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brdgtI think my UMass alumni magazine is pretty good. There were two articles that caught my interest in the most recent issue:
With Each Stitch, Hope
Cari Clement ’71 helps women rebuild lives with her knitting machines
—Melissa Pasanen
Cari Clement travels regularly to Rwanda, the most densely populated country in Africa, to teach women to use donated knitting machines. Income from knitted goods helps them support their families. Already a poor, rural country at the time of the civil war in 1990, the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 destroyed Rwanda’s fragile economy, severely impoverished the population (particularly women), and eroded the country’s ability to attract private and external investment.
SMILE AFTER SMILE BEAMS OUT from photos taken by Cari Clement during her five trips to Rwanda. In the pictures, women like Jeannette and Esperance proudly show off scarves, hats, and ponchos they have created with knitting machines and training provided through Clement’s nonprofit Fiber and Craft Entrepreneurial Development Center (FACED). Their faces tell the happier story of today, not the heartbreak of the past.
Esperance was 15 when all of her relatives, save one, were murdered during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. She escaped into the forest, where she lived alone for weeks, emerging only at night to find food. Jeanette was raped by 60 soldiers in front of her family. She is haunted not only by the memory, but also by the fact that she is HIV-positive.
Rwanda is full of similar stories following a brutal civil war that culminated in the slaughter of an estimated 800,000—largely men and boys—and left the country traumatized and countless thousands widowed and orphaned. Over the last few years, the small, densely populated nation has taken significant steps forward, although challenges to revitalizing the economy and establishing a stable political system remain considerable.
“When you think of Rwanda, all most people think about is genocide. This is so different. From the widows, you see only smiles,” Clement explains. “It’s so tangible. You have a ball of yarn. Then you have a sweater. You take the sweater to market and you sell it…when people have the opportunity to earn a living for their family, there are fewer reasons to pick up machetes.”
In a country where 90 percent of the population struggles to survive on subsistence farming, the simple, hand-operated machines enable women to earn up to double the average national wage. Over the last two and a half years, Clement has worked with about 400 women in Rwanda. A new $99,000 grant will expand her organization’s reach to at least another 1,000.
Knitting has been part of Clement’s life almost as long as she can remember. “My mother was an avid knitter and I was a bit of a challenge, so she taught me how to knit to keep me busy,” she says with a grin. Her passion for knitting led to studies in textiles, clothing, and the environmental arts at UMass Amherst, then to a career in knitting and fashion, including marketing a pioneering, affordable knitting machine.
“I have always known that making beautiful things lifts the spirit and offers hope. In Rwanda, I really saw it happen,” Clement reflected recently in her Montpelier, Vermont, office. From here she manages both her job as director of fashion and design for Caron International (the company to which she ultimately sold the knitting machine business) and her volunteer work. Surrounded by stacks of pattern books, seamstress mannequins, and bundles of yarn with names like “glimmer” and “pizzazz”, she sports hip glasses and lots of chunky jewelry—seemingly more fashion designer than do-gooder—but it’s clear where her heart lies.
After achieving success with her business, Clement approached a number of international aid organizations offering to donate 60 knitting machines and assistance to set up a women’s economic collective anywhere in the world. “My mom was involved with so many causes while we were growing up. She worked for the United Nations in its formative stage,” Clement explains. “I grew up knowing that you need to do something for people. It becomes part of you.”
The United States Association for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (USA for UNHCR) responded quickly, and in July 2003 Clement traveled to Africa for the first time to train Congolese and Burundian refugees in Rwanda who had fled from ethnic conflicts in their homelands. The impact of the project immediately caught the attention of Rwandan and U.S. officials. A framed certificate of special thanks from USA for UNHCR hangs on Clement’s office door.
