University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences

Limitless Ambition

By Brianna Bodine
Photos courtesy of Tama The

After suffering a bout of cerebral malaria as a baby, 13-year-old Selena suffers from blindness, deafness, neurological deterioration and motor deficiencies as a result of calcified muscles; in addition, she has already given birth to a child – by her own father.  In Uganda, where staggering poverty turns children into workers at the age of four, Selena would normally be abandoned out of sheer necessity. 

Selena is my little sister’s name, and they are about the same age,” said Tama The (pronounced Teh), a physics and mathematics major speaking about the uncanny parallels between his own sister and the girl named Selena he met in Africa. “Kids in Uganda are an economic investment, not family, and they’re essentially your retirement plan,” he explained.  “So if your kid has disabilities, it is not only looked upon as a bad investment, but it reflects negatively on both parents.”

Tama traveled to Uganda in the summer of 2008 to help run Elizabeth House, an orphanage for mentally and physically disabled children.  He created individualized therapeutic treatment plans for each of the approximately 30 children attending the institution, 15 of whom are permanent residents. 

“We did physiotherapy, working on gross and fine motor functions, and developed sensory activities for Selena, who is completely unconscious of the world around her,” Tama said.  “Things like filling a tub full of shaving cream or sand, letting her run her hands through it to feel the different textures.”

Tama trained the staff at the orphanage in treatment programs, developed documentation and formal profiles, created spreadsheets to track each child’s goals and made sample daily protocols, troubleshooting guides and progress assessments.  The structure and organization he left behind ensures that the work he has done will be sustainable. 

In Lugazi, Uganda, Tama also worked at a children’s clinic, mostly cleaning and disinfecting wounds.  He also treated an epidemic of scalp fungus that swept through the entire population of children.  At one point, he removed an infected earring that had healed over and created a massive abscess the size of a tennis ball on a young girl’s ear.  Tweezers and a blade from a Swiss army knife, the cotton from a tampon and a bottle of antiseptic were his only tools for the operation.

“She never cried, but there were tears streaming down her face,” he recalled.  “My hands were shaking because of the obvious pain I was putting this child through, but we got this disgusting, black, gooey earring out of her ear after about thirty minutes.”

Tama decided that if he could treat injuries and illness in Africa, he could do it anywhere.  Despite having little hands-on clinical experience, he decided to add biology and chemistry to his curriculum, take the MCAT and apply to medical school.

“Once he gets an idea, he puts his full heart and soul into attaining it,” said Dorcas Tomasek, camp director at Camp Boggy Creek, a year-round camp in Florida for children who have chronic or life threatening illnesses, where Tama has served as a counselor for two summers.   “Tama has an aggressive passion that is just contagious.”

As a camp counselor, Tama is charged with ten campers, ages six through 16, and he plans evening activities for up to 40 campers.  “The care and love that he shows for his kids is just amazing,” Tomasek said.  “He makes other people around him better because of the high standards he sets.”

Tama is also a Student Ambassador, a math tutor, and the student representative to the Educational Policy Committee for the College of Arts &  Sciences at UK.  Russell Brown, director of undergraduate studies in math, supervises Tama, and has been impressed by his drive and commitment.  “I had to tell him to quit working when the tutoring center closed, because he wanted to go out in the hallway and just keep at it,” Brown said.

As an undergraduate, Tama worked in a physics lab studying the nuclear spin of subatomic particles like quarks and gluons, and he had planned on obtaining a master’s in radiological medical physics.  However, with only nine months and 12 credit hours between him and a double major in physics and mathematics, Tama switched his career path to medicine.

“Research is the luxury of rich countries,” Tama said.  “In Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider, an $80 billion mechanism, was just built to find the Higgs Boson, but that’s not going to feed people.”

Tama works with children at Boggy Creek and in Africa to make research less about him and more about humanity.  Ever the mathematician, Tama calculates that if every able-bodied person in the U.S. donated five hours, then that would equal approximately 1.2 billion hours of humanitarian work.

