I’m living just outside a charming walled city.  Evora bears the seal of “Patrimonio Mundial,” a designation recognizing the contribution of the city to the heritage of the world.   It is a vibrant university town of about 50,000 people with tourist traps and fine shops, with traditional Alentejo food alongside trendy bibliocafes.  Its streets are all cobblestones and its encircling wall parts just six times to allow entrance on foot or by car.

When my son, Tim, and my daughter, Emily were here in October, we saw walled towns like Obidos and walled castles like Castelo de Moro in Sintra.  I said to them at the time, “If you’ve seen one walled city, you’ve seen them all.”  That is not true, of course.  Each has its distinctive flavor.   But in several senses, I was right.   Most of the walled cities in Portugal have roots in Roman times, were fortified by the Moors in the Middle Ages, and took their present shape after the “Reconquest” of the Muslim Moors by Christians in the 12th century.  Each sits perched on the highest point around and each provides magnificent vistas of the countryside from atop the walls.  But I was also right in that walled cities have been motivated by the same desire for an elusive security.

More recently, I’ve done some exploring on my own by bicycle. Just 4 kilometers from my home I found the Castelo de Giraldo, named for “Giraldo the Fearless” who harassed the Moors and then fled to this walled highland hideout  in the 12th century.  But the walls Giraldo fled to were likely built in the 3rd century BC!  Just 114 meters around and barely high enough to hide behind, this oval wall makes a stronger statement about the need for defense and the desire for security than it establishes real safety.

A few weeks ago, I went with my friends Ricardo and Isabel to the delightful walled city of Monzaraz near the Spanish border, less that an hour from where I sit as I type this.  Occupied since prehistoric times, Monsaraz has been home to Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, and Jews, and then was traded back and forth between the Moors and those who became the Portuguese.  Monsaraz feels more secure than Giraldo’s place, perhaps because you can see your enemy approaching from miles away.  But standing atop the wall, one recognizes that walls can delay and resist — but not prevent – engagement with “the enemy.”  Safety is not really an option.

So I’ve been thinking about the construction of danger and fear that prompts the building of walls.   And it has occurred to me that this is backwards.  We don’t build walls because there is danger.  Rather, we designate danger – and security — in the building of walls.  Human beings recognize feelings of discomfort and try to find ways to assuage them.   Building walls is something constructive that seems to be an answer.  In the process, we make “us” (inside the wall) and “other” (outside).

We’re still doing it, you know, building walls.   Think of “gated communities” all over the United States, including Lancaster County.  These are neighborhoods usually composed of expensive homes surrounded by walls or fences, fitted with security systems, and watched at the gate by guards who make sure that no unauthorized persons manage to slip by.   We do it with zoning laws too, keeping some kinds of houses – and some kinds of people – out of our neighborhoods.  And the psychological reality is that each of us is a walled city, fortified to protect ourselves from the onslaught of feelings that we don’t understand and don’t value.  And yet . . .   As the poet Robert Frost tells us “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”

We have to work to keep walls up and strong; otherwise, the forces of nature – of weather and of time and of love – bring them down.    Maybe there are reasons for walls, as the neighbor in the poem suggests, maybe “good fences make good neighbors.”  But I agree with Frost:

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
To whom I was like to give offence.”

There’s a funny thing about walls – and security systems generally.  No matter how many gates and locks and alarms and psychological defenses you have, it is impossible to keep the dangers away.   Danger is a fact of human living and we don’t like it.  Doubt and discomfort are conditions of human growth and we reject them.

But walls postpone rather than prevent our encounter with all that life has in store for us.   The walls of Portugal have taught me that.

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I do not know a lot about Dona Alena, mostly because I can only understand a little bit of what she says to me.  I know that she has retired and has come to Portugal from Portuguese-speaking Angola.  I know that she has worked hard to get her small casa in shape and keeps it very clean, I know that she is a kind woman of great dignity who affords others the same dignity and I also know that I have never seen anyone visit her.  As I think about Dona Alena alone and ill in an ancient building that has no central heat and holds the chill in the air, I am frustrated that my weak Portuguese prevents me from figuring out how to be more helpful.

My frustration is in stark contrast to what I was feeling this afternoon as I logged on to Facebook to check out the photographs and videos from the Race for Rita, held to raise money for research for Triple Negative Breast Cancer and in so doing, to honor and support my friend, colleague and neighbor, Dr. Rita Smith Wade-El.   It was very clear that Rita is far from alone.  I knew it in August when, before I left for Portugal, I arranged a meal schedule around Rita’s chemo. treatments.   She wisely predicted that she would need to eat to keep her strength up but would not be able to prepare herself meals.  There were more than enough volunteers to keep Rita fed.

