Tiarra Abell ’12, a double major in Spanish and anthropology, is spending her December break in Ecuador doing research.

As the end of the semester approaches, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students are looking forward to a break from late nights in the library and a chance to spend the holidays with friends and family. But for senior Tiarra Abell of Louisville, Ky., winter break is a time to get some real work done.

At 4 a.m. Dec. 10, just hours after her last class of the semester, Abell began her journey back to Ecuador, where she spent her junior semester.

“A reality is coming true that I never imagined,” Abell said. “Although I didn’t want it to, I expected my time in Ecuador to end. But within just six months I’m able to go back!”

Along with 11 other seniors, Abell received a Barlow Thesis Research Grant. Established by David Barlow ’79, the grant’s goal is to enhance the study-abroad experience.

“I really like the Barlow thesis grant program, as it helps link the study abroad experience to the student’s academic program at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½,” said Stephen Sawyer, director of off-campus study. “It allows students to return to their study-abroad country and interact with that setting in a more targeted way, building on their first experience.”

A double major in Spanish and anthropology, Abell is writing two senior theses, both investigating the lives of the Afro-Choteño community in Chota, a rural village with a population of 800. While living with a host family in Chota last spring, Abell was struck by the warmth and generosity of the Afro-Choteños despite the poverty in which they live.

“That was the first time in my life that I have experienced extreme poverty, in its real form,” said Abell. “The way they accepted me into their culture because I looked like them was very powerful to me. Just because I am black and I was doing well, they were very proud of me, as if I was one of their own.”

The timing for the return visit could not be better. After witnessing Easter in Chota, Abell was inspired to write her Spanish thesis on the role of faith in the lives of the devoutly Catholic Afro-Choteños. Abell hopes that spending Christmas in Chota will allow her to gather valuable interviews and photographs for her thesis.

After ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Abell plans to pursue a career in medicine. While in Chota, she volunteered at the local health clinic. She will return to the clinic to gather more field notes for her anthropology thesis on the economic and racial inequalities affecting medical treatment in Chota.

“This is a great opportunity,” she said. “Now I not only have volunteer experience in the medical field, but I have it in another culture.”

Most of her time will be spent in Chota, but Abell will visit Quito and Otavalo to gather books and articles that are not available in the United States on the Afro-Choteños. During this time she plans to meet Carla Guerron, the author of one of her primary sources, El Color de la Panela (“The Color of Brown Sugar”).

Abell will miss spending the holidays with her family in Louisville. “This is the first Christmas I have missed with my family, but being able to share and give back to people who don’t have nearly as much—who can’t even conceptualize the amount of things I have—brings me back to the true meaning of Christmas that my parents and family instilled in me.”

While home for Thanksgiving, Abell added, “my best friend’s sister gave me a big bag full of toys to give to the kids in Chota knowing that they would go to good use.”

— Erica Long ’12

Hosted by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art, the series continues on Fridays and Sundays throughout the fall. Admission is $5. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

The series is produced by the Global Film Initiative to promote cross-cultural understanding by showing little-known, skillfully made independent films to American audiences. The initiative believes that “a powerful, authentic narrative can foster trust and respect between disparate cultures and mitigate the social and psychological impact of cultural prejudice.”

My Time Will Come tells the story of Dr. Arturo Fernandez , a reclusive Quito coroner. Through the film, a series of interwoven tragedies leads the protagonist to reconcile his relationships with both the living and the dead.

Made in 2008, the film is in Spanish with English subtitles (90 mins.).

After working as a director of photography for television and documentary films, winning awards and acclaim from organizations such as UNICEF, Arregui produced his first short film, El Tropezon in 1999. His first full-length film, Offside, was screened at over 30 film festivals. My Time Will Come is his second feature film.

about My Time Will Come and the entire Global Lens series.

This photo was taken in the province of Manbi on the coast of Ecuador. After a long hike through the bosque seco and bosque nublado we stopped to cut platano and bananas to bring down to the house for our Ecuadorian-American feast.

