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B U L L E T I N 

Alumni in 

AFRICA 

Winter 2010

in this issue 

20 

Chaba’s Story 

Launching Africa’s Leaders, 

One Orphan at a Time 

By Andy Taylor ’72 

Faces: ©www.iStockphoto.com/duncan1890 

h Students, faculty and special 

guests kick off MLK Day with 

a prayer breakfast in the new 

west dining hall. Connecticut 

Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele was 

the speaker. Andre Li ‘11

24 

The Water Carriers 

Learning To Fit In In Madagascar 

By Libby Cox ’92 

B u l l e t i n 

Winter 2010 

30 

Confronting a Dark Pandemic Amidst 

a Technicolor Dreamscape 

Linda Zackin ’80 Propels Health Programs Against 

the Beguiling Backdrop of Namibia 

By Phoebe Vaughn Outerbridge ’84 

34 

An Advocate 

for Africa 

Jennifer Cooke ’81 

Helps Shape U.S. Policy 

By Tom Frank ’80 

Departments 

2 From the Editor 

3 Letters 

3 Taft Trivia 

4 Alumni Spotlight 

10 Around the Pond 

17 Sport 

38 From the Archives

Winter 2010 

from the EDITOR 

Most of you loved the electronic version of 

the Bulletin we sent out with the fall issue, but 

we realize that reading online isn’t everyone’s 

cup of tea, so rest assured that we’ll continue 

to mail the printed version as well. Once we 

are better able to track your preferences, we 

hope to let you choose, but in the meantime 

please excuse us for sending you both (there 

is no additional cost to the school). 

Benefits of the e-version: 

• It’s environmentally friendly and very 

economical. 

• You can click on most websites mentioned 

and go directly to that page. 

• You can forward it to anyone you choose, 

wherever that person may be. 

• Those of you who change locations more 

often than e-mail addresses are much more 

likely to receive the electronic version. 

• You can also search for your name or any 

classmates’, to be sure you don’t overlook 

any news that might be in another class or 

another section of the magazine. 

Still, despite all those advantages, the electronic 

version is hard to settle down with for 

any length of time, and so we understand 

and appreciate those of you who still love 

print. We hope that you’ll proudly display 

the Bulletin on your coffee table, or hand it 

to a friend after you’ve read it, and eventually 

we trust that you will recycle it. 

Above all, we hope this and every issue of 

the Bulletin prompts you to get in touch with 

a classmate, that you feel a bit more connected 

to your school, or that you’ll send us 

your story! We want to hear from you. 

Didn’t receive the electronic version of 

the Bulletin We may not have your current 

email address, so please send it our way. 

Many thanks! 

—Julie Reiff, editor 

On the Cover 

B U L L E T I N 

Alumni in 

AFRICA 

2 Taft Bulletin Winter 2010 

v Theme issues are 

rare for the Bulletin, 

but combining the 

remarkable stories of 

these alums in a single 

issue makes them all 

the more powerful. 

They begin on page 20. 

©www.iStockphoto.com/ 

duncan1890 

This is the fourth issue of Taft 

Bulletin published on 100 percent 

postconsumer recycled fiber. What 

difference does that make Well, this 

issue consumes nearly five tons of 

paper. Not using virgin fiber translates 

into the following savings: 

118 trees, which supply 

enough oxygen for roughly 

59 people a year 

54,082 gallons of water, or 

roughly enough for every varsity, 

JV or thirds boys’ hockey player 

to shower for the entire season 

enough BTUs to power your 

home for 150 days 

3,284 lbs. of solid waste that 

doesn’t go to a landfill 

Environmental impact estimates provided 

by Neenah Papers and are based on 

the U.S. EPA Power Profiler and other 

publicly available sources. 