Rita, she is probably the only person at Millersville who only needs one name, infuriates some people.   Still, many, many people love her.   And the funny thing about Rita is that they are often the same people.   Put me in the second category though.  She does not infuriate me; she fascinates me.  She is a force of nature and I feel privileged to know her, even when I have to walk away because she has just one more thing to say to me and I really do not have time for it.

This will be no testimonial to all that Rita has done for the university.   She is, after all, very much alive and kicking even if she’s not feeling so well right now.   To see the photo of Rita in her chemo-prompted cue-ball look, is to know that you don’t mess with her now any more than you would have messed with her six months ago.

I just want to congratulate those who recognized that Rita was worth fighting for.  All those students, faculty, staff and friends, who organized and pushed their bodies forward along that 5K path offered Rita a medicine more potent than you can imagine, and you gave yourselves a shot of the same serum.  It is the substance of solidarity, the recognition that we love and are not alone, even in those “dark nights of the soul”, or body, when we have to face some challenge all by ourselves.

As I glance across the Patio toward Dona Alena’s door, I am reminded that being and staying connected is a pattern woven of small stitches.  It is a responsibility.  It is work, though not drudge  So now I will knock on my neighbor’s door.  Not Dona Alena’s; there is nothing I can do to help right now.  I will knock on the door of my neighbor and friend Susana who is a nurse and who is Portuguese.  She will know what to say.  She will know how to help.  I will be connected.

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Several things have become clear to me since I arrived in Portugal.   First, most Europeans cannot figure out why we elected George Bush, twice.   Second, they can’t figure out why we are not embarrassed by his policies, by his performance, and by him personally.  I’m not sure this is accurate given the President’s recent approval ratings.

Third, they wonder, in a kind of bemused way, whether Americans realize just how damaged our reputation is around the world.  They are not angry or even critical; they seem quite sad for us and wonder how and why we let this happen.  Fourth, if Europeans voted for the American President, Barack Obama would win.  Fifth, they think he will lose.  They know the polling data, but they just don’t believe that an intelligent blackman can win the presidential election.  I can’t tell if they are more skeptical about our electing someone who is black or someone who is intelligent!

Today at lunch, my hosts talked about the disaster of the war in Iraq. I noted that as we move toward greater educational centralization – prompted in large part by No Child Left Behind, they are moving toward more school decentralization.   We talked a bit about immigration, wondering why the free marketers who brought us unregulated credit markets and hedge funds would limit immigration which is, after all, just a different kind of free market in which bodies follow perceived opportunities.

In each case, they found fault with the paths pursued by President Bush and spoke knowledgeably about the ways John McCain seems to be following the same path.

Their interest in Obama was not unqualified.  They spoke quite positively about some of McCain’s positions and less positively about some of Obama’s.   They seemed well aware of Obama’s lack of experience.  They expressed positive interest in Hillary Clinton and wondered why she was not nominated.  They are clearly not swept up in Obama-mania.   But they are distressed at the damage that President Bush’s administration has wrought and desirous of a sea change (an apt metaphor for this nation of explorers!) in how America interacts in the world.  Obama offers that possibility; McCain, they think, does not.

What I heard today confirmed what I have been hearing and reading for weeks.  I have talked with students and colleagues at the university, with nurses and engineers from other countries who are studying Portuguese with me, with shopkeepers and restauranteurs.  The response is much the same.

In a class last week, I focused on empowering students in schools.  In order to develop ideas about “power over” (domination) and “power with” (the ability to get things done together), I used a variety of images.  I showed a photo of President Bush and Prime Minister Socrates.  The students began laughing as soon as the picture popped up.  I asked if they were laughing at the Prime Minister.  “Sim!”  And then I asked if they were laughing at the president.  Clearly they were.  Young adults view the President of the United States as an object of derision.

A few days ago,  I conducted a faculty workshop with my colleagues in the Departmento de Pedagogía e Educação.  We compared the American educational system under No Child Left Behind to the current Portuguese reality.  They asked me how things might change depending on who won the election.

I told them that McCain would reauthorize NCLB with relatively minor changes but that Obama appeared interested in more major changes, especially the use of multiple performance measures like portfolios.  Then I said that, based on polling, it looked like Obama would win.

They laughed, teasing that we said that twice before, and still Bush won.

I don’t know if they doubt Americans’ ability to select a well-qualified candidate or wonder about the fairness of our elections or simply don’t believe that we will elect a president with dark skin maybe all of the above.  I very much hope their doubts are misplaced.