“You have to do the whole soul-enriching thing, whether that’s going to the wreckage of hurricane Ike or building a house in your own community; otherwise, you get so caught up in blackboards and numbers that you have a skewed perspective of reality,” Tama said.  “Many communities are in ruin from poverty or war, and there is always a place you can go to change the world.”

Writing It Down

By Jennifer T. Allen
photos by Tim Collins

In the Pamir Mountains of eastern Tajikistan, a language is spoken – not written, not taught in schools – simply spoken. With merely 60,000 speakers in Tajikistan and Afganistan, the Shughni language is at risk of extinction. Linguistics professors in the College of Arts & Sciences are working to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“Language is part of our culture and if you lose the language, you lose part of yourself. You lose your identity,” said Gulnoro Mirzovafoeva, who teaches English grammar, lexicology and discourse analysis at Khorog State University in Tajikistan.

Mirzovafoeva and two other Shughni scholars traveled to Lexington to collaborate with UK professors in hopes of creating a comprehensive grammar of the Shughni language.

“Shughni is passed down orally in families,” said Greg Stump, director of UK’s linguistics program and organizer of the workshop. “It has been very intriguing to work with a language that is only spoken.”

Tajik is the official language of Tajikistan and most of the population also speaks Russian. “I mix Russian words with Shughni and realize it more now that I’ve been here. If we continue like this, the language will be lost,” Mirzovafoeva said.

Shughni is an Indo-European language; that is, it is presumed to descend from the prehistoric Proto-Indo-European language that historical linguists have hypothesized to account for the observable similarities in vocabulary between various languages of Europe and Asia, Stump said. “There are words in Shughni that are very close to English.”

Throughout July 2008, the Shughni scholars met with faculty and students in UK’s Linguistics Program to begin the process of analyzing the language.

“I didn’t know this project would be as exciting as it is,” Mirzovafoeva said. “I always just spoke the Shughni language and never thought much about it. Coming here, I realized things such as we have a perfect tense and it has caused me to analyze the language more.”

The goal of the summer workshop is to begin creating a written grammar of the Shughni language to help with its documentation and preservation. “We would ultimately like to see the Shughni language included as part of the education of children in the mountain areas of eastern Tajikistan. It is an extremely rich language and we want to see it preserved,” Stump said.

Using the international phonetic alphabet, the scholars have begun to record the language in a way that linguists around the world can understand, said Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby, a professor of Russian in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

The group of scholars worked through aspects of Shughni grammar in carefully planned meetings, using video and audio recordings and transcription in order to create a permanent digital record of their investigations. “But often, the real insights came when we stumbled upon something,” said Andrew Hippisley, a linguistics professor in the English Department.

James Mastin, an undergraduate linguistics major, volunteered to help record and transcribe the meetings. “I have not seen linguistics in action and this was an excellent opportunity to see what linguistics is and what it can do,” he said. “It’s like a big Rubik’s cube and it’s amazing to get to see the pieces start to come together.”

The team is currently working on articles about their analysis of Shughni and have begun presenting their work at professional conferences.  They expect to have the grammar book completed within five to 10 years, Stump said.  In order to continue their collaboration with the Shughni scholars, UK’s linguists are now making plans for a research visit to Khorog State University.

“Linguistics lives and dies by collaboration,” Hippisley said. “If people don’t work in teams and collaborate, this sort of research wouldn’t be possible.”

UK’s linguists realize how important documenting the Shughni language has become and how it extends beyond just the language.

“All languages are extremely interesting.  Each one gives us new and precious insights into properties of the human mind.  And each one provides a very clear picture of its speakers’ culture,” Stump said. “We are not just studying the Shughni language, but also the Shughni people and Shughni culture in a part of the world that has long been quite inaccessible.”  

As Mirzovafoeva leaves UK and heads back to Tajikistan, she knows the team at UK has begun the important process of helping preserve a language on the path to extinction. “If Shughni is a small detail in a larger construction, if it is lost, the whole tower will collapse,” she said. “If Shughni is lost, all of the world’s languages will lose something.”

And that is exactly what UK’s professors are working to prevent.

