They are a people without a country — more than 100,000 Bhutanese refugees who were trapped between a nation that disowned them and another that wouldn’t take them.

For two decades they languished in United Nations refugee camps with nothing but bamboo huts covered by plastic tarps and meager rations, toiletries and other essentials. Then in 2007, the United States and other countries agreed to end their plight and take in the refugees. More than 22,000 have already immigrated, settling in cities across the country like Jacksonville, Fla.

And that is where two Flagler College roommates come in. For Sheila Acharya, it was a calling to help people from her homeland after her parents began doing whatever they could to help the refugees in Jacksonville. For Jessica Welch, president of Flagler’s Students in Free Enterprise team, it was a chance to develop a unique project around helping people.

They called the project “Suruwat” — Nepali for “creating new beginnings.”

“The first time you meet [the refugee families], you can’t help but want to help them,” Welch said. “It’s instantaneous.”

Welch says this venture isn’t a typical SIFE project.

“It’s the biggest challenge we’ve faced as a team because it’s not just teaching people how to run a business,” she said. “It’s teaching them everything. I mean, we taught them how to go grocery shopping. We taught them how to clean their house, which are not things that meet SIFE criteria. But until we do, we can’t teach them how to get a job.”

This is a heartstrings project, she says, and for her and Acharya, it has also become a passion.

The Life of a Refugee
The plight of the Bhutanese refugees is little known around the world — lost among much bigger and better-known ethnic cleansings and refugee crises, like Darfur and Sudan.

The U.S. agreed in 2007 to accept most of the Bhutanese refugees — about 60,000 in all — who were living in seven refugee camps on the eastern edge of Nepal. Bhutanese by birth, but ethnically Nepali, the refugees were victims of an ethnic cleansing when Bhutan expelled them and revoked their citizenship in the 1990s. Exiled, they crossed the border to Nepal, which also refused to take them.

“They fled to Nepal, but Nepal is a very poor country,” Welch said. “They didn’t have the infrastructure or the desire to support them.”

According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, there are still more than 86,000 refugees in the Nepal camps, all of whom are expected to eventually be moved to new host countries where they will try to make a home.

Jacksonville is slated to receive 6,000 refugees, and about 300 are already living there. One of three charities helps setup the refugees, the oldest of which is a deaf and blind woman in her 80s and the youngest, infants. But the money they’re given doesn’t go far, and their housing is often substandard and in some of the city’s rougher neighborhoods. Many do not speak English, especially the older refugees, and the younger struggle to find jobs, especially in this down economy.

With not much more than the clothes on their backs, they come to the United States to start new lives from scratch.

“Sheila and I were lucky enough to be invited to go and pick up two families when they came in,” Welch said. “A family of four walked off the plane clutching these plastic bags that had all of their documentation and a duffel, which was an overnight bag by our standards. And that’s all the possessions that this family of four owned.

“It’s incredible,” she continued. “For Sheila and me, it’s not uncommon when we’re driving back, especially after that, to sit in the car and cry for hours because there’s just so much you want to do, but you don’t know how.”

Starting Over
In its first year working with the refugees, SIFE completed projects that helped the Bhutanese better understand how to succeed in the United States, like field trips to banks where they learned basic banking.

“There’s a fear of bank accounts because the money is no longer in your hands,” Welch said. “And so we have to explain the benefits and how it actually keeps their money safer.”

They took the refugees to grocery stores to teach them about the fundamentals of shopping, led workshops on English, and taught them other basics that most people take for granted.

The American culture is an alien world to the Bhutanese, and one that is very intimidating and overwhelming. And while Welch and Acharya find it an incredibly rewarding project, they also say it’s never easy.

“The hardest thing is you can’t do enough,” Welch said. “You have all these wonderful ideas, but it’s just a matter of implementing them and getting community support. You just don’t want to let them down, but it pushes you.”

The students experienced how tragic the situation can be in July when one of the refugees — 21-year-old Hari Adhikari — was shot and killed during a robbery. He’s someone both Welch and Acharya knew personally from working with the families.

“He was 21,” Welch said, her eyes growing heavy. “He was our age. He was the only one in his family who spoke English. The man who shot him got food stamps … that’s it. [Adhikari’s] family not only lost a member of their family, but also their sole financial support.”

Acharya said most people don’t understand much about the refugees — what they’ve been through in Nepal’s decrepit camps, how difficult it is to leave their homeland for a new country, and the challenges they face as they try to succeed here, especially in a slow economy.

