Continuum

An artist and activist uses murals to stimulate community engagement.

Five-hundred years ago, two noted artists were commissioned in a contest to decorate the walls of the Council Hall in Florence’s famed Palazzo Vecchio. The competition would mark the rebirth of the Florentine Republic, celebrating its freedom and redefining its community.

The Tuscan artists Michelangelo Buonarotti and Leonardo da Vinci were summoned from Rome and Milan, respectively, to illustrate their civic pride and artistic prowess next to one another on the walls of the palazzo’s Salone (grand hall). The contest was the talk of the town, and the battle scenes to be depicted paled in comparison to the heated battle between the artists.

But the contest would have no winner. Da Vinci’s mural was left unfinished, and Michelangelo’s never made it beyond the preparatory stage. However, the event heralded an era of art for community engagement.

Now, a Utah artist has returned to her hometown of South Salt Lake to engage in a similar renaissance—reviving civic pride through community murals.

Kim Martinez BFA’98, associate professor of painting and drawing, has watched the city evolve from farmland to an industrial zone in her lifetime, and feels the growing pains it and its residents have gone through.

“There are over 40,000 people in South Salt Lake between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.,” she explains. “After 5 p.m., that number drops to only 10,000.” What this means for the community is fewer residents to look after their city, and a greater amount of graffiti to remove from neighborhood walls after sunrise.

In 2003, Martinez began teaching a Special Topics Mural Class that brings students into the community to paint a mural they designed in class. She chose South Salt Lake for the focus of her projects.

Martinez and her students have now completed 17 murals—no simple task when considering the finances, organization, and cooperation required to accomplish such a project. In addition to teaching her students the technical skills required to paint a surface 30 times their size and tie it seamlessly together, Martinez also funds the projects through securing grants, and negotiates the logistics with facility owners. She uses any leftover funding to take her students to visit museums and view art installations firsthand in New York, Chicago, and other metropolitan areas.

Although Martinez has no trouble finding mural sites today—receiving more than 15 invitations per year from business owners along the Wasatch Front to decorate their walls—it wasn’t always the case.

In 2001, Martinez was approached by Tim Williams, then director of Parks & Recreation in South Salt Lake, to paint murals along the city’s TRAX line. She and Williams drove around neighborhoods and approached building owners, asking if they’d like a mural painted.

“When we started out, approaching building owners to ask if we could paint their walls, many owners thought we were offering to paint ads for them. We had to educate them. It took some work to help them understand our goals,” she says.

“The average person sees hundreds of ads per day. Murals are visual images that aren’t trying to sell anything. They are establishing civic pride. We are creating images that instill civic engagement. They are a dialogue with community,” explains Martinez.

Martinez also invites community members to participate in the mural projects as they take place. “If I can get a kid painting a wall with me, and doing it legally, that kid may be inclined to vote when he/she turns 18,” she observes. In 2008, Martinez won a National Endowment for the Arts grant through the Utah Arts Council that allowed her and University students to work collaboratively with participants from “Youth City,” Salt Lake valley teens ages 13-16.

She also notes that the residents and building owners take greater pride in the neighborhood where they’ve contributed murals. The TRAX line has unfortunately been hit by graffiti; however, Martinez says that the murals painted along the line in residential areas have not suffered the way those in vacant lots have. The reason? Martinez’s understanding of the chemistry of paint has given her an edge over graffiti artists whose efforts to deface her murals have often been defeated by her expertise. Martinez uses acrylic paints specially mixed to brave the elements. She and her students paint each mural five to seven times, adding new layers that give them more of a fine art quality than a billboard. “Our murals have been tagged,” she says, “but [the taggers] used house paint, which we were able to remove with an acid wash, and the mural remained unharmed.”

After receiving a BFA from the U, Martinez went on to obtain an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. But long before she was an art professor, she was an artist.

“I come from a blue-collar background, and the arts were not considered a reliable professional choice,” she says. “But I always loved to draw.” She brought that passion to a variety of related careers, including ad agencies, product development and design, and the ski industry, where she designed products for multiple manufacturers.

Although she is known today for her large-scale murals, Martinez started out painting much more portable pieces. “I’d been painting and drawing my entire life, but I had to learn to create murals,” she says. “You have to take into account the perspective of an image so large, and how it changes depending on where you stand in relation to it.”

