On the Campus - October 6, 1999
Summer vacations with a difference
Students savored the challenges of working in Alaska, Kosovo, and the Ukraine
by Katherine Zoepf '00
What did you do this summer?" By early October, the question is
usually fading from campus small talk, having been asked and answered countless
times as undergraduates moved into their rooms, and reunited with friends,
hall mates, and fellow club and college members.
But if the question is becoming less urgent, many students' answers remain exhilarating. Some Princeton undergraduates spent the summer working on jobs or projects as challenging as the toughest course they might take on campus.
Sarah Cook '00, a history major from St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, went to Kharkov, Ukraine, to research her senior thesis project, a historical study of the university system there. The history had never been chronicled, and Cook spent six to seven hours a day in archives in that country, reading, translating, and transcribing documents in Russian and Ukrainian. "It's a culture that's so very different, yet I felt comfortable almost instantly. There's such a mix of old and new. The people are smart and sophisticated-there's virtually no disposable income, but such a generous spirit," Cook says. "I just fell in love with the country."
Chai Vasarhelyi '00, a comparative literature major from New York City, headed to Kosovo in June for a summer internship with the ABC news crew there, to find that with the war ending and ABC cutting its operations, the job she'd expected had vanished. But Vasarhelyi, fascinated by the province and by the stories of the young Kosovars she was beginning to meet, didn't want to leave yet. Armed with a movie camera, Vasarhelyi, along with Hugo Berkeley '99, took to the streets of Pristina, talking to young Kosovars about the future, hoping to make some kind of record of the stories.
"I've never had such an appreciation of human kindness before in my life. Everyone knew who we were and was willing to help us, to talk to us-we were even invited to the first wedding in Pristina after the war," Vasarhelyi says.
Over the course of a month in Pristina, Vasarhelyi and Berkeley recorded more than 30 hours of footage, sleeping on couches in the ABC bunker at night, hitting the streets during the day with a camera. At first they focused on Kosovar culture, and learning about how, and to what extent, that had been preserved as distinct from a Serbian one, but they quickly realized that there was a larger story in just talking to Kosovars their own age.
"These are kids who'd never thought about the future, because there was no future," Vasarhelyi says. "One young boy we talked to put it really well: You're standing in front of a wall your whole life, and suddenly that wall falls. Where do you go? What do you do? You don't know where you fit. The war ends, and everyone's lives change in an instant. One day you're a fighter; the next day you're no longer a fighter. Where do you go? What do you do? The brain drain is such a well-documented phenomenon, but now all these young people suddenly have a choice of where they might go."
Lil Wood '00, an ecology and evolutionary biology major, spent her summer in Petersburg, Alaska, which, exotic as it sounds to most Princeton students, is also home. Wood worked on her thesis, an ecological study of bogs, and worked in a salmon cannery for her sixth summer in a row.
"A fish cannery is a whole culture built around sleep deprivation," Wood explains. "Everyone's trying to work as many hours as they can. My sister and I worked side by side. We'd get there at about 6 a.m. every day, and start work. We'd have our meals in the company cafeteria, and work all day, leaving at about 12:30 a.m. Then we'd ride our bikes home."
"The cannery is also kind of romantic for my sister and me," Wood adds. "My grandfather started a cannery in this town 50 years ago, and that's why our family moved to Alaska in the first place."
"I'm kind of addicted," Wood says. "I hadn't intended to work there this summer, but somehow I just couldn't stay out. You meet the craziest people with the craziest stories. And you think in so much more depth about things, working in the cannery. It's really inspiring."
Katherine Zoepf, copresident of the Press Club, will report on campus events for Princeton Alumni Weekly for the academic year 1999-00. Formerly an editor-in-chief of The Nassau Weekly, she has worked for The Cincinnati Enquirer and has written about Princeton University for The New York Times.
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