The first suturing was performed in the back of a truck. That was when the crowd was manageable. But as time ticked on, and the sun disappeared, the lawn began to resemble a Civil War battlefield.

This was Gressier, Haiti, a relatively large town on the country’s southwest coast, a 45-minute drive from Port-au-Prince. I was spending my winter break from post-baccalaureate, pre-med studies in Haiti, where my plan was to shadow a doctor at a rural medical clinic. And for a week, that’s what I did, absorbing and participating in a different kind of healthcare. And then the earthquake hit—and all hell broke loose.

Outside our clinic, on the battlefield, fluorescent ceiling-light panels were dragged out to the lawn and hooked up to generators; plastic patio furniture was set up as an operating table; cabinetry was ripped apart for splints and stretchers.

We were the only medical clinic in the area, so it wasn’t long before the wounded, the homeless, the terrified appeared. The scene was macabre, though there was hardly any time for the horror to register.

Shattered limbs, gashed heads, compound fractures, lacerations that offered anatomy lessons, paralyzed bodies lying in pools of blood on corrugated tin sheets—I weaved my way in and around them, cleaning wounds, assessing newcomers, holding the hands of patients being sewn up without anesthesia.

With very limited medical supplies (most of the clinic’s stock was buried in some
degree of rubble) and only two doctors, the odds were stacked against us, against them.

The gore was endless; the pain was tangible; in between the constant tremors, the air was full of cries. But there was no time to stop and weep; more stretchers were arriving.

The first 36 hours after the earthquake were a slow-motion blur interrupted only by a fitful 30-minute nap sometime before sunrise.

With the arrival of a new day, we moved our makeshift clinic from the debris-strewn lawn to the still-standing church where we were able to establish a bit more order.

I moved from pew to pew, cleaning out gashes with Betadine and forceps in preparation for sewing and splinting. I saw a woman die on the floor in front of me as I held the shoulder of her son, and I saw a baby emerge into the world in the last pew.

I saw the remnants of hands and feet, faces so swollen they hardly looked human. As I picked what probably amounted to a small cement block out of a young girl’s head, she reported on the status of her family: her mother, dead in the rubble of their house; her four-year-old brother, whom she brought to the clinic that morning, lay dead outside the gate; her baby sister, unable to walk.  She waited eight hours in the pew, but left with a sewn-up head and cheek, and a ride back to her village. Even with my pitiful Creole, I was able to communicate—it turns out agony and fear don’t have much trouble crossing language barriers.

I was evacuated from Haiti seven days later, but it took weeks to process my experience. My gauze and forceps had been taken away. I was left with insufficient words, and a sense of utter helplessness. I was also left with wider eyes, and a fierce conviction about my medical education.

Maggie Higgins ’08 is in her second semester as a post-baccalaureate, premed student at Loyola University in Chicago.

Spring came early to Middlebury this year, not that anyone was complaining.

The first weekend of April, the mercury hit 80 degrees. That Saturday, a meet was held on Dragone Track and a women’s lacrosse game took place on Peter Kohn Field; where normally a few hardened April fans would stand amid giant piles of snow, short-sleeved spectators gathered by the bunch, sporting sunglasses and hats to protect their winterized skin from the sun’s rays.

It will get cold again, I know. We might even have more snow. But spring has sprung. I received final confirmation the other night when a host of full-throated neighbors announced their arrival through our kitchen’s screen door.

“Peepers!”

I had startled my son.

He stared at the door, wide-eyed, expecting, well, whatever a three-year-old’s imagination had conjured up.

I chuckled. “Those are frogs. They’re called Peepers,” which sent us down the rabbit hole of questions that we often descend. Insufficiently equipped with Spring Peeper knowledge, I grabbed my laptop and called up the blog written by Tim Parsons.

The landscape horticulturist at the College, Parsons maintains a blog called the Middlebury Landscape. I subscribe to his feed through my RSS reader, and earlier that day I had seen the headline “Peepers!!!”

Now, Tim is a Vermont certified horticulturist and arborist, and a vast majority of his blog concerns trees and, well, the Middlebury landscape. But he has a curious mind and is prone to random thoughts—and posts. (The Middlebury Landscape even has a category for such musings.) And that day, he—like my son and me—was curious about Peepers.

