A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [21]
Another possibility arose when a career counselor told me about the Michael Clark Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship. Michael was the son of Nelson Rockefeller, the former vice president and governor of New York. After graduating from Harvard, Michael went on to explore the anthropology of New Guinea and brought home extraordinary artifacts and information about the Papuan people. He also wrote beautifully about how the experience had affected him personally. Tragically, and under unclear circumstances, he perished on a return trip to New Guinea. In his memory, his family established the fellowship to enable an individual to spend a year in a distinctly non-Western culture. It embodied the virtues of discovery and perspective that had become important to me, so I applied. The stipend itself was just enough money to get there and back—presumably so no one could move into an Intercontinental Hotel. For fellows, the bracing realities of Third World countries would not include room service. The point was to make your way in unfamiliar settings.
Applicants had to stipulate where they wanted to travel and why. Having never been overseas, I had no frame of reference. I chose Sudan because I had written about it when interning at banks in New York and Boston during the summers in college. More than twenty years later, Sudan, and Darfur in particular, would be known for its bloody civil war, which led to one of the worst humanitarian disasters in memory. But when I was applying for the fellowship, all I knew was that Sudan was the largest country in Africa as well as the poorest. It was in many ways still “uncharted” and a focus of increasing attention from international development lenders. I was curious about the impact of economic development on cultural and social norms and who takes responsibility for the disruption of those norms. It was enough to earn me an interview.
I met with the selection committee in a small basement conference room at the career center. The chair, a tall, distinguished anthropology professor with bushy gray brows and deep crow’s-feet that framed his eyes, seemed skeptical but amused. He quizzed me about my personal story and observed that I had already adjusted to an unfamiliar culture by coming to Milton Academy from the South Side of Chicago. True enough, I said, but I wanted to stretch my boundaries even further and was committed to exploring a truly foreign land. At the end of the interview, paraphrasing Pasteur, he said, “Chance favors the well prepared.” Well prepared or not, I got my chance.
As a Rockefeller fellow, I was responsible for creating much of my own program, and that meant finding an employer. I wrote to everyone I knew with a contact in Africa, specifically in Sudan. Relief agencies, banks, universities, volunteer organizations—you name it. I sent scores of letters and received one reply. A man who worked for a United Nations Development Programme project in Khartoum wrote a friendly letter saying that he was not sure what I would do when I got there, but he would figure it out and I should come. I set about applying for my first passport, arranging for the necessary visas, getting the inoculations, buying a backpack, and figuring out how to fit a year’s worth of clothing and personal effects into it.
Meanwhile, Will Speers had just finished his junior year at Princeton and was making summer