“There are so many things that we see them struggling with,” she said.

Yet, for all the struggles and hurdles they face in their adopted country, Welch and Acharya say they see something much more positive: a chance for them to live out the American dream. Acharya said her parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from Nepal, are prime examples of how that really can happen.

“When [the refugees] were living in Nepal, they had no opportunities at all,” Acharya said. “They were living in the camp, and they were educated, but they couldn’t do anything with it. And then they’re here now and they have these obstacles, but they always say the sky’s the limit. It’s hard for them at first, but my parents went through the same struggles, and I definitely think they can do well.”

Moving Forward
This year the SIFE team is planning on helping the refugees create videos for newcomers as orientations to this new country. That way the Bhutanese will learn from their own people in their own language tips on acclimating, as well as some of the ins and outs of coming to the United States.

“These individuals have incredible skills, but the job set in Nepal is very different than here,” Acharya said. “So it’s tweaking them a little bit so we can then create a business that we can sell their products.”

Acharya says she is excited about the opportunity because the refugees have so many skills and such a rich, vibrant culture.

“A lot of the adults can’t work because they don’t speak English and they just stay at home,” she said. “But many of them have skills like making jewelry, painting and different arts and crafts like that.”

For Acharya, who will graduate with Welch in the spring, it will be tough to let go of the project after it has become such an important part of her life.

“To see how strong they are after what they’ve been through and how optimistic they remain, it’s completely, I don’t want to say changed me, but I realize a deeper understanding of what people struggle with right here,” she said. “To see them improving every week … it’s really cool to see how much they’ve overcome.”

Flagler senior Briggs Hurley stands at the altar practicing Hebrew prayers. Overhead the wording in Hebrew translates into, “Know before whom you stand.” Behind him is a beautiful pane of handmade stained glass in vibrant colors.

Rabbi Mark Goldman, dressed immaculately, interrupts Hurley to admonish him for wearing shorts and flip flops to temple.

“Oh, we’re relaxed since Vatican II,” Hurley says with a grin, dismissing the comment with a wave. Rabbi Goldman rolls his eyes and shakes his head. Then he smiles.

If this were an ordinary conversation between a Rabbi and his Jewish student, the response would make no sense. But since Hurley is going to be attending Catholic Seminary to become a priest soon, the comment fits. What doesn’t fit is a Catholic student practicing Hebrew prayers under the direction of a Rabbi at Temple Bet Yam, a Reform Judaism Synagogue in St. Augustine.

It’s all part of a unique internship Hurley created for his senior year that is focused on a lofty goal the two men hold dear: greater tolerance in the world for paths to God.

Goldman says he and his intern are oddly “a match made in heaven.”

At Temple Bet Yam, Hurley has not only learned Hebrew prayers, religious history and
tradition, but the two have also created a special ceremony to mark his success. They are calling the ceremony “Brit Binah” meaning “Covenant of Understanding.”

“He’s Mr. Perfect,” Goldman said of Hurley. “He’s doing unbelievably well. He’s like a sponge. He is such a quick learner. Briggs is a citizen of the world. He came to Flagler College as a young man with an old soul.”

Hurley has become so proficient in Hebrew that he is currently singing in the choir at the Temple. His mother and grandmother, also devout Catholics, are attending services.

“My Catholic grandmother has no idea what’s going on, but she comes anyway to be supportive,” he jokes.

An Unusual Internship

The idea for the internship came up in the spring semester of 2009 when Hurley took Goldman’s Introduction to Judaism course and loved it. Hurley was eager to learn more about Judaism. “I’ve always been a proponent of inter-religious dialogue,” he said. “I wanted to do an internship in my final year, and I felt that Rabbi Mark and I had a great friendship.”

“We developed a rapport,” Goldman said. “But I had never heard of this. Briggs invented this. I was reluctant at first. No Catholic ever asked me this before. Then Briggs met with [Flagler Liberal Studies chair] Tim Johnson and came up with the syllabus. It was impressive and comprehensive.”

At first glance the two men’s lives may appear contradictory, but watching them interact, there is a profound respect and admiration between the two.

“He reminds me all the time that Jesus was born and died a Jew,” Hurley said. A few minutes later, Goldman repeats this very phrase. Hurley smiles at him and raises his eyebrows. The two men have an open and energetic rapport. “I have to take my vitamins before I come to see Rabbi Mark,” Hurley said.