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The US economy is tanking in ways that will affect each of us.  If your parents invested money to help you pay for your university education, that nest egg has been cut in value by 30 percent or more.

Those of us at the other end of a life’s plan have lost a similar percentage of our retirement funds.  Loans are hard to get and jobs are uncertain. The U.S. economy is tanking and it is taking the rest of the West with it.

More accurately, the cracks revealed in our economy have shed light on cracks in economies all over Europe.  For several weeks, headlines in the G7 nations’ newspapers have been screaming about bank failures and bailouts.

Asian stock markets are responding oh-so-sensitively to the moves made by legislators and investors in countries far from their borders.  From my perch in Portugal, I have been scrutinizing these developments and the way the developments are characterized in countries other than my own.

I have noticed that the headlines talk less now about the fact of this bank failure or that bailout or somemarket decline.  Now those same headlines are focused on fear.   Any economy  and altogether in today’s world – can easily fall prey to fear.  Economics is, after all, the science of scarcity.  My recognition that I may lose what I have, that I may not have what I need, feels threatening.  Threat prompts doubt.  Doubt by itself is not the problem.  It is when everybody starts to doubt at once that doubt is transfigured into fear.

In the usual course of economic events, one investor thinks, “my money isn’t safe,” and liquidates his investment.   It doesn’t even show up on the bank’s or the market’s monitor, because someone else, feeling optimistic that day, invests.

Some days there is more optimism, other days more doubt.   But we tell ourselves that our economy is resilient and we avoid economic panic for another day.  Now, however, fear is staring us and our bankers right in the face.

The bankers are so spooked, they won’t lend each other money. That’s probably because they know how they have stretched the limits of sense and sensibility.   Their fear born of doubt is rooted in a little healthy and well-earned guilt.

Consider the way our economic life has unraveled over the past several weeks. A pull, a random string, is cut loose from the weave.   As it separates, it releases other threads that have nothing to hold them together except each other.

And what is clear from my European vantage point is that this economic world we have woven has no borders, no carefully bound seams that stop the unraveling. American investment bankers have been exporting capitalist enthusiasm along with speculative and spurious financial products with the apparent promise of wealth without end.  Markets around the world bought the premises and the products.

Many blame the U.S.  Most are in a state of confusion and self-examination.  In Iceland, a commentator talks about a “nightmare of globalization,” because tourists can’t get money from ATM’s and students living abroad can not get money from Iceland to pay rent.

In Germany, some think this really is the last stage in the rise and fall of capitalism as stockbrokers played out their own gambling habits with other people’s money.  The very proper British recognize their own mistake in following heedless Americans into a “delirium of deregulation” and lives of luxury fueled by paper profit.

In Ireland, people who could not explain their recent and quite unexpected prosperity seem more bemused than upset as their economy reverts to the way it’s always been.
As with most developments in the paths of people and nations, there is a silver lining. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been a pain in the world’s neck recently, but he doesn’t have the money to go on being a pain right now because his stock market tanked too as oil prices headed down, Speaking of oil, the OPEC nations are in a panic because demand for oil has plummeted as people around the world lose buying power.

Gas prices are down and that just might stimulate our economy, but it will hurt some other countries that depend on oil revenue to balance national budgets.

The world is one – economically, because we are one in the web of trust that secures us economically, as well as socially and politically.

My well-being depends on yours, and on the well-being of my neighbors here in Portugal, and on the well-being of oil producers in Arab countries and everywhere else in this global market economy with few remaining seams.

Right now there is no trust.  Trust has been replaced by fear, in large part because we have collectively forgotten that the pursuit of profit, though important, is not an end in itself.

Markets will return to modest prosperity when the humans who move them remember that how we pursue profit matters.

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Marsha Frerichs lived with her husband, Rich – a long time Millersville faculty member and colleague of mine in the Educational Foundations Department, in a beautiful home overlooking the Crossgates Golf Course where her Penn Manor Golf Team practiced and played. Her death was expected in one sense.

Marsha had been living with end stage breast cancer for more years than I care to count. But in another- sense, her death was utterly unexpected. Someone with a soul that large cannot die.

Marsha Frerichs had been living courageously and fully in the face of her cancer. She had packed more grace, dignity and love into those years than many of us pack into a lifetime.

I could talk about Marsha’s coaching and teaching golf, or about her shepherding MU, hosting Elderhostel participants around in the summer, or about her unfailing support of MU athletic teams, especially women’s basketball, her breeding and raising her beloved Golden Retrievers.