Building Momentum

By Stephanie Lang
Photos by Tim Collins

Asia is richly adorned with different peoples, religions, cultures, foods, languages and histories, all forming a colorful and beautifully interconnected fabric. Visual representations of this fabric are readily available in the breathtaking sandy beaches and inspiring Buddhist temples dotting the island of Bali, Indonesia, or in intricately detailed Japanese kimonos, each showcasing just a fraction of the cultures held within this single region.

UK and the College of Arts &  Sciences are working on the creation of new curriculum and research opportunities for students interested in learning more about this region. The Asia Center, housed in the Office of International Affairs, is committed to increasing the study and knowledge of Asia on campus. Recent successes strengthen the College of Arts & Sciences’ commitment to internationalizing the campus.

To further this endeavor, the Asia Center will use funds received from  two prestigious grants, the Institutional Project Support Award from the Japan Foundation and the Freeman Foundation's second Undergraduate Asian Studies Initiative. The Asia Center, a campus-wide group of interdisciplinary faculty and staff, received its first grant from the Freeman Foundation in 2002.

“While supporting faculty positions housed in the College of Arts &  Sciences, these grants are bigger than A&S,” said Doug Slaymaker, director of the Japan Studies Program. “It’s a university-wide initiative which will extend across campus and have ramifications for many different colleges in the university.”

The Institutional Project Support Award from the Japan Foundation is a grant that supports innovative projects in the field of Japanese studies. This grant, totaling $178,000 of a $500,000 project, not only provides funds to hire two new Japanese Studies faculty, but also allows A&S to build a long-term Japanese Studies concentration beginning with undergraduates then eventually extending to graduate studies.

“The grant, together with matching funds from the university, will improve our library collection in Japanese languages and culture. There is also funding during each year of the grant for arts and events that showcase Japanese and Asian culture,” said Shana Herron, assistant director of the Asia Center.

The Freeman Foundation's second Undergraduate Asian Studies Initiative is a three-year grant providing $300,000 of a $450,000 project budget. The grant allows Arts & Sciences to add two new faculty positions, one in Chinese history in the History Department and one in Chinese language and culture in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures.

“It’s exciting to get together new faculty for the program. A group like this will also give us the focus and cohesion needed to build the program from the ground up,” said Slaymaker.

The funds received from the Freeman grant also help create scholarships for education abroad, permitting students to fully immerse themselves in an Asian culture. The Asia Center will grant $2,000 to $4,000 in scholarships to undergraduates going to Asia for study in 2009.

“These grants give us solid training for Chinese, Japanese, and Asian studies so there is a real undergraduate focus that will come out of this which will produce long-term benefits with the addition of new faculty members” Slaymaker said.  “It also allows UK to have a significant number of Asian researchers in a way we did not before, which will establish the university as a leader of Asian studies in the region.”

As an emerging leader of Asian studies in Kentucky, UK will be able to extend the benefits of these grants outside the university to surrounding communities and schools in the state.

 “The Asia Center has been very involved with teacher training and bringing in teachers from kindergarten to 12th grade.  These new hires will also greatly enrich the teacher-training seminars on Asian culture,” Slaymaker said.

“We hold an annual seminar on teaching about Asia for social studies and arts and humanities secondary teachers.  The new faculty language hires will make teacher certification programs in Chinese and Japanese possible as well,” Herron said.

With the influx of funds, the Asia Center will continue to be a catalyst for educational opportunities that prepare students to face a global economy. “This is the culmination of many hours of hard work, by many people on campus” Slaymaker said. “The possibilities for UK, the possibilities for students, and the possibilities for the community of Asian researchers brings an excited energy to this growing program.”

For more information on the Asia Center or education abroad scholarships, contact the Asia Center at asia.center@uky.edu  or visit their website at www.uky.edu/Centers/Asia.

Similar Southern Hospitality

Jordann Sullivan, a political science and Middle East Studies senior, is living in the Middle East as she works on developing her Arabic language skills. She received the Critical Language Scholarship offered by the State Department and the National Security Education Program Scholarship offered by the Department of Defense to fund her travels. 

