• From the Field

FROM THE FIELD

The Intrepid Travelers
Three recent graduates travel the globe to interview fellow alumni

LAST JUNE, just weeks away from graduation, MPP Scott Taylor had an idea. What if he, along with classmates Eleni Andreadis and Steve Gross, could travel around the world to interview a few Kennedy School graduates with amazing stories to tell about how their work was making a difference? By early July, with the school’s backing and video cameras in hand, Taylor and his classmates were in Washington, DC, interviewing the first alum. Over the course of the summer, they hit four other cities and countries. Below is an excerpt from their blog, http://elenistevescott.blogspot.com/, which they updated as they traveled. Once completed, the alumni profiles will be featured on the Kennedy School Web site.

July 9, 2006 Washington, DC Marie Nelson MPP 1998 has an incredible personal story, fleeing from civil war in Liberia, moving to Maryland, where she lived in a house with more than 20 other women and children, going to Duke at age 16, getting a call from the office of Jesse Jackson the day after she handed in her Policy Analysis Exercise with an offer to work for him when he was appointed as a special envoy to Africa under President Clinton, and producing for Nightline. We spent a couple of days with Marie in DC, including filming her and a colleague as they recorded a pilot of their forthcoming radio program for NPR on African-American issues.

July 16 Tbilisi, Georgia We spent a day at the home of Gela Bezhuashvili KSGEE 2004 (the Georgian foreign minister and K-School grad whom we are profiling) and had the chance to talk with him, among other things, about Georgian pride. The sense of freedom and liberty, he told us, is very strong in Georgians. This is a country at a crossroads, he enthusiastically said, with a very ambitious reform agenda aiming to be part of NATO and a fully integrated European state…. Gela and his wife, Olga, welcomed us in their house like old friends, spent three hours with us, and even let in other unexpected visitors: journalists from the Georgian channel, The Sun, who were doing a story on us profiling Gela. An hour into our interview, we were filming them, filming us, filming Gela. Things got confusing, but it all seems to be worth it as we anxiously await our Georgian TV debut this evening.

July 19 Belgrade, Serbia We are staying in the center of Belgrade at the flat of Richard Danicic MPA 2007, a current Kennedy School student who has just started his one-year Mid-Career Program as a Kokkalis fellow…. It’s been a busy couple of days. The afternoon we arrived we met Ana Trbovich MPA2 2001, former assistant minister of foreign economic affairs, and Vuk Jeremic MPA/ID 2003, senior foreign policy advisor to the president. We spent much of today with Katarina Veljovic MPP 2002, a former assistant minister of finance who is now involved in fostering Serbia’s ongoing transition to a market economy through her work in both the private and non-profit sectors, and through her pursuit of a PhD…. Ana, Vuk, and Katarina are energetic and ambitious and seem to represent a new generation of Serbs who are part of building Serbia’s governmental institutions and reestablishing Serbia’s place internationally. In spite of the progress these past years, the shadow of Milosevic and the Balkan war of the 1990s remains. Some of the buildings destroyed by the NATO bombing campaign remain in the city center, undisturbed, like some reminder of the consequences of tyranny and unbridled nationalism.

August 7 New Delhi, India First impressions of Delhi: a harrowing 4 a.m. cab ride from the airport to our hotel. This driver was seriously crazy. At one point, he almost killed a moped driver and a rickshaw driver (not to mention us) as he accelerated into traffic, then he cackled like some character out of a horror movie when we begged him to slow down….We’re here for a few more days and then off to Darjeeling, a mountain-stop town in NE India which — along with being famous for its tea — is home to Noreen Dunne MPA 1991, the next KSG grad we’re featuring in our documentary. Noreen is a college professor who also works with a charity she helped start called Hayden Hall, which assists women and children in the Darjeeling area.

August 28 Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam I’m not sure what I expected when I came to Vietnam. Perhaps classic scenes of rice paddies, dotted with workers in their conical hats.
To be sure, there are plenty of rice paddies. But the Vietnam we’ve experienced is bustling with the energy of country embracing opportunity and making up for lost time. Thanh Nguyen MPA 2006, our KSG profile, straddles the line between Vietnam’s past and its future. His grandfather was a prominent military officer in Ho Chi Minh’s army during the war with the States, and his parents both studied and lived in Cuba with the support of the Soviet Union. Thanh has an unabashed reverence for Ho Chi Minh. Yet Thanh also has an almost equal enthusiasm for the power of free markets…. It’s been a fascinating and fun experience here punctuated by daily avocado smoothies, driving rickshaws through the city streets, market stalls of cleanly shaven pig ear, and a floating fish farm along the Mekong. Thanh’s contagious and easy laugh, his willingness to share his insights and stories, and his passion for moving Vietnam forward through education and policy research have been a great way to end our project. If political liberalization does someday occur, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Thanh in high office.