times Book Review, the Nation, and other publications. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.

Cecilia Kline • CENTRAL AMERICA January 2009 - 2011

Cecilia is a graduate of Georgetown University, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and the University of Chicago School of Social Service Ad-ministration. In 2007 she began with Casa Alianza in Tegucigalpa, Honduras providing outreach for youth living on the street. As an ICWA Fellow she will write about youth-service programs from several Central American cities as a participant observer.

Derek Mitchell • INDIASeptember 2007 - 2009

As a Phillips Talbot Fellow, Derek will explore the impact of global trade and economic growth on Indians living in poverty. He has served for the past year as a volunteer for Swaraj Peeth, an institute in New Delhi dedicated to nonviolent conflict resolution and Mahatma Gandhi’s thought. Previously he was a Fulbright scholar in India at the Gandhi Peace Foun-dation. He has coordinated foreign policy research at George Washington University’s Institute for Com-munitarian Policy Studies and worked as a political organizer in New Hampshire. Derek graduated with a degree in religion from Columbia University.

Raphael Soifer • BRAZILApril 2007-2009

Raphi is a Donors’ Fellow studying, as a participant and observer, the relationship between the arts and social change in communities throughout Brazil. An actor, director, playwright, musician and theatre educator, he has worked in the United States and Brazil, and has taught performance to prisoners and underprivileged youth through People’s Palace Projects in Rio de Janeiro and Community Works in San Francisco. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Studies and Anthropology from Yale University.