The “New Life” mural located at the Millcreek Trailhead

She notes, however, that she is not a typical commercial gallery artist. “Art can be outside of a gallery or museum, like me. It’s important to me to be engaged in community. If I were an accountant, I would be involved in community accounting. I just so happen to be an artist, so I bring art to the community.” She has taken her art to prisons, hospitals, trailheads, and transportation hubs, to name a few of her chosen locations.

“The work we do will be a bridge,” she says. Martinez is not just teaching her students how to paint, but also to be empathetic to the needs of society. “Murals need to take other people’s experiences and personalize them.”

This is part of the philosophy that guides the selection process for the murals.

Last fall, Martinez’s class completed work on the new Millcreek Trailhead in South Salt Lake. As is the process with every mural project, each student submits a design to be considered for selection by the community. In the case of the Millcreek Trailhead, 150 community members selected the design, “New Life,” by Tyler Smith. The mural, at 870 square feet, is a sequential narrative of birds in space.

Smith says of the work, “A true community has to rely on growth, stability, perseverance, and the fact that ordinary people can go out of their way to make a difference in any way possible. This mural tells a story of ‘new life’ and of a bird born with a single goal, to bring new life to the world. This bird is in search of a supernatural flower that when planted… can grow into a very healthy fruit tree, and not just any fruit tree, but a tree that can bear any and all fruits imaginable. This bird represents the people of South Salt Lake and the idea that anyone can make a difference, the tree is a symbol of growth and stability, and the flower is a symbol of a new beginning. So just remember that with the right mindset, anything is possible.”

Martinez proves that indeed anyone can make a difference, beginning with bricks and mortar, ending with walls transformed into bridges.

—Taunya Dressler is assistant dean for undergraduate affairs with the College of Humanities and has written previously for Continuum.

Cardiologist Nassir Marrouche knows matters of the heart.

He stands a head above his colleagues in the dim light of the electrophysiology lab, his eyes focused on the task ahead. His soft voice conducts an orchestra of assistants tuning instruments playing in harmony to heal a heart.

Bordering the lab, a row of monitors lights the faces of lab technicians observing the procedure. On one screen, a 2-D black-and-white image frames a catheter snaking its way to the left atrium of a heart. On another screen, a 3-D color image of the heart spins suspended. And on yet another, a patient is shown wrapped in the cocoon of the MRI machine.

Nassir Marrouche, M.D., is doing what he does best—fixing broken hearts.

Marrouche has devoted his professional life to finding a cure for atrial fibrillation (AF), a heart rhythm disorder that affects more than five million Americans and is a contributing cause to more than 66,000 deaths a year.

Born in Kuwait, Marrouche knew early in life that he wanted to be a doctor. “At 10 years old I was researching and thinking like a med student,” he says. “I chose to focus on electrophysiology and cardiology because I wanted results—I wanted immediate results for treatments, and to be involved in the excitement of research and creating better treatment options.”

Marrouche chose to study medicine at the University of Heidelberg in Germany because of its vaunted tradition of intellectual investigation and innovation. “And for the German soccer team,” he adds with a grin. “It’s the best in the world!”

In 1999, Marrouche came to the U.S. to start his electrophysiology fellowship. At that time, treatment for AF was based on electrocardiogram (EKG) readings to identify the disease, and ablation (the burning away of tissue) or medications to address it.

“We thought we could cure everyone through ablation,” he says, “but that’s not so. It’s not black and white; there’s always a grey zone. Something was missing.”

Then in 2004, Marrouche came to the University of Utah to give a lecture. While here, he visited the Utah Center for Advanced Imaging Research (UCAIR) and the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (SCI). “I knew Utah was it,” he says. “Everyone has MRI and computers, but nobody else has what Utah has.”

What exactly Utah has is the resources in imaging, specifically Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), to diagnose, treat, and personalize the management of AF.

“AF is the cancer of heart disease,” Marrouche explains. “With cancer, before treating it, you stage it—how much has it spread? Has it metastasized? What is the best approach for treatment based on the stage it has reached? Scanning and staging are used to develop a treatment plan. But with AF, treatment was traditionally based on EKG readings, which can’t tell us the severity of the disease or where it lies within the heart.”

In 2009, Marrouche founded the University of Utah’s Comprehensive Arrhythmia Research & Management Center (CARMA), leading a team of researchers conducting the world’s most innovative research on the use of MRIs to treat AF.