“The program has given a real vitality to the otherwise grim existence most refugees and many Rwandans experience due to extreme poverty,” wrote Senator Patrick Leahy, ranking member on the Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, in a letter of support. Tim Rieser, Leahy’s foreign policy aide, visited one of the refugee camps. “I didn’t even know what a knitting machine was, but when you see it, it’s a simple and inexpensive way for people with no other way to earn money to help themselves,” he said recently over the phone. “Cari is a good example of what one person with a simple idea and determination can accomplish. It’s one thing to have an idea, but another to make it a reality halfway around the world.”
Leahy’s office helped Clement negotiate the bureaucracy involved in landing a $99,000 grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that will focus on Rwandan genocide survivors and enable Clement to equip and train 16 self-sustaining knitting cooperatives across the country. “This is an exciting grassroots project that will have immediate impact on the lives of the women,” wrote Christophe Tocco, a program officer with USAID, in an e-mail from Rwanda.
Clement will continue to travel to Rwanda twice a year and, while home, to actively cultivate partnerships in support of FACED’s work. On her most recent trip, she took members of a high-powered New York-based nonprofit called Business Council for Peace who will help with business and market development. She arranged for refugee-knitted scarves to be included in last year’s Grammy Awards gift bags, and she is working on a book of stories and patterns to benefit the project. Clement recently met with the editor of Vogue Knitting to discuss potential eco-tourism knitting tours and has hosted (in Vermont) both the Rwandan ambassador and one of the country’s most famous singers. “If I had a regular job, I’d be bored,” she says.
Despite her contributions, Clement is quick to deflect credit. “The women did it themselves,” she says. “They’re wearing out the machines. They’re wearing ridges in places I never knew could have ridges…they’re determined.” Between her first two visits, for example, Clement recounts that she did not know how much the machines had been used, but was “greeted with an amazing spectacle: The walls of the center were virtually lined with exceptionally well-knitted sweaters of all sizes and shapes.” The women had pooled their resources to send their best knitter to the Rwandan capital for training. Another group secured an order for 400 sweaters from a local school. “They didn’t know how to knit a round-neck sweater,” she smiles, “but that didn’t stop them from selling them into the school.” The refugees who knitted the Grammy scarves used some of the proceeds to pave the dirt floor of their women’s center to keep the yarn clean. “That’s really remarkable since it’s a refugee camp,” notes Clement. Pointing to a photo of a group wearing huge smiles under top-knotted hats, she recalls, “We showed them how to make hats, and we came back and everybody had one on.”
It is these happy memories that bring tears to Clement’s eyes. “I don’t cry at the genocide memorials where you see skulls and all of these coffins,” she says. “I cry when I see the women being successful.”
For more information:
Fiber and Craft Entrepreneurial Development Center, 802-229-9991; www.fiberandcraft.org.
To buy garments knitted through the project, visit Economic Development Imports at www.edimports.com.
Going Native
What an anthropologist learned when she went back to college as a freshman
—Carol Cambo
When 50-something Cathy Small ’71, professor of anthropology, waited in line to get her dorm assignment as a freshman at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in the fall of 2002, it wasn’t to relive her carefree youth. Instead she wanted to make sense of the students sitting in her classroom. “I noticed I was looking at students as if they were from a different culture,” explains Small, whose past writings have focused largely on immigration, globalization, and life in a Tongan village. “So I did what an anthropologist does. I lived among them.”
The resulting book, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, reveals a student culture that may shock parents and educators alike. Small, who went undercover to experience dorm life, shuttle buses, intramural sports, and a full course load (she wrote the book under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan but was later “outed” by a USA Today, reporter), discovered that students believe two-thirds of their learning happens outside of classrooms and lecture halls. She found that to thrive in college today students must become clever managers of time and resources. “I was overwhelmed by the amount and diversity of things I had to manage,” admits Small.
