Seniors Will Trek To Exotic Locations

Traversing city ports and fishing villages in Indonesia, and performing with a shadow puppet troupe in Cambodia: these are some of the ventures that recipients of this year’s Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship will undertake next year.

This year’s recipients of the fellowship, which offers a stipend of $18,000 to graduating students for a year of purposeful travel, are Matthew A. Busch ’07 of Leverett House, Olivia H. Gage ’07 of Adams House, Emily W. Hogeland ’07 of Currier House, Kelly L. Lee ’07 of Currier House, Oludamini D. Ogunnaike ’07 of Lowell House, Annie R. Riley ’07 of Quincy House, and Amy R. Tao ’07 of Currier House.

The fellowship was established in 1966 in memory of Michael C. Rockefeller ’60, who drowned off the coast of New Guinea following a Peabody Museum Expedition there in 1961.

Busch said he plans to spend his year studying fishing culture in Indonesia after a work experience this summer off the coast of North Carolina piqued his interest in the industry.

Spending time in both city ports and smaller villages, Busch will study the ways in which the fishing economy incorporates community participation at many levels.

“There are the people who work on the boats, people who fish, people who cut out the fish, people who make the nets, which brings up this idea of an interwoven community,” he said.

Gage, who is pursuing a special concentration in Anthropology and Public Health, said she hopes to use dance and art to improve AIDS education in the Iringa region of Tanzania.

“I want to go into Public Health and I feel like the AIDS epidemic will be a defining moral issue for our generation,” she said. “So I feel compelled to do something about it.”

Hogeland will move to an orphanage near Cusco, Peru, to study the availability of health care in third world countries. While much of her day-to-day work will be at the orphanage, she will also visit remote Andes villages to research the disparity in health care between urban and rural settings.

Lee, an African American studies concentrator, said she intends to study the formation of popular assemblies and movements primarily in the Oaxaca and Chiapas regions of Mexico.

The Oaxaca region has one of the highest indigenous populations in the country but also one of the poorest populations, according to Lee.

“I’m working class and African American,” she said. “I feel like the struggles of the people in Oaxaca are similar to the struggles of African Americans in America.”

Ogunnaike will use his fellowship to study music in the West African country of Mali. He has been playing the djembe drum since his freshman year and, last year, helped start the Harvard College Pan-African Dance Ensemble.

Riley said she intends to travel to Seychelles, an island chain in the Indian Ocean off the coast of east Africa, to work with an NGO on conservation and biodiversity through a local school. The school is one of the first in Seychelles for students with disabilities and will offer Riley the opportunity to work on issues relevant to her senior thesis on community-based learning.

Tao, a biology concentrator who is also a Crimson editor, will take some time off before applying to medical school to study spirituality and religion in Cambodia by joining a shadow puppet troupe.

Tao said she intends to live and perform with these master artists to study the spiritual influences on the art form, an ancient form of storytelling in Cambodia. She also hopes to partner with NGOs that are currently using shadow puppetry as a medium to spread awareness about public health.

Seven seniors out of 100 applicants received the fellowships this year. Last year, 86 people applied for five awards.