Although they both come from different walks of life, they have much in common on their journey of faith. Both are lively and exuberant, are world travelers who speak French and have a passion for spirituality and family. They are excellent pianists and love classical music. Each has a staunch conviction about his faith and his commitment to the traditions of his religious upbringing. Both love to banter and share a quick wit and steadfast intelligence.

But Hurley is obviously on a much different path than Goldman, who has 43 years experience as a congregational Rabbi and who served as a chaplain during the Vietnam War.

Hurley, who is graduating after just three years with a dual major in religion and politics, is about to embark on a six-year commitment to Seminary College at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland. Attending at the request of Bishop Victor Caleone, he will earn a master’s degree in philosophy and also theology.

Hurley said his family is supportive of his decision to become a priest. “My family was elated,” he explained. “It wasn’t just out of the blue. I have been talking about doing this since I was 7 years old.”

Building dialogue between religions

After visiting Flagler College as a guest speaker, Goldman was asked to teach a class as an adjunct instructor. The Rabbi was reluctant at first, but has now been teaching courses for the past five years.

“I love talking to college students,” he said. “It’s become a very rich experience. Students often come into the class with stereotypes about Jews.”

But rather than avoid conflict, Goldman provides an open forum for dialogue.

“I open up the class by asking students what they think of Jews,” he said.

Hurley and Goldman agree that better dialogue between religons is critical, and that goes to the heart of the intership Hurley created.

Goldman says he loves to empower people and believes that Hurley will make a terrific priest, partly because of that willingness to open dialogue and better understand others.

“This Father Hurley will go out with a new outlook into the world,” Goldman said. “He will carry a lantern of light, a new kind of lantern. That’s the reason I said yes to this internship.”

Osama bin Laden and Mohandas Gandhi are two names you wouldn’t expect to share the same cover of a book.

While the first is an international pariah whose acts of terrorism have brought fear, suffering, hatred and war, the second chose a path of absolute nonviolence as he waged his own “battles” to free India from British Imperial rule.

Both turned to religion to justify their actions, yet ended up on opposite ends of the spectrum. That is what troubles Flagler Assistant Professor of Religion James Rowell, and why he tried to make sense of it in his first book, “Gandhi and bin Laden: Religion at the Extremes.”

“On the one hand we have a person who believes that religion is nonviolence and must be nonviolence,” Rowell said. “That we must embrace the religious other whether he be Christian, Muslim, Jew or Hindu. On the other hand we have bin Laden saying we emphatically reject nonviolence and that we think that only violence will result in a solution for our problems.

We have two completely contrasting worlds out there. … These are two individuals both claiming to be religious. How can we assert that this phenomenon that we call ‘religion’ encompasses both of them? Can we say that?”

Rowell came to the idea for the book while at the University of Pittsburgh working on his doctoral dissertation, which was primarily about Gandhi and his nonviolent movement.

“I have a great love of Gandhi, nonviolence and his ideas, especially of inclusive tolerant religions — that there is a universal kind of calling to all faiths,” he said. “But right after I finished my dissertation, about 2002, we were of course dealing with 9/11 and the opposite extreme.”

He said it became harder to look at the idea of nonviolence, which also includes Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement, without taking into account bin Laden’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This prompted him to try and understand how two so-called religious figures could be so different.

“I was completely faced with this opposite figure,” Rowell said. “So not only as an American moved by this event, but also an academic feeling responsible to understand religion in the moment, I started studying bin Laden.”

Rowell later took his research and developed it into a class at Flagler before turning it into the book that was released in 2009 from University Press of America.

To him it’s a way to expose people to the significance of nonviolent movements led by the likes of Gandhi, King and even Islamic figures like Abdul Ghaffar Khan.

“Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a Muslim who believed passionately that the heart of Islam was nonviolence — that jihad is nonviolence,” he said. “That’s really a remarkable thing because he actually comes from the Pashtun tribal clan, which is the same clan that contributes to the Taliban.”

Sadly, Rowell said Ghaffar Khan’s memory has been eclipsed by a more violent alternative spouted by bin Laden, the Taliban and other religious extremists. But he felt it was important to include a chapter on Ghaffar Khan to show that throughout history there have been Muslims who were more closely aligned to the teachings of Gandhi and King.