“MRIs look at the disease on a cellular level, making a 3-D image that shows the disease in green,” he explains. This technique, called a delayed-enhancement MRI, involves a patient’s receiving a pre-ablation MRI, during which his or her heart is injected with gadolinium, a silvery-white metal. The gadolinium settles in the damaged tissue, allowing the MRI equipment to create a map of the exact location of the diseased tissue. Through this process, physicians are able to quantify the percentage of damage in the heart. The software to display the damage, developed by the SCI Institute, enables Marrouche’s research team to develop a method for staging AF—a method that the U.S. Heart Rhythm Society has honored as one of the best clinical research projects in America.

Using these 3-D images, Marrouche created a four-stage patient classification system designed to determine the actual extent of damage to the heart. The four stages, called Utah I, II, III, and IV, help guide the treatment plan for each patient.

“If a patient turns out to be Utah I—meaning that about five percent of the left atrium is fibrous—the damage is ablated and the success rate is nearly 100 percent,” he explains. “But if it turns out the patient is Utah III or IV, ablation is less likely to be successful and will only lead to unnecessary costs for both the patient and the hospital. Everyone needs to be staged before being treated. Choosing the right candidates for the ablation procedure is the key to success.”

While patients classified as Utah I have a 99 percent cure rate by ablation, those who are Utah II have an 80 percent rate. “Those are very good odds,” says Marrouche.

The staging system also provides information on a patient’s risk of having a stroke and whether commonly prescribed medications will be effective. In patients at Utah III or IV, ablation is ruled out and the focus turns to managing the disease with medication, since they are at increased risk for stroke.

The staging system is the latest advance in Marrouche’s innovative approach to treating AF. Under Marrouche’s leadership, University of Utah Health Care last year opened the first integrated electrophysiology MRI laboratory in North America, which features an 18,000-pound MAGNETOM 3T Verio scanner from Siemens that provides high-resolution images of the heart tissue.

He and his team are the first researchers in the U.S. to use MRI to see continuous, real-time 3-D images of a patient’s heart and the exact location of a magnetic resonant-compatible catheter used for burning away damaged heart tissue.

The only way to cure AF, explains Marrouche, is to create scar tissue through burning. “Using the MRI, we can see if we’ve created a lesion deep enough to form scar tissue.”

The procedure takes about three hours, and Marrouche has performed more than 1,000 of them. About 90 percent of his patients are arrhythmia free and off heart medications within three months of their procedures.

Marrouche performs radiofrequency ablations on nine to 10 patients per week, and many have been life-changing events. Jim Daily, 72, had been treating his AF with medication for eight years, but because the drugs were no longer effective, he was struggling to breathe with a heart functioning at less than 12 percent of capacity. After undergoing a catheter-based ablation performed by Marrouche, Daily says, “It’s like I got a second chance at life.”

“I’m a very impatient guy,” says Marrouche. “I like to see quick results—and with heart treatments, you often see patients recover right before your eyes.”

Because of his commitment and drive, Marrouche has gained an international reputation. A number of patients from other countries have traveled thousands of miles to be treated by him. He has also begun a worldwide patient evaluation program at 16 international medical centers now using his delayed-enhancement MRI technique to stage the progression of the disease.

But for all of his international outreach and background, Marrouche is firmly rooted in Utah, where he enjoys spending time with his family and staying fit through tennis and soccer.

“Obviously, I love the natural beauty of Utah, especially the national and state parks and the skiing,” he says. But more than that, Marrouche likes the people here. “I love their openness. They are so informative, talkative, excited about the future, and motivated. Utah seems to be a huge, friendly village where everyone knows everyone; it’s a real community.”

And at the core of that community is a healer who takes his work to heart.

—Taunya Dressler is assistant dean for undergraduate affairs with the College of Humanities and has written previously for Continuum.

Professor Bill Farley reflects on the influences that have fueled his 50-plus years in social work.

Bill Farley visits with Marjorie Dyke—one of the many recipients of his dedication to assisting the elderly—at her home. Photo by Roger Tuttle.

How does a man whose career spans half a century sum up his tenure?

“It was one of the most gratifying and rewarding experiences of my life,” he says.