Usually, when I tell people that I live and study in the Middle East, I am met with reactions like “Are you crazy?” Given our nation’s state of affairs, I can certainly understand their surprise when I tell them about my travels. However, I can’t help but want to change their opinion about this part of the world.  

After the tragedy of 9/11, the world’s attention was turned to the Middle East, and not in a good way. The price of oil skyrocketed, Iraq was invaded, countless people were killed. All of these factors contributed to the fear and anger that most Americans feel when thinking of the Middle East.

This is exactly the reason I wanted to pursue a degree in Middle East Studies at the University of Kentucky. I knew that the Arab world wasn’t the terrifying monolith the media had made it out to be. There was something more.

After completing a semester abroad in Egypt, I was lucky enough to travel to Oman last summer with the State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship. To be honest, I had no idea what I was getting into. Most people I knew couldn’t even locate Oman on a map; I certainly couldn’t before I started studying the Middle East.

I arrived in Oman’s capital of Muscat at midnight. As soon as I stepped off the plane, a wave of heat overcame me. I immediately broke into a sweat. I thought to myself, This heat can’t be real, it must be from the jet engines. It has to be. Unfortunately for me, the heat wasn’t emanating from the jet engines. It was around 100 degrees at midnight in Muscat. I didn’t even want to think about what the heat would be like once the sun came up. 

Luckily, I only stayed in Muscat for a few days. Soon after my arrival, our group of Americans was transported to the small coastal town of Salalah. Due to the path of the monsoon rains from India, Salalah acts as a unique biosphere within Oman. While the rest of the country suffers oppressive 130 degree summer heat, Salalah enjoys temperatures in the high 80’s, and plenty of misty rain. Looking around at the rolling green hills and feeling the light rain on our faces, it was hard to believe we were still in Arabia. In fact, it looked a lot like the Appalachians in eastern Kentucky.

After a few weeks, I realized that there was a lot more about Oman that reminded me of Kentucky. It surprised me, actually, how much a formerly isolated Middle Eastern nation resembled my home state (and the American South in general). Let me explain.

Everyone knows that Southerners are famed for their incredible hospitality.  I’ve often had friends from above the Mason Dixon line drop in to visit Kentucky, and of course the first thing they mention is how nice everyone is. Where I grew up, you can’t go to the grocery store without striking up a conversation with the lady at the cash register. Strangers smile and wave from their cars as they let you cross the street. I found the same sense of warm hospitality in Oman. It was nearly impossible to leave our rooms without a kind stranger offering us a cup of tea, a sandwich or directions. Most people just wanted to talk, and to find out why we were visiting their sleepy little town. I couldn’t hide my astonishment when I took a cab from one end of town to the other and the elderly driver refused to take my money, telling me that I was a guest in his town and in his country. 

Every summer, Salalah hosts a mahrajan, or festival, celebrating the coming of the monsoon rains. All the students in my program were told about the festival when we arrived in Salalah, and our excitement escalated the more we heard our Omani counterparts talk about it. I walked into the mahrajan expecting an exotic and distinctly Omani experience. Much to my surprise, the mahrajan turned out to be exactly like a large “county fair” in the United States. The rickety rides, vendors in stalls selling snack food and soft drinks and live music were all there. The only difference was that the crowd wore abayyas and dishdashas (traditional dress for Omani men and women) instead of cut-off jeans and t-shirts, and ate falafel instead of funnel cakes.

Southerners, and Kentuckians especially, pride themselves on their sweet tea. A pitcher of sweet tea on a Kentuckian’s table is just about the most common sight you can see on a summer afternoon. Well, the same goes for Omanis. They love their tea, and they love it sweet and often. My very southern mother would be quite impressed, I believe. Omanis are also incredible cooks. If you enter an Omani home, you’re going to eat. Even if you’re not hungry, you’ll eat. It reminds me of when my family has get-togethers, and all of the women who prepared the meal don’t allow anyone to abstain from seconds, much less forego the meal entirely. I think this happens because both of us, Omanis and Southerners, develop a sense of community and foster a feeling of welcome through sharing food.