WWW 

Taft on the Web 

Find a friend’s address or 

look up back issues of the Bulletin 

at www.TaftAlumni.com 

For more campus news and events, 

including admissions information, 

visit www.TaftSchool.org 

What happened at this 

afternoon’s game 

Visit www.TaftSports.com 

Don’t forget you can shop 

online at www.TaftStore.com 

800.995.8238 or 860.945.7736 

B u l l e t i n 

Winter 2010 

Volume 80, Number 2 

Bulletin Staff 

Director of Development: 

Chris Latham 

Editor: Julie Reiff 

Alumni Notes: Linda Beyus 

Design: Good Design, LLC 

www.gooddesignusa.com 

Proofreader: Nina Maynard 

Mail letters to: 

Julie Reiff, Editor 

Taft Bulletin 

The Taft School 

Watertown, CT 06795-2100 U.S.A. 

ReiffJ@TaftSchool.org 

Send alumni news to: 

Linda Beyus 

Alumni Office 



TaftBulletin@TaftSchool.org 

Deadlines for Alumni Notes: 

Spring–February 15 

Summer–May 15 

Fall–August 30 

Winter–November 15 

Send address corrections to: 

Sally Membrino 

Alumni Records 



TaftRhino@TaftSchool.org 

1.860.945.7777 

www.TaftAlumni.com 

The Taft Bulletin (ISSN 0148-0855) 

is published quarterly, in February, 

May, August and November, by The 

Taft School, 110 Woodbury Road, 

Watertown, CT 06795-2100, and is 

distributed free of charge to alumni, 

parents, grandparents and friends of 

the school. All rights reserved. 

This magazine is printed on 

100% recycled paper.

Letters 

The picture on page 40 is of 1980 classmates 

Craig Kravit, Paul Todd, Dave Evans, Larry 

Stabler, Rob Peterson, Slade Mead, Corey 

Griffin, Jeff Thompson, Bob Kelly and Jeff 

Potter. It was given to our dear friend, The 

Old Beezer, when he was ill about five years 

after we graduated. I recall that the picture 

was taken after dinner senior year during an 

early fall snow flurry. I apologize but the rest 

of the story is highly classified information. 

Perhaps, if you’re buying the beer, you may 

be able to get some of the details out of one 

of us at our upcoming 30th reunion! 

—Rob Peterson ’80 

I believe many of my ten former classmates in 

the photo lived in the “Senior Boys Dorm,” a 

converted Common Room off HDT-2 near 

the Art Room above the Dining Hall. 

My IDs left to right are: Craig Kravit, 

Paul Todd, Gary Edwards, Larry Stabler, 

Rob Peterson, Slade Mead, Corey Griffin, 

Jeff Thompson, Rob Kelly and Jeff Potter. 

Alas, I have no insight about the cryptic 

message or the circumstances of the photo. 

However, this was one of the legendary 

yearbook photos of our era, ranking up there 

with Toby Fleming and Jeff Atwood’s photo 

in the 1979 yearbook (page 90), which 

featured the two wearing togas while surrounded 

by 15 of the school’s prettiest girls 

and headmaster Lance Odden. That may be 

worthy of reprinting and discussion as well! 

—Jim Ramsey ’80 

My former colleague at Taft, Amy Jones, 

and I both taught French—and “book 

ended” most of the boys in the pond. For 

a reason that escapes me, six of them were 

moved from CPT into an old classroom on 

the second floor of HDT, between HDT2 

and the ISP wing. Amy was in the apartment 

above the dining hall, and I had the 

first apartment on HDT2. They were in the 

middle. We were assured that they would 

be angelic. Well, I can attest that they were 

fun. As for angelic... 

—Jim Mooney ’74, former faculty 1978-83 

Quite a good Bulletin. On page 3, the 

guy carrying books, second from left, is 

Parker Griffin, ’71. The others I can’t recall. 

However, the books were transported 

in Library of Congress order, not Dewey 

Decimal. This was a pet project of librarian 

Walter Frankel, and he re-cataloged all the 

books prior to the new library’s opening. 

On page 80, you name 1935 as “the 

Golden Age of dramatic stagecraft.” Please 

refer to my article in the fall 1970 Bulletin. 

Those sets were lavish, but the golden age 

was under the direction of Peter Candler in 

the ’50s. 