O. William “Bill” Farley BS’58 MSW’59 PhD’68 began his career as a professor of social work at the University of Utah in 1962. In his 48 years here, Farley has built an impressive legacy of programs that have provided opportunities for students to develop their social work skills, given assistance to the greater Salt Lake community, and been an inspiration to those around him.

“When I was in fifth grade, my friend’s uncle was studying medicine at the U,” Farley recalls. “They lived near campus, and I always thought, ‘Wow, what an opportunity to be at that university someday!’ ”

Farley worked hard to make that dream a reality. He was the first of his extended family to attend college, and his dedication to studying in high school paid off as he scored high on the national exams and received scholarship offers from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. He chose to attend Yale, where he focused on industrial administration. He returned to Salt Lake City in the middle of his sophomore year to marry his sweetheart, Mary Siggard ex’57. Not long after returning to Connecticut, the couple decided their hearts were still in Utah, and they moved back. Farley enrolled at the U, where he received a bachelor’s in sociology and master’s in social work before entering the United States Air Force.

Bill Farley (second row, far right) poses with his fellow MSW students in 1958.

“Campus was a different place when I came to study in 1955,” he says. “[The College of] Social Work was still located in Presidents Circle, and there was nothing where we are now.”

It wasn’t until 1969 that the College of Social Work would have its own building, and Farley was there for the groundbreaking, just as he was there for the groundbreaking of the Wilford W. and Dorothy P. Goodwill Humanitarian Building in 2007.

“I was so excited to be on campus,” Farley recalls. “I chose social work because I like dealing one-on-one with people. I needed the hands-on approach of working with people and helping them.”

After a three-year stint in California, where he was the chief psychiatric social worker for Travis Air Force Base Hospital, Farley was once again pulled back to Utah, where he and Mary had strong family ties, and to the U, where this time he returned as a member of the social work faculty, going on to receive his doctorate in educational psychology.

College of Social Work faculty Fenton Moss, Zella Allred, and Bill Farley overlook construction of the new social work building in 1969.

“It’s funny, I had opportunities to work just about any place in the U.S.,” he says, “but what made me stay at the U was the super students. Many of those students are now retired and have made great contributions during their careers as heads of different agencies in the social work system. It’s gratifying to know that these were my students.”

Although Farley’s students kept him based at the U, his zeal for community outreach led him to travel throughout the state. He spent 10 years working with a mobile mental health clinic that each month visited the rural areas of Southern Utah. Farley also trained paraprofessionals in Alaska. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, more than 50 percent of social workers in southwest Alaska were trained at the U or by U faculty, thanks to a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

“I have really enjoyed my career because I have had the opportunity of working with folks as well as teaching and doing research,” says Farley.

Part of his “work with folks” led him to his current role as director of the College of Social Work’s W.D. Goodwill Initiatives on Aging and its successful Neighbors Helping Neighbors (NHN) program. Established in 1997, NHN is committed to helping the elderly live independently for as long as possible. The program is powered by social work students and community volunteers who offer their time and talents to seniors in need of home repairs, cleaning, shopping assistance, snow removal, counseling—or simply companionship.

U of U President Michael K. Young (fourth from right) shakes hands with Bill Farley at the groundbreaking of the Dorothy P. Goodwill Humanitarian Building in 2007.

“By 2015, someone will turn 65 every 23 minutes in Salt Lake County,” Farley explains. “People don’t talk about growing older—or the ability to be cared for. There are many older citizens living in Salt Lake who are in need of assistance right now. Our program has assisted almost 3,000 older adults to live in their own homes. We are always asking the questions ‘How can we help keep them in their homes? How can we make things better for them? How can we keep their bodies and minds engaged?’ We really want to get out there and help as much as we possibly can,” he says. “Just a little bit of work and cleaning can keep them in their homes. We want to give them a sense of hope and a quality of life. That’s what the new building will help us accomplish.”

That structure, the Wilford W. and Dorothy P. Goodwill Humanitarian Building, was created to house the NHN program and the W.D. Goodwill Initiatives on Aging, as well as to provide a Senior Support Program, where seniors can come for assistance with everything from applying for Medicare to family counseling.

Working alongside the Goodwills, Farley had a vision to create these programs to help the elderly. In turn, the Goodwills saw a need and responded to it. Wilford Goodwill had watched as his aging mother’s dependence on others steadily increased. He realized that her situation was not unique, and that there was a clear need for more research and better programs for senior citizens. He became determined that when he was financially able, he would do everything possible to help others like his mother.