In her book, Small outlines a theory as to why today’s students need time-management skills. Over the last several decades many state legislatures have cut funding for public universities, which have, in turn, raised tuition rates, so most undergraduates today are burdened with loans to support their schooling. As a result, students have adopted a bottom-line approach. They take the safest, least costly route to a secure job—and income with which to repay those loans (which is likely one reason why, says Small, enrollment in English and philosophy departments is on the decline…). Today’s university students place high value on grades and credits, as well as volunteer and work experiences to plump up their résumés. Students put their critical thinking to work coordinating cumbersome schedules and balancing academic demands with part-time jobs instead of engaging in intellectual debate for its own sake. Nowadays it’s wiser to write a paper that reflects the professor’s view than waste precious time fighting for an original idea. In smooth prose sprinkled with relevant historical and theoretical digressions, Small shares other discouraging discoveries in her book, such as the lack of ethnic diversity in students’ social networks and a pervasive ignorance about world geography.
But Small found reasons to be encouraged, too. Students were mostly kind and friendly, and most would not take a degree if it were given to them and miss out on their college experience. There are healthy pockets of intellectual and political life to be found in various university subcultures, including those of environmentalists and evangelicals alike. She witnessed dorm- and classmates earnestly weathering a rite of passage to adulthood. And while modern students consume alcohol as heartily as generations before them, they are more responsible than Small’s peers in the 1970s. “They are more aware of substance issues in general,” says Small, “and students are more likely to call a cab or designate a driver than in my day.” She admits, though, that her weakest insights came in the social realm. “I wasn’t invited to many three-keggers,” she says.
While some of Small’s findings are troubling, she reminds us it’s best to take a long view; she was a less-than-perfect student in her day and now holds a PhD and a tenured professorship. “I was the worst undergraduate in my UMass days; it’s embarrassing. One semester I got a .9 and another 1.8.” Small says she was a product of her time, when students were less materialistic and rarely held outside jobs. But even then, most learning took place outside of the classroom. “I was a great example of a student who couldn’t get it together, one who partied too much. That was my life then.”
Small’s life now is that of dedicated educator and researcher, and she immediately put her findings to good use. “If students learn just 35 percent in the classroom, and my class is just three credits out of 120, I need to tie in my classroom work with the rest of their lives,” says Small. She developed a new course for freshmen and sophomores, Anthropology of Everyday Life, with this in mind. “So if we’re talking about kinship and relationship, for example, I have them write a personal ad, then we look at ads from other cultures and see how the ideas of relationship compare,” says Small.
My Freshman Year is also having impact on a larger scale. The president of NAU has made it required reading for all administrators; Small’s findings are resonating with leaders at educational institutions around the country and the world—she has been able to accommodate only a fraction of the invitations she’s received to speak at universities and national conferences. The international media, including major outlets in England, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, have run stories on the book with an eye to understanding their own students. Now in its fourth printing, the book has gotten students’ attention as well. One recent student review of her book began by thanking the author for writing it, for unveiling truths about the college experience. And Small is working with experts who would like to use her research to make institutional policy changes that better reflect and accommodate current college culture.
Life as a freshman changed Small’s teaching in other ways. She saw how personal upheaval wreaks havoc on a delicately balanced schedule. “As a student, I saw those who were holed up or had gone home for some emergency, wondering if a professor would accept a late paper as a result. I gained a great amount of empathy for students, especially those drowning in the details,” says Small. “I have the same class policies, but I’m more likely to change policy for individual circumstances. Now, if I notice a student has missed a couple of classes, I e-mail, ‘Are you okay?’ not ‘Class policy dictates a drop in grade for your absences.’” Small says her evaluations reflect a change; she now gets comments like “she really understands what we’re going through.” As further reinforcement that she’s on the right track, Small was named NAU’s Teacher of the Year 2004-2005.
While Small was glad to leave behind heat that couldn’t be turned on or off, mediocre food, and cliques within her dorm, she misses the constant buzz of campus life. “I loved having my door open and listening to the language and music of student life,” says Small. It’s a good bet that this anthropologist still has her ear to the ground.