—Bob Foreman ’70 

I should know the answer to the trivia question 

since I am the one leading the book 

carriers. I think it was my junior year so 

would have been 1969–70 school year. I 

think I remember the names of those in the 

picture including the slacker (Rich Bell ’71) 

leaning against the wall in the background. 

I believe behind me is Don George, 

next I couldn’t remember, followed by Ned 

Doudican and as I said I think it is Rich Bell 

without any books. I would have to dig out 

my yearbook to be sure and am not really 

sure I know where it is. 

—Fred Erdman ’71 

I was a bit disturbed that your lead story 

[fall 2009] was about an alumnus who 

crisscrossed America on a motorcycle. 

Not my idea of a goal I would welcome for 

my grandson. 

It is hard for me to envision any Taft 

student aspiring to such a trip. Sorry I am 

such a stick in the mud, but the majority of 

people riding around on motorcycles that I 

see are not role models for students of Taft. 

And even more important is the danger 

inherent on traveling by motorcycle. I know 

two people who had dreadful accidents that 

left them paralyzed for life. No drugs or 

alcohol were involved. One suddenly hit a 

part of the highway with oil on it. The other 

gravel. Both on a curve in the road. No one 

else hurt, but it was devastating for both. 

—Margaret Foster 

 

Taft Trivia 

Which member of the Taft faculty 

has been teaching here the longest 

(Current faculty are not eligible for 

the prize this time.) A Taft T-shirt 

will be sent to the winner, whose 

name will be drawn from all correct 

entries received. 

Congratulations to Fred Erdman 

’71, who correctly guessed 1969 as 

the year in which the Hulbert Taft Jr. 

Library opened. 

Love it Hate it 

Read it Tell us! 

We’d love to hear what you think 

about the stories in this Bulletin. 

We may edit your letters for length, 

clarity and content, but please write! 

Julie Reiff, editor 

When I read, with keen interest, the Fall 2009 


article “College Counseling Today,” it reminded 

me of many prior decades when college 

Watertown, CT 06795-2100 

110 Woodbury Road 

access was taken much more for granted. I 

or Reiff J@TaftSchool.org 

recall that 14 of my fellow 81 graduates matriculated 

at Yale, where 28 had applied. 

The only college counselor at Taft in the 

fall of 1963 was Mr. Sullivan, head of the —letters continued on page 60 

Taft Bulletin Winter 2010 3

alumni Spotlight 

By Julie Reiff 

v Venture capitalist Paul Klingenstein ’74 

helps tackle the disease that is devastating 

Africa. “At Taft I learned to take the needs 

of the greater community very seriously,” 

he says, “and I am grateful for that lesson.” 

Key Research 

An HIV vaccine: we need one, and we 

don’t have one, says Paul Klingenstein ’74, a 

venture capitalist who also serves as chair of 

the board of directors for the International 

AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), a nonprofit 

organization working in 24 countries to 

ensure the development of safe, effective, 

accessible, preventive HIV vaccines for use 

throughout the world. 

IAVI works with more than 40 

academic, commercial and government institutions, 

spending around $100 million 

a year, to discover and assess possible HIV 

vaccines. So far, they have helped evaluate 

six vaccines in early-stage clinical trials on 

four continents. 

Finding a vaccine “has become an increasingly 

urgent undertaking,” reported 

Scientific American magazine in November. 

“Despite advances in therapies, HIV/ 

AIDS is still incurable. Some 7,400 

people worldwide contract HIV every 

day. Preventing people from getting the 

virus would save millions of lives as well as 

greatly reduce health care costs associated 

with treatment.” 

“At its core now, this is a big science 

problem,” says Klingenstein. “We have to 

do a lot of work in the lab, but we think we 

now know where to focus. The number of 

people getting infected every year is larger 

than the number of additional people that 

we can treat with drugs. So treatment is 

important, but without a vaccine it just 

gets worse and worse and worse.” 