Danica Doroski  ’10

Those activities have waned, and now, thanks to a tourism boom, the place attracts a lot more people. There’s world-class mountain biking, whitewater rafting on the Colorado River, two national parks, and, as a result, an ever-increasing number of coffee shops and Mexican restaurants. Still, the nearest mall and big-box stores are 90-plus minutes away, and first-run movies take a month to find our tiny three-screen theater. The local newspaper is just a weekly.

In this amazing landscape (lots of films have been shot around here), accented by a quirky, tight-knit community of locals, I’ve found my home. But living here has its tradeoffs, the most apparent of which is a disconnection from part of my identity — my ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ identity. Where I live, folks don’t just ask, “Where’s ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College?” but “Where’s Maine?”

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ itself is 2,000 miles away, and my closest college friends live in the Pacific Northwest or New England. Attending ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ weddings and visiting other friends during my travels helps me get a fix on my ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ identity, as do the e-mail ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½News updates. A ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ calendar hangs in my home office.

Even as I’m feeling cut off from the place and people that helped form part of my self, my work here is all about place. My job with the Bioregional Outdoor Education Project helps rural schoolteachers instill in their students a stronger sense of place. The idea is that students who have a relationship with their outdoor place will become better citizens, more inclined to protect and interact with their environment.

On one summer trip to train teachers in outdoor education, I met a woman about my age. As we camped in the bean fields of eastern Utah and talked about our backgrounds, I learned that she was from New England. I peppered her with questions: What part? Was she familiar with the New England colleges?

Well, she wasn’t just familiar with the New England colleges. She was a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alumna — Sarah Merrill Strouthopoulos, Class of 1996.

My class. But we never knew one another as students.

It seemed impossible. But as she and I recreated our ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ years, we realized that we had led parallel and separate ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ lives. Sarah was an art history major; I toiled in the geology labs. She lived off campus; I was a happy Frye Street resident. She spent her junior year abroad in Nepal, while I spent a semester in Ecuador. She was a varsity skier, and I played rugby.

After that surprise mini-reunion, Sarah and I continued to work together during the school year. She is an elementary school teacher in Durango, Colo., about three hours from my home office in Moab. Every other week, I traveled to her classroom to work with her and her students. We set up compass courses in her schoolyard, conducted “Animal Olympics” with her students and their parents, and planned field trips throughout the year.

Sarah and I spent a rich school year reliving our time at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, but we also created a new chapter: us working together on outdoor and place-based education projects, while her students’ wide eyes told us we were accomplishing our goals. To our shared stories of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ — we laughed about the housing lottery and recalled our graduation speaker — we added new ones, like her students’ highly amusing oral reports on Colorado eco-zones.

The teacher certification program culminates with an extended backcountry rafting trip on the San Juan River. Winding through southern Utah and the northern Navajo Reservation, Sarah and I realized that we had discovered a new sense of place, but not in strict geographical terms. Instead, it’s more like a deep awareness, one that was planted and grown in each of us during our ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ years, when we learned to take risks, challenge ourselves, and meet new people.

Separately, Sarah and I put down roots here in the West, drawn by a love of the landscape, the environment, and the people. But she and I are connected, and we are connected to others, across miles, across years, and across differences.

By Erika Jones ’96, Illustration by Marty Braun

A product of rural Ecuador, Vicente López was born with a great musical gift, says his daughter, Patricia López de Jaramillo. (She has taught at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ this academic year and is a founder and the academic director at the Andean Center for Latin American Studies in Quito, Ecuador.)

Now 75 years old, López earned a degree in piano from the National Conservatory of Music at the Central University of Ecuador. He taught music and served as a choral director early in his career, and continued to perform and compose even after leaving professional music.

López’s concert at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ will combine his own compositions with popular songs, a little Beethoven and Albeniz, and traditional music of Ecuador, which will constitute the program’s second half. That music explores such typical rhythms as the sanjuanito and the pasillo, which shows a strong indigenous Andean influence. López’s own compositions include tributes to his wife and oldest son, who are deceased.

López makes music “with all his heart,” says his daughter. For her, his music conjures up a world of associations beyond the purely musical. “I just feel transported to all my ancestors, to all my background,” she says. “I feel like I am connected to so much life many, many years before my Dad.”

For more information about the performance, please call 207-786-6135.