And he hopes that more people will look to these leaders for inspiration, and that followers of bin Laden and Al Qaeda will begin to realize very little can be accomplished through violence.

“There’s no real coherent declaration to what bin Laden wants to do,” he said. “I think what’s substituted is a dark rage and a zealous religious hope that if we just create massive confusion as much as possible we will come to power.”

King and Gandhi, he said, both knew that once a movement took a violent path, it was almost impossible to bring it back. Rowell writes “Rebellion by nonviolence was more permanent, more lasting in Gandhi’s view. What was gained by the sword could easily be taken back by the sword, but what was established on principles of truth and justice might be held and prized forever.”

Which is why he is hopeful that some day a new Islamic champion of nonviolence will emerge as a “kind of counterbalance to the current extremism.”

“It’s very important that we try to recapture nonviolence,” he said, noting that today Gandhi and King are more relevant than ever. In fact, when President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in December of 2009, he said that the two leaders must remain guiding forces in the world, even while countries like the United States find themselves dealing with extremists like bin Laden through force.

Rowell, who said his class on bin Laden and Gandhi is well-received by students, would like to see more classes on world religion taught — not to preach a certain value or belief, but to help students better understand how religion continues to play such a critical role in world history, politics and even economics.

Rowell, who came to Flagler in 2006, also teaches “Religions of the World,” “Religion from Tibet to India,” and a class he calls “God, Ape and Man.”

Those classes touch on topics often touchy and controversial. “God, Ape and Man,” for instance, focuses on the debate between evolution and religion — primarily whether they are compatible. “I like to think of them as compatible,” he said.

On the whole, Rowell said it is a thrill to be able to teach to students about his passions.

Excerpts from “Gandhi and Bin Laden: Religion at the Extremes”

ON GANDHI’S EARLY EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH:
What made Gandhi a “Great Soul”? At the time of his life there were approximately 300 million Indians under British Imperial rule. Why did he stand out from the rest? Why do we remember Mohandas Gandhi as the Mahatma? It is a title he was reluctant to accept, to be sure, as he always spoke freely and openly about his own faults, yet he was the “Great Soul,” or “Mahatma,” the pioneer of the non-violent technique in politics during a very violent century. … How was it that this lone, frail Hindu, scarcely five and a half feet tall and not much over a hundred pounds, could bring such a monumental and heart-felt impact upon a heartless world?

ON BIN LADEN AND THE ROOTS OF JIHADISM:
The comparison of Gandhi with bin Laden is a striking mix of similarity and stark contrasts, a myriad of puzzling questions about our human nature, our politics, and our concept and use of religion. Why is it some have been captivated by the forces of
religious civil disobedience, while others are prepossessed by a dark religious rage? The answer cannot be as simple as that we are dealing with a different religion. In short, we cannot posit that Christianity and Hinduism are conducive to non-violence, and that Islam is not, because counterexamples are easily furnished to disprove this.

Design-heavy street art with grit and detail is how 22-year-old Hahau Yisrael defines his work.

Yisrael, a graphic design major and advertising minor graduating this spring, doesn’t speak about art the way many have been taught. He understands the importance of balance and perspective, but uses them on his own terms. He doesn’t stick to a particular medium – combining coffee grounds, spray paint, ink, charcoal, henna and acrylics.

And he uses whatever he can get his hands on as a canvas: surfboards, skateboards, tile, wood and T-shirts.

Born in New York City and raised in Jacksonville, Yisrael says his life as an artist began in a unique way. “It’s when my older brother taught me about graffiti,” he said. The genre has since influenced every aspect of Yisrael’s work.

Though he turned his art in another direction when he came to college — “too much at stake,” he admits of the often illegal art form — Yisrael still uses many of the same principles of texture, layering and an unconventional, bold illustrative style. One of his main influences is Jose Parla, a Cuban-American, multi-faceted street artist who utilizes calligraphy, script and heavy textures in his work.

Most street graffiti portrays a message, whether it be political, social or territorial, and Yisrael chose graphic design for the same sentiment. “I’m into the heavy conceptual aspect,” he said of branding, typography and advertising.

With graduation looming, Yisrael’s been thinking a lot about his future. “I can’t see myself doing anything else,” he said of combining art with graphic design. Although he moved from New York at the age of 1, Yisrael still hopes to find himself in the Big Apple, working for a design firm or ultimately opening his own.