In short, without a vaccine we’ll 

never get ahead of the epidemic. Still, 

there is an ongoing struggle for funding 

between AIDS treatment and research 

toward a vaccine. 

Twelve years ago Klingenstein, who 

was previously involved with a vaccine 

company, was working at the Rockefeller 

Foundation when IAVI was being formed. 

“We had this raging epidemic and there 

was talk of vaccines but nobody was working 

on them,” he says. “The major vaccine 

companies didn’t have substantial HIV 

vaccine discovery efforts going on.” 

So Klingenstein talked to people he 

knew in the industry—“and knew well 

enough for them to be honest with me”— 

and it became clear why. Yes, it was about 

the risk and potential financial return, 

“but really it was because the science behind 

it wasn’t well enough understood.” 

So IAVI set out to create an environment 

for a vaccine to be developed—not 

discovered—because, says Klingenstein, 

“at that time we thought people could take 

their best vaccine constructs for other diseases, 

dust them off and try them on HIV.” 

After years of clinical development programs 

IAVI ran more than a dozen trials to 

determine safety and immunogenicity, to 

see how the immune system responded. 

“I went around to the field sites, which 

were not only conducting tests but also 

delivering care to those communities. 

We were doing trials in some of the most 

challenging places on the planet—places 

where the infection rates are really high. 

We also did the first trials in India. 

“It’s very powerful to see the devastation 

caused by this disease. Actually some of it’s 

very inspiring. There are a lot of infected 

people now who get drug therapy and are 

doing fine, who are very encouraged to help 

their peers and their peers’ kids and their 

communities. But there are many, many 

devastated communities as well. 

“Last summer I was in Kwazulu Natal, 

and around Cape Town. If you go through 

these townships they look very unusual. It 

takes awhile to process that they are missing 

whole age groups—they’re not there. 

There are no adults. There are old people 

and there are a bunch of kids, and that’s it. 

“This has proved to be the world’s 

toughest vaccinology problem,” he says. 

“The HIV virus is constantly evolving, even 

in a single patient. So for a vaccine to work, 

it has to trick the body into making these 

broadly neutralizing antibodies. None 

had been found in 10 years and IAVI has 

recently found two, and we know exactly 

where they actually bind to the virus. 

“We’ve found the lock,” says 

Klingenstein, “now we just need to design 

the key. And we’ll get there, because we 

have some of the best minds on the planet 

working it.” 

4 Taft Bulletin Winter 2010

h UN Ambassador 

Augustine Mahiga, 

Ann Hanin, Judy Smith, 

Tanzanian President 

Jakaya Kikwete, 

Stephen Smith ’51 and 

Professor Jumanne 

Maghembe 

A New Library in Tanzania 

In January 2009, a new, expanded 

Jifundishe Free Library opened its 

doors. Helped by a team of volunteers 

from the U.S., the library was ready to 

open to the public with many more programs 

and books. 

Judy and Steve Smith ’51, representing 

the Crawford-Smith Foundation, were 

on hand for the formal dedication in July, 

with their family, including son Steve Jr. 

’80. Tanzanian ambassador to the UN 

Augustine Mahiga was the keynote speaker. 

The day was a celebration of the village 

and the opportunities that the library provided 

to everyone living in the area. 

The success of Jifundishe’s first library 

led to the beautiful new building with space 

for more than 5,000 books, a community 

room for workshops, classes and presentations 

as well as an office for Jifundishe staff. 

The library now hosts another women’s 

cooperative project, evening adult literacy 

classes, film nights, after-school tutoring 

programs and educational enrichment 

competitions for secondary students. 

Because this library/community center 

has been so successful, Judy and Steve 

are proceeding with plans to duplicate its 

model to other rural areas of Tanzania. 

In September, they met in New York 

with Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho 

Kikwete and Minister of Education 

Jumanne Maghembe, and received their 

full support and cooperation. 

Judy and Steve also worked with 

Jifundishe to create a school science lab 

in 2007 [see “Lab Report,” winter 2008]. 