She loved learning to journal for physical and spiritual health after her diagnosis and the incredible poems she composed, her spot-on mothering of two lovely and loving adult daughters – Kim and Melissa, her unflagging support of her life partner Rich, or about her ability to make me and so many of us think I was her closest friend, but I don’t have to.

Anybody reading this who knew Marsha is already crying. They are also smiling and thinking about the time . . .

I spoke with Rich over long, long distance the other day and he told me about Marsha’s funeral. He said they were planning a simple reception at the church after the service, that he had been worried about the number of people and providing enough food.

The minister, Randy Martin, suggested that he just make an announcement that family and close friends were invited to the reception; that way people wouldn’t stay unless they felt Marsha would have wanted them there.

Rich told me he started laughing and said to Reverend Martin, “Oh c’mon now, you know Marsha, everybody she ever met thinks they were one of her close friends.”

Rich is right. That was true of Marsha when I met her in 1985 and it was true when I visited her at Hospice the day I left for Portugal.

This woman just five days from death made me feel like the center of her attention in a miracle of barely-verbal communication.

I knew the first time I met Marsha that she had a big heart. What I learned in the last years of her life was how big her soul was.

The smaller her body became — she lost weight slowly but steadily because of her cancer and her treatment – the bigger her spirit grew. She began to journal as a healing practice and to compose poetry. Then she started sharing the practice of journaling with others facing and fighting cancer.

She continued to coach golf, focused as always on the development of young golfers into responsible young men and women.

She spent time on and with her many friends, listening generously and commenting lightly and lovingly. Marsha was fully present to the life she was offered.

By the time she died, she could convey love, support and peace with a look, a chuckle, a hug. You knew in your head that she was slowly dying but everything about her spoke of life.

My colleague John Ward and several hundred others attended Marsha’s funeral. He emailed me: “You probably heard about Marsha’s funeral – it was really a wonderful tribute. [President] Francine [McNairy], among others, gave beautiful eulogies. Made me really want to live life. Not because life is unpredictable and short, but because Marsha was so inspiring in how she lived hers.”

The poet Mary Oliver has been keeping me company on my adventure to Portugal, helping me to stay grounded as I encounter the strange in another culture and the new in me.

Oliver writes almost exclusively about nature, but her poems are almost always about loving life and living well.

In “The Summer Day,” Oliver puts it this way: Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

I am in Portugal because I heeded Oliver’s call and Marsha’s example. May Marsha rest in peace. You and I have living to do.

Dr. Barb Stengel has been a member of the educational foundation since 1985. She writes “Uncommon Sense” for The Snapper.

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Whether it is a science or a language, a set of skills or a way of thinking, there is new vocabulary to learn, new protocols to master, new rules for practices that are themselves novel and sometimes strange.  Learning, real learning- the kind that changes how one understands oneself and acts in the world- is often not comfortable.

The reminder comes this time as a result of a week spent in an intensive language school in Lisbon.  For three hours each morning in group class, three hours each afternoon in individual tutoring, and nearly three hours each evening in homework (trabalha de casa), I have been wrestling with the Portuguese language.

The wrestling starts early each morning as I walk to school bombarded by city sights and signs that are unfamiliar.   (If a pasteleria sells pastry and a café sells coffee, does a farmacia sell farms???  (Don’t be silly, Barb, it’s pharmaceuticals.)  My wrestling continues into the evening as I “relax “ by watching televisao- em Portugues, of course.

My head spins through the night in sleep that is disturbed by dreams of conjugations and irregular constructions.

As a teacher, it is easy to forget what it feels like to be a learner.  I inhabit my role -and status- as an expert all too easily, quite comfortable with my knowledge and unquestioning of the trust that my students usually place in my guidance.

If I am not careful, this habitude is dangerous.

I can become impatient with the student who doe not understand the point I am making or overly harsh with the student who repeatedly asks, “What do you want?” with respect to some assignment.

It has become once again clear to me this week that when I react this way I do not encourage learning.  This point was driven home to me because I was the worst student in my class this week!

Now, it is true that there were only three other students in the class- two professors of sociology from the University of Berlin (married to each other and visiting Portugal for the fourth time) and one young woman from Paris whose father is Portuguese  -who did have a head start on me because of their prior experience, and because this was their second week at the language school.  It was not hard to be the worst student in that company.

But no matter how much I told myself that I could learn and would learn, there were many moments when my self-doubt turned to real fear.  My teacher, competent and kind in many ways, didn’t always help.  She was frustrated at my inability to keep up conversationally with the other students.