“Spring Peepers are a variety of  ‘chorus frog,’” Parsons wrote. “I always reach for the Latin names, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Pseudacris crucifer crucifer is the Northern Spring Peeper. Pseudes (false) and akris (locust) for the sound, similar to a real locust insect. Crucifer meaning cross bearer, named for the cross-like markings on the underside.

“Peepers hibernate near ponds, and the males start making noise early in the spring, seeking mates. Smaller than one inch, they are nocturnal, so hard to find, and although equipped with large toe pads for tree climbing, are more comfortable on the ground, hiding in the grass. I’ve learned they can tolerate freezing of some of their body fluids, so that explains their ability to have such an early life cycle in the spring.”

I relayed all this information to my son, and he silently took it all in.

Then he asked, “Are they going to come inside?” They sounded like they were on our doorstep, after all.

“No.” I smiled. “They like it better outside.”

“Good,” he replied, “ ’cause those peepers would be far too loud for our house.”

Yes, yes they would.

Spring has come to Middlebury.

On an otherwise normal late-February evening, an article of clothing that has aroused passions among people and governments around the globe took center stage in a crowded Rohatyn Center conference room, its meaning embodied and expressed by three young Middlebury women who have confronted a key element of their identities at a young age.

Photograph by Brett Simison

For more than two hours, sophomore Hafsa Ahmad and first-year students Mariam Boxwala and Mahnaz Rezaie spoke openly—and with great maturity and global perspective—to a packed room of community members about their experiences wearing the hijab, the traditional veil worn by many Muslim women.

An Arabic word that refers to the type of head covering traditionally worn by Muslim women, hijab can also indicate the modest Muslim styles of dress. There seem to be as many understandings of the hijab as there are women who wear it, and these three were no exception.

Hafsa began by acknowledging what was obvious to all—that she was the only one of the three panelists not wearing the hijab. She explained that she had recently stopped wearing it for a host of reasons, none of which had to do with a dwindling of her faith, but that would become clearer as she spoke. Hafsa first donned the hijab after 9/11, when many Muslims in her central New Jersey hometown were removing their religious garments or shaving their traditional beards out of fear.

With the uninhibited precocity of a bright-eyed sixth-grader, Hafsa saw her decision as a cultural rite of passage and a chance to celebrate a part of who she was. “It seemed like something every Muslim should be doing—especially then. I wanted to show my faith, regardless of the slurs and vandalism that might come with it.” She eventually stopped wearing the hijab as her departure for college neared. “Wearing it for those seven years certainly taught me to be stronger because I had to find ways to deal with the prejudice and backlash. But I began to struggle with who I was outside of the hijab, and I wanted to explore that.”

When Mariam spoke about growing up in Canada and northern Vermont, she emphasized that the hijab could mean something different to every woman, but more often than not it could cause controversy. “Some of the strongest criticism I got when I began wearing the hijab at age 13 was from my own Muslim community,” she said. Because she is an Indian Muslim, her style of dress has different customs—she is allowed to show her hair, for example—and many of her Muslim friends who were unfamiliar with her sect would call her immodest for not covering her bangs.

Mahnaz, an international student from Kabul, Afghanistan, recalled that she took great pride when she began wearing it at age nine. “The Koran states clearly that you should not display your beauty,” she said. “And my hair is part of my beauty.” Upon coming to Middlebury, some back home suggested that she didn’t need to wear her hijab in the States. “But I value the respect and confidence it brings me,” she explained. “It is my faith; I believe in it. To change that would break me.”

All the panelists noted that the hijab had provided a sense of freedom on many levels—from ever-changing fashion trends, from the eyes of men, from the burden of being judged by one’s looks rather than one’s words.

Asked how her life had changed when she began wearing the hijab, Mariam said simply, “It was harder to ride a bike.” After the laughter subsided she added, “It’s part of my identity, it always has been, but it’s not the only part.”

“For such a simple piece of cloth,” Hafsa agreed, “it’s very complex.”

—Blair Kloman

Talk about institutional pride! In what might be an even greater long shot than the Butler Bulldogs making it to the championship game of this year’s fabulous NCAA D-I basketball tournament, a team of more than 55 Middlebury undergraduates won entry into the Department of Energy’s 2011 Solar Decathlon competition.