With Each Stitch, Hope
Cari Clement ’71 helps women rebuild lives with her knitting machines
—Melissa Pasanen
Cari Clement travels regularly to Rwanda, the most densely populated country in Africa, to teach women to use donated knitting machines. Income from knitted goods helps them support their families. Already a poor, rural country at the time of the civil war in 1990, the genocide of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 destroyed Rwanda’s fragile economy, severely impoverished the population (particularly women), and eroded the country’s ability to attract private and external investment.
SMILE AFTER SMILE BEAMS OUT from photos taken by Cari Clement during her five trips to Rwanda. In the pictures, women like Jeannette and Esperance proudly show off scarves, hats, and ponchos they have created with knitting machines and training provided through Clement’s nonprofit Fiber and Craft Entrepreneurial Development Center (FACED). Their faces tell the happier story of today, not the heartbreak of the past.
Esperance was 15 when all of her relatives, save one, were murdered during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. She escaped into the forest, where she lived alone for weeks, emerging only at night to find food. Jeanette was raped by 60 soldiers in front of her family. She is haunted not only by the memory, but also by the fact that she is HIV-positive.
Rwanda is full of similar stories following a brutal civil war that culminated in the slaughter of an estimated 800,000—largely men and boys—and left the country traumatized and countless thousands widowed and orphaned. Over the last few years, the small, densely populated nation has taken significant steps forward, although challenges to revitalizing the economy and establishing a stable political system remain considerable.
“When you think of Rwanda, all most people think about is genocide. This is so different. From the widows, you see only smiles,” Clement explains. “It’s so tangible. You have a ball of yarn. Then you have a sweater. You take the sweater to market and you sell it…when people have the opportunity to earn a living for their family, there are fewer reasons to pick up machetes.”
In a country where 90 percent of the population struggles to survive on subsistence farming, the simple, hand-operated machines enable women to earn up to double the average national wage. Over the last two and a half years, Clement has worked with about 400 women in Rwanda. A new $99,000 grant will expand her organization’s reach to at least another 1,000.
Knitting has been part of Clement’s life almost as long as she can remember. “My mother was an avid knitter and I was a bit of a challenge, so she taught me how to knit to keep me busy,” she says with a grin. Her passion for knitting led to studies in textiles, clothing, and the environmental arts at UMass Amherst, then to a career in knitting and fashion, including marketing a pioneering, affordable knitting machine.
“I have always known that making beautiful things lifts the spirit and offers hope. In Rwanda, I really saw it happen,” Clement reflected recently in her Montpelier, Vermont, office. From here she manages both her job as director of fashion and design for Caron International (the company to which she ultimately sold the knitting machine business) and her volunteer work. Surrounded by stacks of pattern books, seamstress mannequins, and bundles of yarn with names like “glimmer” and “pizzazz”, she sports hip glasses and lots of chunky jewelry—seemingly more fashion designer than do-gooder—but it’s clear where her heart lies.
After achieving success with her business, Clement approached a number of international aid organizations offering to donate 60 knitting machines and assistance to set up a women’s economic collective anywhere in the world. “My mom was involved with so many causes while we were growing up. She worked for the United Nations in its formative stage,” Clement explains. “I grew up knowing that you need to do something for people. It becomes part of you.”
The United States Association for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (USA for UNHCR) responded quickly, and in July 2003 Clement traveled to Africa for the first time to train Congolese and Burundian refugees in Rwanda who had fled from ethnic conflicts in their homelands. The impact of the project immediately caught the attention of Rwandan and U.S. officials. A framed certificate of special thanks from USA for UNHCR hangs on Clement’s office door.
