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.

Alumna Summer Bozeman’s passion for St. Augustine’s past turned into a paying gig when she was tapped to author a pictorial book on the Nation’s Oldest City.

When Bozeman graduated from Flagler in 2007, she bought several books on St. Augustine history and found herself fascinated by many of the historic photos.

One of the books the communication major bought was “St. Augustine in the Gilded Age,” from Arcadia Publishing. The book was chock full of Flagler-era photographs featuring St. Augustine landmarks and landscape. Bozeman began walking around the downtown area comparing the old pictures to what’s currently in those spots.

“I thought it would be really cool to make myself a scrapbook with old pictures and then the new pictures,” she said. “And maybe someone else would want that, too.”

Aracdia’s “Then & Now” series fit the bill. When Bozeman called the publisher, she found they had already been looking for someone to take on the project. Within a month she was digging through old photos and papers.

Bozeman did all the research for the book — searching archives and selecting photographs. Then she went out and recaptured the locations in her own photos. She climbed walls, moved branches, and even once had to lie down on top of a wall to get the shots. She says a lot of the shots were hard to get because the landscape has changed so much.

“In the past 100 years, a lot of people have planted a lot of trees,” Bozeman said. “No matter what shot I wanted, there was a big tree in the shot.”

She spent many hours working with the St. Augustine Historical Society and the Florida Archive in late 2008. With just four months to complete the book, Bozeman found it was the passion for the work – and a little help from her mother – that helped her stay on track.

Bozeman currently works as an intern for the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau in Macon, Ga., but she says she wouldn’t rule out working on another project like her St. Augustine book in the future. In fact, she recently helped her mother with a “Then & Now” book on Macon.

“I loved going through archives … putting my hands in all those letters and newspaper clippings, and the research was so much fun,” she said.

Making a difference in Swaziland is no small task. Roughly 25 percent of children in the African country have contracted HIV/AIDS. In the rural area of Gamula, about 70 percent of the community is unemployed, most living on about a dollar a day. As Peace Corps volunteers, Tristan Estes and Rachel Manring are doing their best to make everyday improvements there.

Now the 2008 graduates live in a stone and mud house without electricity or running water. At Flagler, Manring studied communication and Estes was a theatre major. To prepare for their move, the married couple completed two months of training on topics like health, culture, safety and language — a particular challenge, Manring said, because siSwati is “full of clicks and sounds that don’t exist in English.”

They have also battled frequent illness since their departure to Gamula, including Manring’s bout of swine flu in September. But despite the challenges they face, Estes and Manring are enjoying the chance to stretch their boundaries, live with a host family and become part of a new community. Manring’s main tasks are working with school health/anti-AIDS clubs and running self-confidence building workshops for orphans and other vulnerable children. Estes primarily works at a clinic and a preschool, in addition to helping with the workshops.

“These children often feel unloved, hopeless and depressed,” Manring said. “Confidence building is vital because if children feel good about themselves and know that people believe in them, they are more likely to believe in themselves … A better value of life leads to hopes and dreams for the future, which leads to positive decision making.”

Estes said sustainable development work is never a quick fix; he and Manring hope the workshops’ most immediate effects will be improved grades and school attendance.

“Development work isn’t just about building huge structures and throwing money at problems,” he said. “It’s more about interpersonal and small-scale things that can empower people to change their lives.”

The resilience of the community has surprised and sustained Manring during the tough adjustment to life in Gamula.

“Most of the people in our community have been through so much … death of family members, disease, hunger, drought, lack of clean water, emotional trauma, the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS, and abuse,” she said. “They make it through another day, support each other the best they can, and simply try to enjoy their lives. They genuinely want to improve the quality of life for themselves and their community members. This is what inspires us and makes us glad to serve.”

Read more about Estes’ and Manring’s Peace Corps experience on their blog: http://rachandtre.livejournal.com/

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.

The students were from the Aviles School of Art, and the restoration marked the start of a relationship between Flagler and the Spanish school.

Maria Sedano, head of the painting restoration department in Aviles, oversaw the technical work of six students. She said they’ve all had about three years of education and many have recently completed degrees in art restoration.