The Department of Energy Web site describes the Solar Decathlon in the following way:

The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon challenges 20 collegiate teams to design, build, and operate solar-powered houses that are affordable, energy-efficient, and attractive. The winner of the competition is the team that best blends cost-effectiveness, consumer appeal, and design excellence with optimal energy production and maximum efficiency.

The first Solar Decathlon was held in 2002; the competition has since occurred biennially in 2005, 2007, and 2009. The next event will take place in fall 2011. Open to the public free of charge, the event takes place on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Visitors can tour the houses and learn how energy-saving features can help them save money today.

It states that the Solar Decathlon:

• educates student participants and the public about the many cost-saving opportunities presented by clean-energy products;

• demonstrates to the public the opportunities presented by affordable homes that combine energy-efficient construction and appliances with renewable-energy systems that are available today; and

• provides student participants with unique training to help fill jobs in our nation’s clean-energy economy.

And it notes that since 2002, the Solar Decathlon has

• involved 72 university-led teams, which pursued multidisciplinary course curricula to study the requirements for designing and building energy-efficient, solar-powered houses;

• established a worldwide reputation as a successful educational program and workforce-development opportunity for thousands of students;

• affected the lives of 12,000 university participants; and

• expanded its outreach to K–12 students by inviting Washington, D.C.-area schools to visit on class tours.

What began with a question from my wife Jessica in June 2009 has now become an institutional point of pride for all of us: “Can we assemble a team from Middlebury to compete in the Department of Energy’s 2011 Solar Decathlon? It would be perfect for Middlebury students.” I couldn’t even answer Jessica’s question when asked because I had never heard of the Solar Decathlon.

But it didn’t take long for both of us to realize that, with a bit of spirited support from the President’s Office, this was a great opportunity for our students to combine best practices in leadership, innovation, science, and environmental sustainability in pursuit of an ambitious, but not insurmountable, goal. We were convinced that our students would undoubtedly rise to the challenge of defying the odds—defying the odds to compete successfully with institutions that have undergraduate programs and professional schools in architecture, engineering, and landscape design, and that are 10 and even 20 times our size. It was a challenge that would test our profoundly held conviction that a liberal arts education prepares students to be distinctly well suited to tackle complex problems by teaching them the art of asking questions and the skill of finding answers through critical analysis, clear communications, and breadth of study.

Perhaps most remarkable about the selection of Middlebury as one of the 20 finalists is the degree to which the College’s team of students had to create and assemble the requisite talent to complete its proposal to the Department of Energy. The two-step proposal that won a spot in the competition required a depth of knowledge in disciplines and professions not readily available, or available in any structured way, on our campus. As a result, the team, led by Addison Godine ’11, needed to identify and then gain the participation of experts from outside the College to help guide the team through the rigorous application process.

Faculty from our physics department and pre-architecture program, along with practicing architects, engineers, and energy specialists from throughout Vermont—all of whom were experts in solar power, green architecture, or efficient energy systems—worked closely with our students for eight months, helping them conceive of a design for their house, mapping out all the interrelated pieces, and working through the architectural, mathematical, and modeling functions necessary to complete their proposal. Special courses were mounted in winter term and during the (current) spring semester, team-taught by visiting faculty, which were crucial to the students’ successful scaling of a steep learning curve across several disciplines.

The visiting faculty who taught these special courses went toe-to-toe with the students in terms of their excitement over, and dedication to, the project. The solar-house design entered by the Middlebury team combined 21st-century technology, replete with environmentally sensitive heating, cooling, water, and waste systems, with the vernacular of the traditional Vermont farmhouse.

The creativity, persistence, leadership, and organizational talent exhibited by the students was remarkable, and the positive, can-do optimism that one couldn’t help but notice throughout the eight-month precompetition phase reflected an idealism and confidence that is rarely so evident in college students.

One more aspect of the Solar Decathlon competition that is worth mentioning is the way in which the students on the team ensured the success of such a large group working toward a common goal. Addison and his fellow student leaders figured out:
(1) how to create a student organization that was fluid enough to enable new students to move into support positions throughout the long proposal phase of the project; (2) how to enable students to cycle in and out as their schedules allowed (including studying abroad); (3) how to integrate learning outside the classroom with classroom work done by students formally enrolled in the courses that were offered specifically for this initiative; and (4) how to make this everyone’s project, with no individual ego overshadowing the efforts of the entire group. Many of us in positions of leadership here and elsewhere could learn a lot from how these students went about their work.