Over the last 10 years, the Goodwills have invested in programs at the University of Utah that help social work students become more knowledgeable about aging; their investment includes the building that bears their name.

“How can someone stay in one job for so long?” Farley muses before responding to his own question: “When you can give to folks. It’s even more fun when you can put theory into action. What’s exciting is to witness the creativity of these great students.”

Farley’s own creative impulses have produced many books, other publications, and paper presentations that reflect his varied interests in aging, human behavior, research, mental health, and rural practice. First published in 1964, Introduction to Social Work is now in its 12th edition. Farley also had the privilege of writing the Social Work Licensure Law in 1971 for the State of Utah.

How has the field changed in all this time?

“People’s problems go on,” says Farley. “But recently I’ve noticed a significant increase in substance abuse and challenges with interpersonal relations. There seems to be a lot more chaos to existence than ever before.”

Reflecting again on the challenges and satisfactions of his long career, Farley pulls himself back to the moment and says with a wide smile, “What a thrill. I’ve really enjoyed myself.” This is evident from the enthusiasm he displays while pointing out portraits of past colleagues and friends such as the Goodwills, Milt Thackey, and Rex Skidmore—“social work giants,” as he calls them—who have all been touched by and worked alongside him over the years.

Farley will retire this year at the end of June, but the thrill he describes is sure to carry on. An avid traveler, he anticipates new journeys with his family—five children (all of whom attended the U), 21 grandchildren, and six great grandchildren.

When asked how a pioneer in the field of aging feels about his own pending retirement, Farley relaxes, knowing that, thanks in no small part to his own efforts, Utah now hosts some of the finest programs anywhere for seniors—programs that can eventually benefit us all.

—Taunya Dressler is a writer with University Marketing and Communications and has authored previous articles for Continuum.

Polly Wiessner

Anthropologist Polly Wiessner turns her efforts toward benefiting the people she studies.

The Enga tribes of Papua New Guinea have a saying, “Endakali Yangingi”—You need a person—meaning that everybody is of value and has something to give to accomplish a task, no matter how daunting or trivial.

Polly Wiessner has been one such person for the Enga.

Wiessner specializes in researching hunter-gatherers, cultural systems of sharing and exchange, ethnoarchaeology, ethology ecology, warfare, and oral history. For more than three decades, she has focused her research on populations undergoing rapid transition—from the Kalahari Bushmen in southern Africa to the Enga tribes of Papua New Guinea. She has devoted the past four years to the creation of the Enga Take Anda, or the Enga Tradition and Transition Center, in Wabag, in the Enga Province of Papua New Guinea.

When asked what drives her to such remote corners of the globe, she says it’s “long-term friendships and understanding what people in other cultures face in their lives, how they cope and adapt in this rapidly changing world” that intrigues her the most.

No stranger to adventure, Wiessner was raised in Stowe, Vt., known for its four-season recreational opportunities. Her father was one of the top mountaineers of the 20th century, introducing her to travel and instilling in her a love of hiking and skiing in the wild places of the world.

She credits her passion for writing and observation to her mother, whom she describes as “a creative and imaginative person who found something unusual wherever we went.”

Saiyo Tondea bringing a traditional wig for the exhibits.

Since those early beginnings, Wiessner has lived in Botswana, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Denmark, and Germany, the latter for about 15 years. She speaks six languages, professing humbly that she is by no means perfect in any of them.

“I came to the U for the mountains and for the excellent department with an orientation towards evolutionary biology,” she explains. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, Wiessner received her doctorate in anthropology at the University of Michigan. She spent 14 years with the Max Planck Institute for Human Ethology in Germany and has worked or consulted for the World Bank, European Community, and World Wildlife Foundation, as well as universities in Denmark, Germany, Namibia, and France. She came to the University of Utah in 1998 as a visiting professor and joined the faculty in 2000.

Engans trying to identify relatives in exhibit photos.

Wiessner’s story with the Enga began in 1985, when she first traveled to Papua New Guinea to begin her observations among the 110 Enga tribes. (Enga is unique among the provinces in Papua New Guinea in that it is populated by only one major linguistic and ethnic group.)