“The program has given a real vitality to the otherwise grim existence most refugees and many Rwandans experience due to extreme poverty,” wrote Senator Patrick Leahy, ranking member on the Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, in a letter of support. Tim Rieser, Leahy’s foreign policy aide, visited one of the refugee camps. “I didn’t even know what a knitting machine was, but when you see it, it’s a simple and inexpensive way for people with no other way to earn money to help themselves,” he said recently over the phone. “Cari is a good example of what one person with a simple idea and determination can accomplish. It’s one thing to have an idea, but another to make it a reality halfway around the world.”
Leahy’s office helped Clement negotiate the bureaucracy involved in landing a $99,000 grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that will focus on Rwandan genocide survivors and enable Clement to equip and train 16 self-sustaining knitting cooperatives across the country. “This is an exciting grassroots project that will have immediate impact on the lives of the women,” wrote Christophe Tocco, a program officer with USAID, in an e-mail from Rwanda.
Clement will continue to travel to Rwanda twice a year and, while home, to actively cultivate partnerships in support of FACED’s work. On her most recent trip, she took members of a high-powered New York-based nonprofit called Business Council for Peace who will help with business and market development. She arranged for refugee-knitted scarves to be included in last year’s Grammy Awards gift bags, and she is working on a book of stories and patterns to benefit the project. Clement recently met with the editor of Vogue Knitting to discuss potential eco-tourism knitting tours and has hosted (in Vermont) both the Rwandan ambassador and one of the country’s most famous singers. “If I had a regular job, I’d be bored,” she says.
Despite her contributions, Clement is quick to deflect credit. “The women did it themselves,” she says. “They’re wearing out the machines. They’re wearing ridges in places I never knew could have ridges…they’re determined.” Between her first two visits, for example, Clement recounts that she did not know how much the machines had been used, but was “greeted with an amazing spectacle: The walls of the center were virtually lined with exceptionally well-knitted sweaters of all sizes and shapes.” The women had pooled their resources to send their best knitter to the Rwandan capital for training. Another group secured an order for 400 sweaters from a local school. “They didn’t know how to knit a round-neck sweater,” she smiles, “but that didn’t stop them from selling them into the school.” The refugees who knitted the Grammy scarves used some of the proceeds to pave the dirt floor of their women’s center to keep the yarn clean. “That’s really remarkable since it’s a refugee camp,” notes Clement. Pointing to a photo of a group wearing huge smiles under top-knotted hats, she recalls, “We showed them how to make hats, and we came back and everybody had one on.”
It is these happy memories that bring tears to Clement’s eyes. “I don’t cry at the genocide memorials where you see skulls and all of these coffins,” she says. “I cry when I see the women being successful.”
For more information:
Fiber and Craft Entrepreneurial Development Center, 802-229-9991; www.fiberandcraft.org.
To buy garments knitted through the project, visit Economic Development Imports at www.edimports.com.
Going Native
What an anthropologist learned when she went back to college as a freshman
—Carol Cambo
When 50-something Cathy Small ’71, professor of anthropology, waited in line to get her dorm assignment as a freshman at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in the fall of 2002, it wasn’t to relive her carefree youth. Instead she wanted to make sense of the students sitting in her classroom. “I noticed I was looking at students as if they were from a different culture,” explains Small, whose past writings have focused largely on immigration, globalization, and life in a Tongan village. “So I did what an anthropologist does. I lived among them.”
The resulting book, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student, reveals a student culture that may shock parents and educators alike. Small, who went undercover to experience dorm life, shuttle buses, intramural sports, and a full course load (she wrote the book under the pseudonym Rebekah Nathan but was later “outed” by a USA Today, reporter), discovered that students believe two-thirds of their learning happens outside of classrooms and lecture halls. She found that to thrive in college today students must become clever managers of time and resources. “I was overwhelmed by the amount and diversity of things I had to manage,” admits Small.