Jifundishe is the Swahili word for “teach 

yourself.” The organization was founded 

in 2004 when local students, teachers and 

villagers together with foreign volunteers, 

identified the need for a library. In many 

rural areas in Tanzania, literacy rates have 

been on the decline. For more information, 

visit www.jifundishe.org. 



Remembering Margaux 

n Margaux Powers ’00—left, along with her father Mike Powers ’69 and her sister Dana— 

is remembered through a new scholarship at Taft. 

When tragedy strikes it can bring people 

together in unexpected ways, and that has 

never been truer than it was for the family 

and friends of Margaux Powers ’00, who 

was killed in May 2008. 

“We were looking forward to watching 

her life continue to blossom,” her father, 

Mike Powers ’69 said at the time. “But her 

future has been tragically cut short and we 

are overcome with grief.” 

But Mike and others have taken that 

grief and used it to find ways to come together 

to remember their friend, sister and 

daughter. Among the more enduring legacies 

is the Taft scholarship in her name. To 

date, 432 donors have contributed more 

than $1 million to this lasting memorial. 

“The creation and continued growth of 

this scholarship will serve as an enduring 

tribute to Margaux and do a great deal to 

sustain her memory in perpetuity,” says 

Mike, who was on campus in January with 

daughter Dana to meet the first Powers 

Scholar. “In so doing, we celebrate a 

magnificent life.” The first recipient is returning 

middler Sachika Balvani, a highly 

talented girl from Mumbai, India, who 

placed first at the New England Squash 

Tournament last year. 

Many people contributed effort, time 

and money to establish Margaux’s memorial 

scholarship but special thanks go to 

Mike’s Taft teammate and friend Rafe de la 

Gueronniere ’70, who was instrumental in 

raising support for the fund. Margaux’s classmates, 

organized by Ribby Goodfellow, are 

raising funds for the scholarship in her name 

through the sale of Patagonia fleece vests 

customized with the alum’s Taft year. 

Margaux and her father were both passionate 

about sports in general and shared 

an interest in tennis. At Brown University, 

Mike’s alma mater, the Bruno Classic in 

Honor of Margaux Powers, was created 

as an annual event on the tennis schedule 

(www.brownbears.com). Margaux “was an 

enthusiastic fan of the team for many years 

and attended countless Brown matches, 

both home and away, and would join me 

there on Alumni Days,” says Mike. And 

watching over the courts at the Piping Rock 

Club near their home in Long Island, there 

is a memorial bench that bears her name. 

Her family and friends also had a 

Margaux sports day a year later, just a casual 

word-of-mouth event with her Taft, Cornell 

and Long Island friends that Mike hopes will 

continue, and he extends an invitation for all 

her friends to join them this summer. 

Tina Porter Teagle ’00, who was a lifelong 

friend and classmate of Margaux’s, 

first on Long Island and then at Taft—and 

whose fathers (Grant and Mike) were also 

Taft classmates—was married in the fall in 

the same chapel where Margaux’s memorial 

service was held, and so they a lit candle 

in her honor as part of the ceremony. Amy 

Pasquariello Millette, Margaux’s dear friend 

and roommate at Taft, asked Mike to be a 

reader at her wedding last summer. 

Knowing that Father’s Day would be 

incredibly difficult for him, Margaux’s 

friends, organized by Sam Hall ’00, created 

an album of letters and photographs 

of her and presented it to Mike in June. 

“It might be the nicest present I’ve ever 

gotten,” he says. “There were photos of 

Margaux that I’d never seen. Her friends 

have been so nice. They’ll stop by often and 

we’ll get flowers and visit Margaux together. 

And so I’ve gained this wonderful group 

of young friends. 

“Margaux made so many wonderful 

friends at Taft,” Mike adds. “She entered 

as a homesick middler, but by the time she 

graduated three years later many of her 

happiest days were spent at Taft.” 