Now that the Middlebury Solar Decathlon team has won a place in the international competition, the actual design and building of its house begins.

The College’s Web site will provide updates on the team’s progress, and the team will have an active Web site up and running soon. For more information about the Solar Decathlon, please visit its official Web site.

More of Ron Liebowitz’s writing on College issues can be found on his blog Ron on Middlebury

I love coffee. I also consider myself an environmentalist. And like many others who self-identify this way, I often make decisions that are undoubtedly not the best environmental choices. Like my coffee consumption. According to several carbon footprint calculators, if others drank as much coffee as I do, a couple of extra Earths would be required to support our habits. So, why do I, and others like me, act in a way that clearly flies in the face of our environmental values and attitudes?

Obviously there are many practical or situational constraints that might prevent one from acting in accordance with one’s values (caffeine dependency being only one example). But there are also psychological issues that affect why individuals who already hold pro-environmental attitudes might fail to act in accordance with them.

Trying to make complex decisions on too little information and too little sleep.
Personally, I feel I have a pretty good understanding of the scope of the environmental challenges facing us. I understand the scale of the problem and the factors that are contributing so forcefully to climate change. I get the “Big Picture,” from the top down. Nonetheless, it still takes extra cognitive effort to figure out how my daily individual actions may hinder or help the cause because the “Big Picture” is complicated when viewed from the bottom up.

My car is 14 years old. It gets good gas mileage, better than many new cars on the market today. But I could get better mileage if I replaced it with a Prius. Should I do that? If I buy the Prius, I probably wouldn’t junk my old car. It still runs, and supposedly my make and model is good for at least another 50,000 miles. Maybe I should sell it? If I sell it to someone else, and I buy a Prius, I’ll improve my gas mileage, but I’ll have added another operating vehicle to the vast fleet of cars already on the planet. Moreover, I’ve heard it said that you would need to drive a Prius for many miles to offset the carbon cost associated with its manufacture. So, maybe I should keep my old car. But perhaps my old car is not running as cleanly as it once was. . . . The parade of imponderables arising from what started off seeming like a clear environmental choice seems almost endless. And while purchasing a car is an infrequent decision, deciding on “paper or plastic” or “organic or local” are routine and contain just as many imponderables when closely examined.

To make these kinds of decisions, I need good information. But much of the discussion around climate change and other environmental concerns (e.g., endocrine disruptors) is filled with scientific terminology. If I’m not trained in the relevant field, either I have to spend considerable cognitive effort and time learning the basic jargon or find trusted sources to serve as guides as to how my choices translate into environmental currency. But even finding trusted sources could involve an extraordinary amount of cognitive effort. How would I know whether the “Best Earth Institute” was an honest provider of environmental information or was a lobbying front for the petroleum industry? Should I look for trusted sources to vet my trusted sources?

From a psychological standpoint, people are more willing to engage in this extra effort when deeply committed to a particular value; but they also have to be in the position to expend the extra effort required. Alas, the hectic, hassled world in which most of us live does not lend itself to the thoughtful assessment of our behaviors, much less extensive information gathering to decide what brand of toilet paper to buy. Consequently, well-informed, researched decisions about daily actions and lifestyles often manifest themselves as a disconnect between attitudes and behaviors. Even when people care, they will default to the “easier” option if they are cognitively overloaded.

Killing the messenger who brings the difficult news.
Having good information readily available and sufficient cognitive space in which to process it may not be enough. People have a tendency to twist information towards their existing biases and ease. Generally speaking, we are uncomfortable when there is dissonance between our attitudes and behaviors. This discomfort can serve as a positive motivator to change. However, when we are confronted with information that would require us to change our behavior dramatically in order for us to act consistently with our expressed pro-environmental attitudes, we may well find ourselves underestimating the quality of the information or overestimating the uncertainty surrounding it. When reason tells us that we will need to make a major change, it is not unusual to think, “Well, if you’re going to ask me to make that big a change, I want to be certain that your information is accurate and certain. And it’s starting to look less accurate and less certain the more I look at it. Perhaps I’ll spend some more time considering the situation. Maybe tomorrow.” Once information is deemed inaccurate or uncertain, it can be more readily devalued and ignored.