In her book, Small outlines a theory as to why today’s students need time-management skills. Over the last several decades many state legislatures have cut funding for public universities, which have, in turn, raised tuition rates, so most undergraduates today are burdened with loans to support their schooling. As a result, students have adopted a bottom-line approach. They take the safest, least costly route to a secure job—and income with which to repay those loans (which is likely one reason why, says Small, enrollment in English and philosophy departments is on the decline…). Today’s university students place high value on grades and credits, as well as volunteer and work experiences to plump up their résumés. Students put their critical thinking to work coordinating cumbersome schedules and balancing academic demands with part-time jobs instead of engaging in intellectual debate for its own sake. Nowadays it’s wiser to write a paper that reflects the professor’s view than waste precious time fighting for an original idea. In smooth prose sprinkled with relevant historical and theoretical digressions, Small shares other discouraging discoveries in her book, such as the lack of ethnic diversity in students’ social networks and a pervasive ignorance about world geography.
But Small found reasons to be encouraged, too. Students were mostly kind and friendly, and most would not take a degree if it were given to them and miss out on their college experience. There are healthy pockets of intellectual and political life to be found in various university subcultures, including those of environmentalists and evangelicals alike. She witnessed dorm- and classmates earnestly weathering a rite of passage to adulthood. And while modern students consume alcohol as heartily as generations before them, they are more responsible than Small’s peers in the 1970s. “They are more aware of substance issues in general,” says Small, “and students are more likely to call a cab or designate a driver than in my day.” She admits, though, that her weakest insights came in the social realm. “I wasn’t invited to many three-keggers,” she says.
While some of Small’s findings are troubling, she reminds us it’s best to take a long view; she was a less-than-perfect student in her day and now holds a PhD and a tenured professorship. “I was the worst undergraduate in my UMass days; it’s embarrassing. One semester I got a .9 and another 1.8.” Small says she was a product of her time, when students were less materialistic and rarely held outside jobs. But even then, most learning took place outside of the classroom. “I was a great example of a student who couldn’t get it together, one who partied too much. That was my life then.”
Small’s life now is that of dedicated educator and researcher, and she immediately put her findings to good use. “If students learn just 35 percent in the classroom, and my class is just three credits out of 120, I need to tie in my classroom work with the rest of their lives,” says Small. She developed a new course for freshmen and sophomores, Anthropology of Everyday Life, with this in mind. “So if we’re talking about kinship and relationship, for example, I have them write a personal ad, then we look at ads from other cultures and see how the ideas of relationship compare,” says Small.
My Freshman Year is also having impact on a larger scale. The president of NAU has made it required reading for all administrators; Small’s findings are resonating with leaders at educational institutions around the country and the world—she has been able to accommodate only a fraction of the invitations she’s received to speak at universities and national conferences. The international media, including major outlets in England, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, have run stories on the book with an eye to understanding their own students. Now in its fourth printing, the book has gotten students’ attention as well. One recent student review of her book began by thanking the author for writing it, for unveiling truths about the college experience. And Small is working with experts who would like to use her research to make institutional policy changes that better reflect and accommodate current college culture.
Life as a freshman changed Small’s teaching in other ways. She saw how personal upheaval wreaks havoc on a delicately balanced schedule. “As a student, I saw those who were holed up or had gone home for some emergency, wondering if a professor would accept a late paper as a result. I gained a great amount of empathy for students, especially those drowning in the details,” says Small. “I have the same class policies, but I’m more likely to change policy for individual circumstances. Now, if I notice a student has missed a couple of classes, I e-mail, ‘Are you okay?’ not ‘Class policy dictates a drop in grade for your absences.’” Small says her evaluations reflect a change; she now gets comments like “she really understands what we’re going through.” As further reinforcement that she’s on the right track, Small was named NAU’s Teacher of the Year 2004-2005.
While Small was glad to leave behind heat that couldn’t be turned on or off, mediocre food, and cliques within her dorm, she misses the constant buzz of campus life. “I loved having my door open and listening to the language and music of student life,” says Small. It’s a good bet that this anthropologist still has her ear to the ground.
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Date: 2006-01-27 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-27 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-27 09:39 pm (UTC)