One of Wiessner’s important discoveries involves the humble sweet potato, introduced to the Enga people 350 years ago, which had a major impact on the culture. First brought to Indonesia by the Portuguese, and then to Papua New Guinea via the indigenous trade, the new crop made surplus production possible for the first time. Competition over status and wealth resulting from this surplus subsequently led to the most extensive systems of ritual, warfare, and ceremonial exchange known in pre-state societies, involving some 40,000 people.

Traditional Enga dancers at the Take Anda opening ceremony.

Over the decades spent studying the Enga, Wiessner has noted a profound shift in generational knowledge of ceremony, tradition, culture, and history. The Enga’s first contact with Westerners—from the Australian Administration and Christian missions—occurred in the 1950s, and with this contact came rapid change. The history and tradition of everything from courtship, marriage, and male-female relations, to warfare and peacemaking since the introduction of guns into modern Enga warfare, to politics as played out in this emerging democratic state, began taking on new characteristics, quickly disposing of the old.

“This was the eleventh hour,” Wiessner says. “After 25 years of researching a people’s history and tradition, what does one do with the results? Most academic research is of value to science but doesn’t return anything to the people. The Enga needed to benefit from this research, too.”

Wiessner explains that the first missionaries abolished many traditional rituals and discouraged separate men’s and women’s houses, where oral traditions had been transmitted. “The Enga needed a space once again to pass on their history,” she says.

And so she set out to build a center that would restore cultural knowledge to the people while the elders could still talk about the past with their grandchildren.

“My Enga colleague and I started out in the basement room of a dank building with a phone, an iffy Internet connection, and 10 kids racing around,” she says. “We needed capital to convince donors we were for real.” Undaunted by the challenge, she sold a piece of her own land in Vermont to start a capital fund and create an NGO. From this base they were able to solicit donors and raise $1.5 million.

The grand opening of the Enga Take Anda center.

More challenging than raising the money, though, was designing the building and selecting its contents. After several architectural proposals, the Enga people chose a modern structure, designed by a Papua New Guinea architect and built by an Austrian contractor. “They wanted something new, something to carry their history into the future, and this center represents that,” says Wiessner.

In addition to text, the exhibits needed to include images, artifacts, and audio recordings made by elders that could be discussed and explained. Realizing how important photos would be to young people who had no access to images of life in the past, Wiessner spent two years collecting almost 2,000 old photographs from early Australian patrol officers and missionaries.

Wiessner and son Silas hiking in the hills of Snga after the Take Anda opening.

“Most young Enga are unaware of how recent the first contact with Europeans took place and how significantly this has altered their culture. They look at photos from 50 years ago and can visualize for the first time events that they have heard bits and pieces about from their grandparents,” she says. “They are often surprised by what they see.”

Wiessner describes how in the past 30 to 40 years, much of Enga ceremony and tradition has been lost. “We wanted the Take Anda to be a place where Enga culture could be kept alive by making it relevant to the 21st century,” she says.

In order to install the center’s often larger-than-life murals, photos, and artifacts, Wiessner enlisted the assistance of Utah Museum of Natural History graphic designer Dawn Farkas and operations coordinator Tim Lee. “They were the only ones interested in taking on such a challenge,” she says.

And it paid off. The result: Walls covered with poems, songs, and traditional images; artifacts from the people, spaces still to be filled by the people. “The panels are a trigger for discussion,” says Wiessner. “People come to be among the space, see images of friends and relatives from decades past, and to discuss the past and present, not necessarily to see the entire exhibit. We didn’t want to create a museum. Rather, we wanted a space the Enga could make their own.”

The main gallery of the Enga Take Anda center.

“The Enga have a saying,” says Wiessner, “‘You need a person.’ Contrast this with the Western ‘Money is life’ philosophy that is growing in importance in Papua New Guinea today and the creation of this center becomes even more important.”

Wiessner attended the center’s opening in September 2009. It was an occasion marked with ceremony and pomp, politics, and joyous celebration. Traditional dance and dress marked the day. Enga of all ages covered the hills beyond the Take Anda, rejoicing in the new beginning. At the center of the stage, a petite blonde woman from Vermont looked out on all the people it took to accomplish the first step in this ongoing project: The center is built; now the real work begins.

—Taunya Dressler is a writer with University Marketing and Communications and has written previously for Continuum.