In the environmental arena, this tendency is particularly problematic, because much of the climate-change discussion seems to be shrouded in doubt and uncertainty. The media in the United States still speaks of an ongoing climate-change “debate,” even though scientific opinion overwhelmingly agrees that climate change is occurring, that human behavior is part of the cause, and that it’s all happening faster than we thought. The only debate or uncertainty in scientific opinion seems to be exactly how bad the consequences of climate change will be at a given point in time (not if, but when). However, this general sense of uncertainty placates us: “If the scientists aren’t clear what the consequences of climate change are going to be, then I can wait to worry. Perhaps I still have time to buy a few more cases of coffee.”

Well, then, what are the Joneses doing?
Whether we acknowledge it—or know it—we look towards others in determining appropriate actions. This is particularly true when we’re not sure ourselves. Checking out what others are doing carries with it a bit of social apprehension. When we attend to what others do, we assume they are also attending to us. This consciousness carries with it a perceived risk: If living in accordance with one’s personal attitudes takes one too far outside what is considered “normal” behavior, then there is a risk—sometimes real, sometimes merely perceived—that one will be rejected or sanctioned in some way. (“Man, can you believe it? She reuses her Saran wrap!”) Under such circumstances, even if this perceived risk is unfounded, we may avoid taking the risk, and “pull back” from pro-environmental behaviors if it appears that those behaviors fall too far outside the permissible range (or typical behavior) of the groups with which we are comparing ourselves.

However, with this phenomenon in mind, we can see that normative feedback can also encourage pro-environmental behavior. When we see the Joneses engaging in pro-environmental behavior, or think the Joneses are engaging in pro- environmental behavior, then we are less likely to be dissuaded from following our own inclinations to do so as well. Conversely, we might engage in a pro- environmental behavior because others do. Goldstein and colleagues found that when hotel guests are asked to “join their fellow guests” in saving water by reusing towels, they are much more likely to do so compared to guests who are simply provided information about how much water would be saved if they reused their towels without referencing others. This type of feedback is even more persuasive when the reference group is similar to the target (i.e., when the reference group is another guest who stayed in your very own hotel room).

Because of its power, social-norm feedback holds much promise in nudging pro-environmental behavior. But we need to be cautious, because when people are engaging in atypical but pro-environmental behavior, feedback that they are not among the crowd can result in adjusting their behavior towards the group norm. (For example, Schultz and colleagues found that homeowners informed that their electric usage was less than the average for their neighborhood may increase their electric use the next month.) This boomerang effect can be countered with feedback that indicates approval of the pro-environmental behavior (something as simple as a smiley face on an electric bill for a low usage customer). Social influence is both powerful and stealthy—people are rarely aware of the extent to which they adjust their behavior because of this type of social pressure.

Both the apparent impact of social influence and our apparent lack of awareness of its power have at least four important implications from a pro-environmental standpoint. First, these phenomena suggest that increasing the awareness of community members who engage in pro-environmental behaviors should have a ripple effect, as these people serve as exemplars and help shift the expectation of normative behavior towards pro-environmental choices. Second, they remind us that we are both affected by others’ behaviors and serve as role models for others who are themselves trying to figure out how to behave. If we act in a pro-environmental manner, we are helping others do the same. Third, if living in accordance with our environmental values is really important, it would behoove us to seek out other like-minded individuals—it is far easier to “stick to one’s guns” when we see others doing the same on a daily basis. And, of course, when enough pro-environmentalists are seen doing their pro-environmental things, well, it starts to look like the norm. Finally, given that people are predisposed to use normative information to decide what behavior is appropriate, we need to be cautious in how we discuss environmentally damaging behaviors. If the explicit message is that the majority of people waste food, litter, and drive instead of walking, we may be increasing the very behaviors we are trying to decrease. Public service messages about littering should not make it appear commonplace, but should rather ask the public to join others in protecting the environment.

I haven’t touched on the individual difference factors that make it easier or harder for some of us to live in accordance with our values. The American Psychological Association recently published a report on psychology’s role in understanding and advancing our knowledge of environmental issues. It is a great primer and is available on its Web site.

And then there’s the power of a public commitment. People feel a need to follow through on their commitments—particularly public ones. Making a public commitment regarding a goal, even a small one, makes it easier to act in accordance with it. So, for example, I am going to commit right here, in print, to reduce my coffee consumption by 50 percent and replace it with a local beverage. Talk with me in September, and I’ll let you know how it’s going.