“I’m a little bit intimidated by the city,” he said. “It seems like something to work up to. For now, I’ll just go with the flow.”

So he is concentrating on the present and just focusing on surviving his senior portfolio class. “Flagler has put me in some great situations and really shaped me as an artist … I probably wouldn’t have been as nurtured had I not gone here,” he said. “I’ve met some amazing people, in and out of school, and I’m always asked to push myself and never settle for less.”

Mallory Needleman gets paid to listen to horror stories. As an assistant outreach and archival researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., she catalogues and fact checks interviews with survivors, witnesses and perpetrators of the Nazi Germany genocide that killed roughly 6 million European Jews.

The 2008 Flagler alumna works with about 1,600 of the museum’s audio and video accounts of the Holocaust’s everyday atrocities: not just the typical shootings and mass graves, but unexpected details – like a neighbor who found the village’s Jewish tailor with all his teeth gone, pulled for their tiny gold fillings.

“There’s still a part of me that just doesn’t understand,” Needleman said. “About 95 percent of the museum’s stuff is in a warehouse, and we switch things out … One day, I started breaking down crying.

“I looked to the left of me, and staring me straight in the face were three cans of the Zyklon B. It’s the most ironic kind of thing because it says ‘POISONOUS, USE WITH CAUTION,’ and it was used to kill millions and millions of people … My boss told me, ‘Everybody has their little things. Mine is the hair.’ We have bags and bags of hair, and some of it is braided, and some of it has that baby curl to it. He can’t work with it.”

Needleman has spent her entire college career trying to understand the Holocaust. She studied history and international relations at Flagler and took classes that fascinated her, like Dr. Tim Johnson’s course on Christian-Jewish relations. Now, Needleman is finishing a master’s degree in Jewish studies at Towson University. While her tasks at the museum sometimes stress her, Needleman said she feels lucky to be contributing to a subject she’s passionate about.

“This is a generation that is leaving,” she said. “We need to be able to say 100 years from now that the Holocaust happened … It sounds cheesy, but knowledge is power. If you don’t know, then you’re just going to fall to the depths of ignorance.

“People ask me why the Holocaust happened, and it’s not one thing. These things could happen again today. It’s a destructive economy. It’s the loss of a war. It’s a very influential leader. It’s, ‘We need to find someone to blame this on.’ ”

Needleman’s goal at the Holocaust Museum is to make sure the interviews are as factual as possible, translated into various languages and easy to search; this will allow historians and scholars to access as much reliable information and testimony about the Holocaust as possible.

Currently, she helps coordinate 52 volunteer translators who are working on 70 interviews in 16 languages. Each hour-long interview takes about a month to translate.

Needleman said maybe 20 or so of the museum’s in-house oral history accounts are from admitted perpetrators. She said those interviews are often enlightening, but especially disturbing. Needleman recalled one man in particular: “He gives me chills because he speaks about the Holocaust in the way I think about it: in terms of gray areas,” she said. “Is the perpetrator the person who shot the gun? Or is the perpetrator the person who looked away and refused to hide the neighbor?

“He was one of the mass shooters. He took all their valuables and shot them into graves … And he’s talking about this family, and he’s being honest. He’s like, ‘Well, I shot the dad, and then I shot the kids,’ and he’s just saying systematically what he did. And he says, ‘Being a dad, could you imagine seeing your kid shot? … I did him a favor by killing him first.’ ”

Needleman says such ethical gray areas are important to examine if society wants to prevent future genocides. In addition to her studies, she has traveled to Germany and will soon be visiting Poland to get a clearer picture of both Holocaust history and contemporary culture in the area.

It was only fitting that such a magical run ended with the team in St. Paul, Minn., site of the NCAA Division II Volleyball Championship, making angels in the snow.

“The experience in itself was unbelievable,” Flagler volleyball coach Taylor Mott said. “That was one of the things that we tried to remind the girls to just enjoy every second of the experience. Whatever happens when we get there, enjoy every moment.”

Snow blanketed the ground outside the national quarterfinals site before the Saints were scheduled to play their Elite Eight matchup with Dowling University. Just as their coach had advised, the players, many of whom were born and raised in Florida, decided to soak it all in.

“That made the trip 10 times better to even have that experience,” senior Katie Beale said. The significance of such a milestone wasn’t lost on their coach.

“The surreal experience was just another chapter in what easily became the most memorable season, not in just Flagler College Volleyball history, but possibly in the history of Flagler College Athletics,” Mott said.