The dining hall’s murals — which are more than a century old — had minor damage caused by paint peeling away from the plaster beneath. The dining hall is part of the former Ponce de Leon Hotel, which was completed in 1888 by Henry Flagler and is today a National Historic Landmark.

Don Martin, Flagler art and design professor, said the murals haven’t been touched up for almost a decade. The first major restoration was done in the 1980s.

“We thought this was something our art department does not offer, and it would establish a mutually beneficial experience,” Martin said. “The city and the college wanted
to establish cultural exchanges … Next summer we hope to have a relationship with their graphic design program.”

They are faces she can’t get out of her mind. Stories that are now etched in her consciousness — that haunt, or even inspire her on a daily basis.

For Kathy O’Keefe, a 1980 alumna and Flagler College’s former alumni director, the nine-day trip to Kigali, Rwanda, this past summer was something she could only describe as a life-changing experience.

Audio Slideshow: Kathy O’Keefe Speaks About Trip to Rwanda

“I don’t really know how you process [everything I experienced],” she said of the trip, which coincided with the 15-year anniversary of the genocide that killed an estimated 1 million Rwandans. “I think what you do is you just say, ‘It’s a part of my life now.’ Every day I think of certain people who might as well be family members.”

The trip was organized by Seattle’s Luis Palau Ministry, which has been working in Rwanda on a number of service projects. O’Keefe took part in several, including helping to pour concrete floors in what will become homes for women and children who were victims of the genocide.

But for O’Keefe, the trip wasn’t just about service or getting a better grasp of Rwanda’s horrific past. Rather, it was as much about building relationships and making connections with women who had suffered through unimaginable atrocities, as well as orphaned children, many of whom are living with HIV/AIDS.

“You go in and every single person you interact with is a survivor, on some level, of a murder in their family,” she said. “So that is really tough because people want to share their story, and when they do it’s just heartbreaking.”

O’Keefe said she struggled to comprehend how a nation could be gripped by such brutality. But she also said it is a country that is moving forward — focused more on its future than what tore it apart in the past.

“They are an incredible people with a vision of reconciliation and renewal for Rwanda,” she said. “They believe the tribal lines have, at least, blurred, and they have an incredible hope for the future.”

O’Keefe, who stepped down as Flagler’s alumni director in late 2009 to pursue new opportunities, said she intends to go back to Rwanda to see people she now feels so close to.

“Their story has become a part of our lives,” she said. “It is not the place to go if you don’t want to own the story.”

O’Keefe wasn’t the only Flagler grad on the trip. Her son, Tucker, ‘06, and alumnus Ray Spencer, ’94, also traveled with the group.

When his team suffered back-to-back losses to open the season, Flagler soccer Coach John Lynch knew some changes were in order, especially after a 6-1 loss in their second game.

“In the second game of the season we played dreadful. We lost 6-1,” Lynch said. “We had to do something dramatic and we did that weekend in trying to wake the group up. We made massive changes in personnel and we made a big change in tactics.”

The changes prompted a new beginning for Flagler, and the Saints went on to reel off wins in 11 of their final 14 regular-season games. Their mid-season surge included six wins in seven conference games, and they secured the Peach Belt Conference regular-season championship on Halloween with a 3-1 win over conference power Francis Marion on Flagler Field.

“Everyone was so excited that we finally made it into a conference and had something to play for. Being able to win it the first year was an amazing feeling,” said junior goaltender Matt Gilman, who finished his first season at Flagler with 14 victories and six shutouts.

Entering the season, Flagler’s coaches and players knew very little about their Peach Belt Conference foes. But when preseason rankings were released and the Saints saw themselves ranked seventh in a nine-team conference, they were both excited and motivated.

For Lynch, the year also brought an important milestone — he notched his 100th win as Flagler’s coach against North Georgia and was named Peach Belt Conference Coach of the Year.

Flagler moved into the NCAA Division II National Tournament ranked fifth in their region, but fell 4-0 to Wingate in the regional quarterfinals.

“We did a lot of good things,” Lynch said about the season. “We faced a lot of unknowns and to come out as champions and do it in the style we did, it was really, really satisfying.”