Oscar Baez
Baez’s project, “Lost in Translation: The Impact of Language Policy on Cultural Heritage,” will take him to Spain, Switzerland, Morocco, South Africa and Taiwan. “Language is the voice of a community’s culture. I seek to explore how this unique voice is being silenced, and the best ways to make it heard,” wrote Baez in his project summary.
Baez has studied English, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin and Classical Arabic. His passion for languages emerged not so much from a love of grammar or declensions, but from the frustration he experienced growing up in Boston, Mass. In 1989, Baez and his family emigrated from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic to the U.S., where his parents could find work only as custodians because of their inability to speak English and their lack of college education. “The language barrier prevented my parents from living confidently and participating fully in my life. Seeing my father hide his embarrassment because he could not help me with my third grade spelling homework was not only frustrating, but simply disheartening,” recounted Baez in his personal statement of his Watson application.
A number of personal experiences have contributed to Baez’s decision to pursue a career in public service, through which he hopes to aid underrepresented groups. At 16, Baez worked for Jarret Barrios, the only Latino Massachusetts State Senator, and witnessed the senator’s failed struggle to sustain bilingual education in Massachusetts. While abroad in Florence, Italy, Baez worked at a shelter for North African and Albanian immigrant women. In Italy, he overheard one mother speaking in Italian to her children. When Baez asked the woman if she wanted her son to preserve their native language, she replied, “If he has to forget our past to create his own future, so be it.” Last summer, Baez worked as a U.S. citizenship instructor, educating adults about U.S. history and government. While many of his students could correctly answer the questions that would determine their citizenship, some could only answer in their native Spanish. “If the U.S. does not have an official language, why must proficiency in English be a requirement for participating in the civic life of the nation?” posed Baez.
In his project, Baez will create, through a literary anthology, photo essays and video clips, “a multilingual narrative of how communities of ethnic minorities are struggling to preserve their cultural identity. By transcribing their stories in both their native tongue—in which their cultural essence is best expressed—and in the majority language—I hope to provide a unique view into the struggle that these communities are facing against overt language policies that are institutionalizing assimilation for the sake of a unified ‘national identity.’”
Baez chose to travel to Switzerland and Spain, two nations that are distinguished for their linguistic diversity. He selected Morocco, South Africa and Taiwan as examples of countries that have been criticized for neglecting minority languages and providing undue preference to ‘foreign’ languages of wider communication.
Ryan Shields
Shields’s project, “Investigating Health Care in Post-Genocidal Societies,” will take him to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and Cambodia, where he will “explore the function of health care and its possibilities through the choices that humans make—are forced to make—in the most desperate of times,” according to his project proposal.
During the summer following his sophomore year, Shields worked in a hospital in Lopburi, Thailand where the doctors convinced him to pursue a health care profession. In his personal statement, Shields recounted the moment when he realized that he was destined to become a doctor. “A patient who had been in a motorcycle accident was getting the screws removed from his jaw. I watched the entire surgery; tears welled up in his eyes. After the surgery finished, I asked him one of the only questions I knew in Thai, ‘Is it delicious?’ He shook his head and smiled. If I could make a man who had just spat out blood for 10 minutes smile, then I knew where I could have an influence.”
Shields has also worked for Development in Gardening in Senegal, where he helped construct urban vegetable gardens that would provide necessary nutrients for HIV+ patients on antiretroviral treatment, as well as a safe community space.
Shields selected his three countries because each supplies a different cultural context for his study of genocide, as well as a breadth of historical times, places and circumstances.
“I do hope that I can talk to doctors, nurses and patients, and hear their stories and hopefully collect them into a type of narrative,” said Shields on what he hopes to accomplish through his research. “Yet, more importantly, I want to be friends with them. I want to hang out with nurses in a hospital in Sarajevo, and go out clubbing with doctors in Kigali, and then meet up with all my friends from Amherst in Phnom Penh and introduce them to all the people I’ve met.”