In just its second year competing in the NCAA, the Saints beat out many teams who have been in Division II for a long time without any of their teams advancing to or winning a regional.

“I definitely think we put Flagler on the map, and that’s a good thing for all of our teams,” she said.

To get to Minnesota, Flagler volleyball won both the Peach Belt Conference regular season and conference tournament titles in their first Peach Belt season, an unprecedented feat in itself. Then they bulldozed through the regional tournament, dropping just four sets in three matches and knocking off host Wingate in the final to advance to the quarterfinals.

“When we won regionals, it didn’t click for a lot of us for a while,” senior outside hitter Justine Burkhardt said. “On the bus ride back I remember just asking ‘Did that really just happen?’ It seemed like it all happened pretty fast and it just seemed so surreal.”

The win sent them to the national tournament, and after their adventures in the snow, Flagler dispatched Dowling in one of their best matches of the year, with a 3-0 sweep.

“We had a lot to prove,” Burkhardt said. “We were never ranked during the season, and we had played and beaten teams that were ranked, too. To beat Dowling once we were there, we all just played incredible. … That’s probably one of the best games we played all season. Everyone was doing their job so well that it made everyone else’s job that much easier.”

The victory sent Flagler to the final four, where they went on to lose their matchup with West Texas A&M, snapping a 29-match winning streak that began on Sept. 19 in Greenwood, S.C., with a victory over PBC rival Lander. The streak broke the Flagler record of 22, spanned 76 days and also tied a Peach Belt Conference record.

The team was motivated purely by the ability to play for a championship. Since joining NCAA Division II three years ago and before joining the Peach Belt, Flagler was ineligible for post-season play no matter how successful their season had been.

Our drive to make it as far as we could in our senior year really motivated the younger girls to help us,” Beale said. “We had so much fun playing together. That’s what kept our winning streak going. That’s what kept us going into the final four. I can’t imagine my senior year going any better.”

On top of the team accomplishments, the Saints received plenty of individual accolades as well. Mott was named Peach Belt Conference Coach of the Year. Beale was named to the NCAA Division II All-Southeast Region first team while Burkhardt and junior Meg Weathersby received second team honors.

Burkhardt also made the PBC All-Academic second team and shattered the Flagler College career records for sets played (545), kills (1881), attempts (5,573) and digs (1,676). It proved to be a truly unforgettable senior season for the St. Augustine native.

“Throughout the entire season — every practice, every game — I was just trying to soak it up as much as possible,” Burkhardt said. “It couldn’t have worked out any better. I guess you could say it was bittersweet. All of the games up to that we had all played so well and I don’t know that we all really clicked that last game. … But I’m not disappointed with how it ended. For us to get that far was absolutely incredible in itself.”

For Mott it was fulfilling to see her team’s constant drive reap the rewards they deserved.

“I don’t know that this season could have been any more rewarding and not so much because of the winning and all of that. That is a byproduct,” she said. “The most rewarding thing is seeing all the hard work pay off for a group of girls that didn’t know if we would ever be in a conference or even when we would be active Division II.”

Mike Galluzzi, ’88, is in the business of space. And right now the space business is in a period of transition.

The current shuttle program is set to retire by September 2010, leaving a gap in human space transportation for at least a few years while the new “Constellation” program takes off. Constellation’s plans echo the heyday of the space program with exploration of the moon and eventually manned missions to Mars.

One of Galluzzi’s jobs as NASA’s supply chain manager for the Explorations Systems Mission Directorate is to help ease the transition by streamlining common processes and eliminating redundancies — even looking at ways to use the resources on the lunar surface as part of the interplanetary supply chain. He calls it “designing for sustainment.”

“When you look at us going to the moon and beyond, I like to say ‘Spares are not an option,’ ” he said. “We really have to be focused on what we call the ‘ilities,’ which is reliability, maintainability, supportability and more importantly, affordability, and from an agency perspective, accountability.”

With the significant time gap between human space flight programs, it is unknown whether the companies that supply components of the shuttle will still be producing the same products. Galluzzi says this is the key to his line of work. It’s not just about streamlining current business practices. It’s also about ensuring these same processes can be applied to future programs as well.

“What we’re [NASA’s] designing today may be obsolete when we get up to production,” he said. “So it’s my job to ensure a healthy supply base and ensure that we’re flexible and agile enough to allow the engineering community to design in the next evolution or innovative product.”