Besides our penchant for sweet tea and home cooking, Oman and Kentucky share other similarities. A strong commitment to religion and family values is deeply rooted in both cultures. In my opinion, a church-going Kentuckian and a devout Omani Muslim, despite their obvious religious difference, would actually share many of the same moral principles. And of course, I would be lying if I said that I didn’t feel a little camaraderie with the people of Salalah, who told us how Omanis from the more developed city of Muscat teased them about their accents.

I never thought that I would feel at home in a country halfway across the world. I think a lot of Kentuckians would be surprised at how alike our cultures truly are. It’s easy to look at the styles of dress, the religion, and the language, and dismiss the Middle East as completely foreign. But when given a second glance, the culture of these countries is actually not so distant from our own. With that, I will bid you as-salaam wa alaikum, or “peace, y’all.” 

The Open Arms of Generosity

By Robin Roenker

Though she’s not a UK alumna herself, An Le knew the University of Kentucky was the right place to establish the Bill Bridges Memorial Scholarship – an award to honor and celebrate the life of Bill Bridges, a former University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension officer and community volunteer who helped her family during one of their most trying times.

In 1979, eight-year-old An Le and her family – her parents and four older siblings – escaped overnight from their native Vietnam. They had nothing but the clothes on their backs and the hope of a brighter future elsewhere.

The family shuffled from Hong Kong, awaiting sponsorship in the United States, to Michigan, home of an aunt, before settling in Lexington, Ky., where Le’s father had some friends.

The move wasn’t easy. Le’s father was the only one in the family who knew any English. Her parents had owned a successful chain of pharmacies in Vietnam, but in Lexington, the best job her father could find initially was a nighttime shift washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant.

The family was struggling to learn English and piece together their new, American lives.

That was how Bill Bridges found them, soon after their arrival in Kentucky.

A Mt. Sterling native with degrees from the University of Michigan and Columbia University, Bridges had been a longtime volunteer with the Peace Corps and the United Nations Association. He’d literally traveled the globe helping to build villages and run rural development programs in Nepal, Bangladesh and South Korea. He was also an active volunteer locally, helping foster Kentucky’s 4-H program, the Donovan Scholars Volunteer Task Force, and Lexington’s Christian Unity Task Force, among other programs. Over the years, he worked one-one-one to teach English as a second language to students from more than 15 countries.

Before long, Bridges became a weekly fixture at the Le home, where he’d work with An and her siblings on their English and provide them with tape-recorded spelling lessons to work on throughout the week. With An, the youngest, he formed a special bond. Soon, the children came to call Bridges – who by then was a widower with no children of his own – —their “grandfather.”

After two years in Kentucky, the Le family moved to California, but An Le and Bridges maintained a steady written correspondence throughout the years.

“He was just a great man. So gentle and kind,” Le said of Bridges. “His whole life was about service and helping other people.”

As a student at UCLA, Le wrote to Bridges about her struggles to put herself through college via a demanding job as a legal secretary and still maintain high grades in her honors classes. She had decided to study English literature, despite her parents’ insistence that she choose a major with a more reliable career path.

What she got in reply was a shock.

In 1991 Bridges sent her a check for $5,000, telling her to use it to help cover the cost of her books and other expenses. He also offered some much-needed encouragement: “He said, ‘Don’t worry so much . . . just do what you think is right. Everything will work out,’” Le recalled. 

“That was the most wonderful thing. Just his words of encouragement. And his active generosity. It wasn’t so much the money,” said Le, who went on to pursue a law degree from UC-Hastings and now works as a labor lawyer for ABC. “I couldn’t tell you how much that meant to me. To have somebody outside my own family who believed that much in me.”

For Le, that encouragement was enough. She decided not to use the money, but invested it in a CD instead, aiming to return it one day to Bridges.

When Bridges died in 2001 in his late eighties, Le knew right away that the money should go toward establishing a scholarship in his name.

Now each year the A&S English Department awards the $500 Bill Bridges Memorial Scholarship to a first-generation college student majoring in English literature – someone much like Le was all those years ago.

"It feels like after all these years, Bill's gift continues to give,” Le said.

Front page photo - sunrise over Da Nang, Vietnam