President's Page: Traveling, Teaching, Learning

This past June, at my second Reunion as president of Vassar, I once again heard from many alumnae/i what an amazing feeling it was to return to the scene of one of the most transformative experiences of their lives. One month later, it was Kent and I who experienced a similar kind of amazing feeling, as we returned to the Republic of Zambia in southern Africa, where we had lived and worked for three years in the mid-1990s.

The occasion was an AAVC trip. Our party numbered 21, and ranged in age from the 16-year-old granddaughter of an alumna to an 87-year-old former chair of Vassar’s board. It was a wonderful group, and a reminder that Vassar alumnae/i – and their spouses, children and grandchildren – share a certain, instant bond that is hard to describe precisely, but is nevertheless very real. It would be dangerous for me to tell any stories about our fellow travelers in this column, for fear of a letter to the editor, but I do want to point out that our most senior alumna didn’t miss a thing; in fact, she was scrambling in and out of our safari vehicles and canoes as if she were still a student!

Zambia is a beautiful country – the home of Mosi-oa-Tunya (“the smoke that thunders,” also known as Victoria Falls), teeming with wildlife that we were privileged to see on several game drives – and it was great fun to be back, especially with the Vassar group. The tour was a good blend of the artistic, the natural (on safari, we saw lions, giraffes, hippos and more) and the historic. Kent and I had the opportunity for a sentimental journey of our own, going through our old neighborhood in the capital of Lusaka, seeing our old house again and, in a particularly emotional reunion, meeting again a woman who had frequently looked after our children, back when they were so much younger.

And yet, I wish a little more had changed since we were last there. Zambia achieved its independence in 1964, and four decades later its GDP per capita in constant US dollars had actually declined. I had been there in the 1990s as an advisor to the government on economic matters, and it was dispiriting to see – and hear, from a group of Zambian professionals with whom we met – how underperforming the nation’s economy has been. There are, however, some signs of improvement in the last few years. Also on the optimistic side, Zambia has held four democratic elections since 1991, when the country returned to multiparty democracy.

One of the factors complicating economic development is the AIDS epidemic, whose frightening proportions in Africa may not be clear to the average American. We visited the Fountain of Hope shelter and Lubuto Library in Lusaka, built for children who are living on the streets, many of whose parents have died of AIDS. The library itself is well stocked with books, to be sure; but elsewhere on the compound, children are also fed and put up in bunk beds and sent to school, allowing them to get off the street. At another stop we witnessed the performance of an original dramatic play put on by schoolchildren about AIDS, which has touched almost all their lives. It was a very powerful experience.

Appropriately for an AAVC trip, our journey reinforced a couple of Vassar’s core values. One is quite simply the value of education itself. At the lodges where we stayed for our safaris, there were schools for the children of employees, opening up future opportunities for their students. Education is, as it has always been, the single most effective way to lift people to better lives, whether it was the young women who flocked to Vassar when we first opened our doors, or the AIDS orphans of Zambia today.

The other core value, which has been part of our College from the beginning, is the need for all of us to be citizens with a truly global perspective. When such enormous disparities exist between the lives of Zambians and the lives of Americans, the need to take intelligent action, to do something that can have a real impact on those disparities, becomes paramount. I am proud that our College continues to produce leaders who are in the forefront of taking action to effect these kinds of changes.

Photo credit: copyright Dixie Sheridan