At the end of the day, space exploration is still a business. But because of its unique challenges — NASA is entering uncharted territory with the Constellation program — existing business models don’t always apply. Missions to the moon are no longer a week-long “camping trip.” The goal is in-depth, long-term space exploration, and that creates new supply chain dilemmas. Any delay in parts or supplies increases exponentially the moment you leave Earth. Galluzzi has invented software that could help to solve some of those problems.

Prime Supplier™ is a one-of-a-kind supply chain simulation software, which NASA is pursuing a patent on. He developed the software to look at the percentage of business NASA generates for its suppliers, which are shared with the Department of Defense and the aerospace industry as a whole, and to help NASA determine mutually beneficial systems, pooling of resources, etc.

Galluzzi says his philosophy comes from a basic economic concept he learned at Flagler: supply and demand.

“How do you adjust to changing economic and customer demands?” he said. “That is essentially the foundation that I built everything else on, from Prime Supplier, to simulation, to possibly ultimately influencing policy for the agency.”

In an industry where the average civilian worker is an engineer, Galluzzi gets to use his knowledge of business to influence processes that could be used for years to come. But that career path wasn’t always clear.

After graduating from Flagler on a baseball scholarship, Galluzzi was somewhat torn. Within the course of two weeks he had three possible career options: play baseball in Italy, become an Air Force pilot or work in the space industry. Three choices that, in his mind, were dreams come true.

Galluzzi says the decision to join Rockwell International Space Systems Division and work as a logistics engineer on the environmental control and life support system for the space shuttle seemed like the best chance for a long-term career.

“I had the most unique opportunities fall into my lap,” he said. “Then the offer from Rockwell came. So I thought it’s time for me to quit playing around and grow up.”

Galluzzi has “grown up” immersed in business, from that first job at Rockwell, to returning to school for more specialized training, to owning his own company. It’s all helped him understand those basic supply and demand principles even more. But business models aside, Galluzzi really believes in the objectives of space exploration.

“When you start seeing the next vehicle … you start saying ‘Wow, I want more of this. We’ve got to do more.’ When I first stepped into the lunar rover (LER), I thought, ‘I want more … we need to go to Mars.’ We need to do all of these things, and the timeline, from my personal standpoint, is too long. We need to become agile and come up with quicker design and contracting processes.”

That includes looking out for the types of scenarios that will eliminate situations like on Apollo 13 when NASA scientists literally had to find a way to fit a square peg into a round hole because parts weren’t interchangeable.

It’s undeniably a tall order to fill, but Galluzzi tries to stay focused on the big picture.

“There are times when you just stand back [and realize the magnitude of what you are doing],” he said, “but I try not to let that happen. I must stay focused and not be so lost in the fog of admiration that you lose touch with what’s important. Literally people can get hurt if you don’t focus.”

Of course, when you spend your days “seeing what some might consider science fiction become reality,” it’s hard not to live every day in awe of your surroundings.

“We really do work with rocket scientists,” he said.

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Photos by Scott Smith, ‘04

It’s hard to define “success” in the publishing world these days. As major publishing firms struggle to turn a profit, it’s more difficult than ever to get a traditional contract. Meanwhile, self-publishing companies – which let anyone print their work, for a fee – are rapidly expanding. But the books they publish sometimes reach just dozens of readers – as opposed to, say, a million.

Flagler Assistant Professor of English Liz Robbins is finding success somewhere in between those two extremes. Her first full-length book of poetry, “Hope, As The World Is A Scorpion Fish,” was published by small, Nebraska-based The Backwaters Press in 2008 and has sold more than 1,000 copies.

One of the poems, “Studio,” was recently selected by Garrison Keillor – the famed American author and radio personality best known for his Minnesota Public Radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” – for national radio broadcast on “The Writer’s Almanac.”

Robbins’ book also received praise from David Bottoms — poet laureate of Georgia and editor of the literary magazine “Five Points” — who describes Robbins’ poems as exploring with “unflinching courage the human need for love and meaning. They are born out of that mysterious and painful tension between the hopeful heart and the world it must confront.”

For Robbins, success has more to do with creating, improving and sharing her work than with fame or money. She nurtures a similar approach in her creative writing classes at Flagler.