Professor Michelle McCauley has taught in Middlebury’s psychology department since 1995. Among the courses she teaches are Cognitive Psychology, Eco-Psychology/Human Behavior, and Environmental Problems and Behavior. She also oversees the newly developed Conservation Psychology Laboratory.

Abigail Washburn never intended to be a musician, but now she delivers unforgettable performances—in Chinese.

Abby Washburn (Chinese School ’98, ’01) is living in a dream world. In it, she can hear the high, lonesome strains of bluegrass music; she can travel exotic landscapes, witness the magical entrance of her heroes, and see other wonderful, serendipitous events happen. But like another famous dreamer, she has discovered her dream world quite by accident, backwards, “through the looking glass,” as it were. This is true especially of her unexpected success as a musical artist—an artist who fuses two very different worlds, Appalachia and China.

“I never thought there was a career for me in music,” Washburn admits, with emphasis on never. “I couldn’t have dreamt that dream at the time it happened. This dream found me, not the other way around.”

Washburn began her journey when she was a student at Colorado College. Her ambition early on was to get to China, learn the language, and work in a field, such as law, that would allow her to combine her love for the Far East with her American roots. But her first trip was a disappointment and almost put her off her mission. “I went to China to study the language,” she says. “I was 18, and the experience of going to a country with such a different culture was very difficult for me. I didn’t connect at all with the Chinese people, and I went away feeling frustrated.”

Despite these difficulties, she returned a year later, this time to Sichuan University’s technology college, where she enrolled in a six-month program. There she met a professor named Wang Dehua, a kindly, older woman who mentored Washburn in the ways of the Chinese world. Amid an array of birds in bamboo cages, exotic potted flowers, and delicious jasmine tea, Wang recited poetry to her young student and explained its meaning in the beautiful ambiguity of Chinese translated into English. “Her stories of her country’s history and its characters were so moving that I would shed at least a few tears every time I was with her,” Washburn recalls. The color and intimacy of her encounters with Teacher Wang deepened Washburn’s relationship with Chinese culture.

While studying at Colorado College, from which she would graduate as the school’s first Asian studies major, Washburn was accepted to Middlebury’s Chinese School in 1998, and her journey continued. She plunged headlong into high-intensity Classical Chinese. “The Language School was one of the most amazing experiences of my life,” she says. “You have to totally surrender to the program or else the language spanks you! But the quality of the teaching was fabulous, and the immersion gave me the ability to comprehend, learn, and speak.”

After her second stint at Middlebury and living in Vermont several years, Washburn moved to Nashville to take a new job, and it was in this new place that another side of her emerged. “I remember one day I heard an old-time version of Doc Watson’s ‘Shady Grove,’” she says, “and it totally floored me! It was primitive and funky and gorgeous all at once!”

She plunged into American folk music and its cultural roots. Doc Watson became one of her heroes. “Music of the Appalachias combines our immigrant and slave cultures of West Africa and Europe with Scottish/Irish melodies, and the result is a very American thing,” she says. She was so smitten with the music that she bought a banjo. She had never actually learned an instrument before, and learning the banjo is notoriously slow going. She asked around Nashville and turned up a banjo tutor named Riley Baugus, one of the best pluckers around. He gave her a crash course in the clawhammer banjo.

Washburn had officially embarked on a love affair with old-time music. Although she had no way of knowing at the time, her romance would become her ticket back to China—she would soon become a musical ambassador, bringing the old-time music of America to the eager audiences of China and the Orient.

Growing up, Washburn lived a pretty normal life. Her family, which included Mom, Dad, and an older brother, followed her father’s career path, which led to life in suburban neighborhoods in D.C., Chicago, and Minneapolis. That upbringing didn’t involve much music, at least not for Washburn.

“My brother proved to be the real musician in the family,” she admits, adding that during her collegiate experience she had explored music, but only as a singer in choirs and assorted bands. “I remember him constantly playing his Steinberger guitar in the basement, honing his craft.” She laughs. “I wasn’t that person at all!”

After learning the banjo and fully embracing old-time music and bluegrass, her life changed with absurd alacrity. She was discovered, quite by accident, jamming with three other women at a bluegrass conference in Louisville, and received a recording contract practically on the spot.