Her response to my blank looks was veiled impatience and occasional not-quite-joking remarks about my look of terror when she called on me.   She was right.  I was terrorized.  I didn’t want to be – or feel – inept.  I didn’t want to disappoint.

I wanted to speak well.  I did my trabalha de casa faithfully.   But I have to admit my progress has been slow -a blow to my confidence but a boon for my humility.

Slow as it has been, I have progressed in large part because of my afternoon tutor who responded to my halting attempts at conversation much differently.

This teacher’s approach stands in sharp contrast to my morning teacher.   She was unfailingly patient, encouraging me to try to speak and accepting what I said until I got a little momentum going, then gently correcting my grammar and reshaping my pronunciation.

When I got it right  -it did happen occasionally-  she did not make a big fuss or congratulate me.   She just took me seriously and responded in conversation appropriately.

Sometimes I understood what she said to me, sometimes I did not, but I was thrilled to know that I had said something worth responding to.

No faux reinforcement is anywhere near as powerful as the recognition that you have hit the mark.  I was motivated to speak again, and to listen more carefully.

What my afternoon teacher understands and my morning teacher may not is that any student can, and will, only learn when he or she is not stuck in the paralysis that accompanies the fear of looking and being “dumb.”  Even talented and motivated students can find themselves in that position by virtue of circumstances beyond their own control.

This is a lesson worth remembering, one I will take with me. My students and I will struggle every day to understand each other but I promise to be patient with them  -and myself.

Dr. Barb Stengel has been a member of the educational foundation since 1985. She writes “Uncommon Sense” for The Snapper.

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When you read this I’ll be trading dollars for euros, stuffing just a few more things in my suitcase, and testing my Skype connection one last time in preparation for a Saturday flight to Portugal.   For the next three months, I’ll be a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy and Pedagogy at Universidade de ‘Evora located in the Alentejo region east of Lisbon.  This is an adventure that will test my inner control freak.  I am going alone to a country where I’ve never been, know no one, and – despite my best efforts over the last several months – barely know the language.  My host colleagues seem welcoming and gracious, but are not able to tell me what I’ll be teaching or when.  Working at ‘Evora will be a far cry from the well-oiled institutional machine that is Millersville University.  I’m looking forward to the unpredictability, to the pure potentiality.

As I was gearing up to go, Millersville’s revised Mission Statement showed up in my email box.  I read the statement with interest, scanning it for references that supported my commitment to study abroad and my own new venture,  and I came away oddly disappointed.  Study abroad opportunities, the International Studies major and minor, and programs like the Shanghai Executive Training Program, which brings international visitors to campus have expanded steadily.  Still, the impact of those efforts seems not to have altered the campus identity in any appreciable way.

There are references in the mission statement to “diversity of people, cultures, ideas and viewpoints”, but these come in the context of describing an “inclusive campus community.”    Principles of inertia – resistances to change that are curricular, economic, and personal in origin – keep MU students in place.

Our overloaded curriculum requirements make it very difficult to spend a semester abroad without stalling progress toward graduation.   A few majors (specifically, the foreign language majors) offer exceptions to this rule.  However, your typical biology major or BSE social studies major or business major who tries to study abroad finds it very difficult to make curricular ends meet.

My solution?  Simple.  Any student who spends a semester on a different continent or in a country where a different language is spoken can use that semester to cross off any five gen ed requirements.  I’m sure that proposal will rile those for whom distribution and skills requirements are sacrosanct, but I assert that the “off plantation” experience is that important and that life changing.

Sometimes the ends that don’t meet are financial.  Spending a semester abroad – or even taking an international study course – has its costs. In the face of ever climbing tuition and room and board prices, finding a couple thousand dollars more may seem insurmountable.   It may seem so, but it’s not.  Prioritizing and borrowing will be necessary (as I’m discovering myself), but the payoff is, as the advertisement suggests, “priceless.”

The biggest hurdle to leaving the country is often neither curricular, nor financial, but personal.  We are comfortable and not easily pushed out of that comfort zone.  We are, too often, risk averse.  There is no cure for that except the reminder that “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”  In the end, we are all at Millersville to grow.   Growing may mean leaving, at least for a time.

So I will be writing from Portugal this semester, from my personal place of altered inertia, in a modest attempt to get you thinking about doing the same.   Each installment will be a similarly modest attempt to alter how we think about ourselves at Millersville – as a place where “study abroad” is a feature of one’s education more often than not.   For now, at least, we won’t mess with the mission statement.

Dr. Barb Stengel has been a member of the educational foundation since 1985. She writes “Uncommon Sense” for The Snapper.

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