“I knew I wanted to teach, and I knew if I wanted to teach writing, publishing in a traditional way would be connected to that,” she said. “But I think also there’s so much rejection in sending out your work … that you absolutely have to be driven and passionate about it.

“I think different poets have different reasons and have different ways of writing … For me, it’s always starting with a puzzle of one kind or another … I think that we could benefit collectively from more contemplative thinking and inwardness, reflection. And I think actually all of literature plays that role; whenever we read a short story or a poem, no matter what, we’re getting some insight into the human condition and seeing ourselves and the people we know reflected back to us.”

The “Scorpion Fish” collection is hardly Robbins’ first literary accomplishment; she has received the First Coast Writers’ Poetry Award, judged by Robert Bly, and has been nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in “Calyx,” “The Chattahoochee Review,” “The National Poetry Review,” “Natural Bridge,” “Potomac Review,” “Puerto del Sol” and other literary journals.

Robbins has begun working on new projects since the publication of “Scorpion Fish.” Last summer, she received a research award from a Schultz Foundation grant given to Flagler. She used that award to produce roughly 20 poems about Hastings, a rural town near St. Augustine that’s known as “The Potato Capital of Florida.” Four of those poems are already on their way to publication in literary journals.

The award also allowed Robbins to do additional work with Kim Bradley, a Flagler visiting assistant professor of English who runs “Word Play,” after-school poetry classes for underprivileged youth at Hastings’ non-profit Organization of United Resources Center (OUR Center). Bradley mainly teaches elementary school children there. Robbins has assisted with those classes, run a teenage poetry workshop and helped Bradley produce and self-publish “Juice Up the True Say,” a collection of the “Word Play” students’ poetry.

Blog: Juice up the True Say

“Once I saw all the good that she [Bradley] was doing out there, I knew I wanted to get more involved,” Robbins said. “I was inspired by the kids, too, and I wanted to capture their experience to some degree [in my poetry.]”

Bradley and Robbins both said the main goal with the Hastings students is to “make writing fun” – a task that is made especially difficult when the children have already been forced to do writing “drills” and follow strict essay guidelines to
prepare for standardized tests at school.

“Poetry is such a hard sell,” Bradley said. “So I started to think about why I’m a writer and why I loved the written word as a child.”

Class activities range from playing with magnetic poetry to rapping. Their poetry prompts include giving personality to colors and responding to jazz or photography. Robbins said creative teaching and exposure to contemporary poetry helps the kids better relate to what they’re reading.

“They are so confident about words now,” Bradley said. “They have a command of the language that they didn’t have before. They know how to articulate feelings … I hope that having this ability to explore themselves like this, hopefully it will mean great things for some of them.”

Robbins said it was an invaluable experience to teach students of a variety of ages and socioeconomic backgrounds.

“Those built-in walls for self-protection as adults are not there yet,” she said. “That same lack of defensiveness comes into their writing … In some cases, their word combinations ending up being quite profound. I think even the title of the book, ‘Juice Up the True Say,’ is an example of that. It sort of has a nonsensical feel to it, but it absolutely makes sense … There is that lack of self-consciousness that’s refreshing and exhilarating to be around.”

The most difficult part of teaching in Hastings was seeing evidence of struggle in the children’s lives, Robbins said – and not being able to do much about it.

“It’s a cold awakening to see really young kids, first graders, having such an awareness about, say, a violent home life,” Robbins said. “And being able to speak about it with such frankness because it’s so ordinary to them.

“That’s disturbing … The heart of poetry is truth-telling, and some painful experiences are told.”

She added that a “kind of rawness” is something she seeks in all literature: “There has to be an element of risk, where I get the sense that the writer is revealing something that is information we could not get in any other way, in any other setting – things about the human heart, the nature of suffering, the nature
of relationships.”

As an instructor, Robbins said she feels privileged to learn about students’ personal lives and points of view through their creative writing – both at the OUR Center and at Flagler.

“I’ve taught at different universities,” she said. “The students at Flagler, as a group, tend to be compassionate, sweet, self-motivated, modest … Just getting to know them is very rewarding.”Robbins said she sometimes has difficulty making time for both teaching and writing, but she thinks the tasks complement each other.

“I read a statistic somewhere that there are like 200 writers in the United States who make a living off of their writing,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a single poet I know of that doesn’t also teach, and that’s including the ones at the top of the heap.

“But teaching writing helps you become a better writer … and the best teaching requires a profound creativity.”