In 2004 she joined the acclaimed Uncle Earl (“all g’earls!”), a band that grew a sizable following in the bluegrass community. Yet even as Washburn worked extensively with her new bandmates, she also began writing and recording solo material. Her own debut, Song of the Traveling Daughter, a bilingual album featuring both English and Chinese lyrics, came out in 2005. At the same time, she and a handful of musicians from Nashville (including future husband and banjo hero Béla Fleck, cellist Ben Sollee, and Casey Driessen on fiddle) came together as the Sparrow Quintet—acoustic music wedded to Chinese lyrics. Touring in China, they made such an impact, they were invited on the first-ever official tour by an American band in Tibet.

In 2008, Washburn took a different type of trip to China. The Sichuan earthquake had taken the lives of 80,000 people in the province she had come to know so well. To raise money and awareness, she and electronic artist David Liang spent two weeks in early 2009 making an album called Afterquake. “We traveled around the province playing, and kids would come up to us after and pour their hearts out in song.” The Americans recorded the children, many of whom had been separated from their parents, singing these songs.

She and Liang layered the children’s voices over a rhythmic sampling of sounds from the rebuilding: cement mixers, shovels, bricks, and anything else they could turn into music. The result is a unique sonic fusion that ended up raising thousands of dollars for rebuilding. “Sichuan has been an amazing friend to me over the years,” she says. “It has opened my heart forever, and really changed my life. I just wanted to be a friend back.”

In blending the musical boundaries of America and China, she has finally found the perfect crossroads of her cultural passions. Her next album is a solo project that will be out in late 2010. “My goal is to grow into an artist who has something meaningful to share,” she says. “I want to do something that can help entire communities of people. The world can live with less suffering and more kindness and love. It’s a very spiritual path.”

Bob Gulla ’83 most recently wrote about musician Anaïs Mitchell ’04 in the summer 2008 issue. He is a journalist in Wakefield, Rhode Island.

Abigail Washburn’s music can be found at www.abigailwashburn.com.

Digital Extra: Xander Manshel talks to Tal Birdsey about the state of secondary education, his educational philosophy, and what life is like at North Branch.

Middle school is a terrifying place.

Students revile it. Parents endure it. And alumni—“survivors” seems the better term—work hard to forget it, or remember with an admitting cringe. No, middle school is not the place for romantic memories of youth to flourish. Rather, it is a circus tent, under which is packed a dazzling, if repulsive, collection of bizarre growths, untamable urges, and near-acrobatic anxieties. It is the purgatory of adolescence, a cruel middle ground that offers nothing but the distant prospect of getting beyond it. And yet, each of these comparisons fails to fully capture the singular truth of the middle school experience: it, like, sucks.

With this in mind, a group of parents from Ripton, Vermont—home to Bread Loaf, just east of Middlebury on mountainous Route 125—decided that middle school as they knew it would have to go. Fed up with the institutional feel of the local public school, hungry for a community alternative that better fit the needs of their kids, in the fall of 2000, they set out for something wholly different. They began the search for a head teacher.

A couple towns away in New Haven, Vermont, Tal Birdsey ’87, MA English ’93, was working as a stay-at-home dad to his two young sons. Originally from Georgia, Birdsey had moved back to Vermont a couple of years before, after 10 years of teaching at the Paideia School in Atlanta. Admittedly, starting a school had always been a dream of his. So when Mia Allen, one of the Ripton parents, first called him up and invited him to a community meeting to talk about their imaginary school, he jumped at the chance.

He was the perfect candidate. A graduate of both Middlebury and the Bread Loaf School of English, Birdsey was no stranger to Ripton or the mountain roads that led there. He knew Vermont well, but his Georgian twang made him stand out in a crowd. He was young enough to take on a backbreaking project like building a school, and experienced enough to maybe pull it off.  Perhaps most important, he believed that kids—the teenagers in Ripton, his own two young sons, all kids—deserved more from their schools. So after much philosophizing and imagining with local parents, after scores of meetings held around kitchen tables and woodstoves, Tal Birdsey took the job.

He was officially the headmaster and head teacher of a school with no name, no curriculum, no building, no books, and no students. Whatever.

Allison Stanger rarely jets to Washington without an agenda. On a warm evening not long ago, the agenda was sushi. Seated at Zentan’s dimly lit back table, a glass of the house red firmly in hand, she was struggling to make up her mind.

Good Asian fusion is in short supply around Middlebury, so every trip to the city is a chance to try a new rice house. This one, a stone’s throw from the White House, promised not to disappoint, even if ordering was agony. After 45 minutes, an otherwise patient waiter selected most of the dishes. But when the 19-ingredient Singapore Slaw arrived 15 inches tall—its architecture supported by fried noodle scaffolding—Stanger was pleased.

Just shy of 50, she retains the qualities of a young Hill staffer. That morning, she’d prepared and delivered a lecture on the interplay of globalization and terrorism for her American foreign-policy course, and then run three discussion sections. On her way to the airport, as is her habit, she detoured through Burlington for a manicure—“When you leave Vermont, you have to clean the mud off your shoes and fix your nails”—only to find the salon closed. Within an hour of landing she had checked in to her hotel, changed, and dashed to the restaurant. The next morning, she would deliver a closed-door talk to a prominent security think-tank before catching a taxi to the Department of State, where she’s an expert consultant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s four-year policy review. By the following day, she’d be gone—on to a different city to promote her new book.

Last fall, Stanger, chair of the political science department and director of the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs, published One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy (Yale University Press), and the trim, provocative book sent tremors through Washington’s wonkier circles. In October, at the behest of Secretary Clinton, Stanger spent a day in exhaustive conversation with State Department officials, eventually winding up in Clinton’s office. And in November, Thomas Friedman, who covers foreign affairs for the New York Times, used her work as the framework for a column on outsourcing.

One Nation Under Contract makes a concise argument: Because the United States government now outsources many of its core functions, it has become a shell of its former self. Key agencies have been eviscerated into little more than clearinghouses for lucrative contracts and grants awarded to private sector firms and non-profits. By 2007, Stanger reports, “the federal government was spending more than 40 cents of every discretionary dollar on contracts with private companies”—meaning that the average federal employee now “oversees” more than $1.5 million in contracts, making robust accountability impracticable. As a result, America lacks a coherent foreign policy, not to mention oversight of its tax dollars and a clear delineation of what roles the state—and only the state—should fill.

“There’s just no ‘there’ there,” she says. “Government is wholly dependent on the private sector to conduct its daily business and pursue its policies.”

In essence, Stanger asserts, we need a new paradigm, one in which the government is able to intelligently unlock the efficiency and dynamism of the private sector through public-private partnerships that “secure the homeland” and assist in international development. Oh—and all the while hold for-profit contractors accountable to the “common good.”

The conventional wisdom on contractors tends to be alarmist. Stanger’s book is less a battle cry than a call to action. While she focuses heavily on the failings of privatization thus far, her consideration of the problem is infused with a can-do American spirit. Had she not studied foreign policy for more than two decades, one would be tempted to call it bright-eyed.

Stanger is adamant that although contracting can be a potential liability, it can also be a powerful asset. “With its emphasis on individual responsibility, privatization is an expression of American values,” she writes. But, she warns, “unenlightened outsourcing—our present standard practice—creates an enormous accountability vacuum that has enabled three dangerous developments: gross fiscal irresponsibility, dangerous apathy among the public at large, and the inadvertent militarization of American foreign policy.”

Consider Lockheed Martin. In 2009, the firm did $45.2 billion in net sales—85 percent of which were to the federal government in the form of contracts. “Lockheed Martin,” Stanger writes, “sorts your mail, tallies up your taxes, cuts social security checks, counts people for the U.S. census, runs space flights, and monitors air traffic.” Annually, it receives more money from the government than either the Departments of Justice or Energy. And yet, even when providing public goods, Lockheed Martin is a publicly traded company, responsible first and foremost to its shareholders. Its corporate tagline reads, “We never forget who we’re working for”—but in the case of government contracting, it’s not clear just who the “who” is.

Worried that we were witnessing the rise of a private sector “shadow government” without understanding its implications, Stanger set about mining online dumping grounds of federal data, searching for statistical evidence. When she found it, she wrote about it. Now, with one foot in the Green Mountains and the other firmly inside the Beltway, she’s trying to bring her paradigm shift to the marbled halls of the Pentagon and the Department of State.