The Margaux Powers ’00 Memorial 

Scholarship was established in 2008 

in memory of Margaux E. Powers by 

her father, Michael S. Powers ’69, her 

sister, Dana A. Powers, family, classmates 

and friends. This scholarship 

stands as a lasting tribute to a remarkable 

woman, of warm heart and 

beautiful spirit, beloved by family and 

friends. Her genuine and caring nature, 

her intelligence, her confidence 

and strength, her skills as an outstanding 

competitor and athlete inspired 

all who knew her. In awarding this 

scholarship to deserving students, 

preference is given to young women 

attending Taft who exemplify these 

outstanding qualities. 


Oppenheim Named Rhodes Scholar 

Spending summers working construction in rural Maine while at Taft, Willy 

Oppenheim ’04 felt a chasm between this environment and his affluent hometown 

in Connecticut. He was determined to forgo college until he “felt certain 

my elite education could benefit someone other than myself,” he wrote in his 

essay for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. 

So, at 18, he headed to India and discovered that he could “amplify the 

voices” of local educators before a global audience and help avoid “the tendency 

of ‘development’ efforts to patronize and disempower those they intend 

to serve.” 

Back in Colorado the next winter, and living in a tent, he worked from a 

public computer to build a database of Indian schools seeking foreign support, 

which has evolved into the Omprakash Foundation [see “Connecting the 

Dots,” Spring 2008]. 

At Bowdoin College, where he continued to live in a tent all four years, he 

designed his own major in international educational policy, with courses in religion, 

anthropology and education. He wrote his thesis on Muslim schooling 

in South India. He now teaches for the National Outdoor Leadership School 

and continues to volunteer his time with Omprakash. 

“My ambitions and accomplishments as a student, a teacher and a nonprofit 

founder emerge from a unitary intention to ‘lead out’ the citizens of the 

world toward an awareness of the greater human and ecological community 

from which we are indivisible and within which we can enact change,” Willy 

wrote. He will use the Rhodes Scholarship to study comparative and international 

education at Oxford. 

n Willy Oppenheim ’04, greeted by Headmaster Willy MacMullen ’78, was back on 

campus to present a Morning Meeting about Omprakash only days after being named a 

Rhodes Scholar. Ben Pastor ’97 

Paranormal Marketing 

“The campaign to bring Paranormal 

Activity to the public is already a movieindustry 

legend,” wrote Time magazine 

in October. 

Originally made three years ago 

by director Oren Peli on a budget of 

$11,000, the film was eventually picked 

up by Paramount and scheduled only to 

play at midnight in 16 college towns last 

fall. Soon audience demand expanded 

that to all-day runs on 159 screens in 44 

cities, and, Time predicted, “it’s headed 

for a box-office breakout.” 

“Once every five years, a guy makes 

a movie for a nickel that can cross over 

to a broad audience,” PA producer 

Jason Blum ’87 told the LA Times. But 

as unique as the film’s marketing plan 

was, part of its appeal was clearly its 

less-is-more approach. 

“In a genre where a fresh mutilated 

corpse every 15 minutes has become 

a reasonable expectation,” writes 

www.Slate.com, “this slow-paced 

but relentless spooker is refreshingly 

un-extreme. It comes by its screams 

honestly, earning them with incremental, 

at times agonizing gradations 

of old-fashioned, what’s-that-noisein-the-hallway 

suspense.” 

Since opening his own company 

in 2000, Blum has produced 12 feature 

films. He served as co-executive 

producer of The Reader, directed 

by Stephen Daldry, for which Kate 

Winslet won an 

Academy Award. 

His next projects 

include Tooth 

Fairy, for 20th 

Century Fox, and 

Area 51, again directed 

by Peli. 



In Print 

Goddess of the Market: 

Ayn Rand and the 

American Right 

Jennifer Burns ’93 

Oxford University Press, 2009 

Worshiped by her fans, denounced 

by her enemies and 

forever shadowed by controversy 

and scandal, the novelist and 

philosopher Ayn Rand was a 

powerful thinker whose views on 

government and markets shaped 

the conservative movement from 

its earliest days. Drawing on 

unprecedented access to Rand’s 

private papers and the original, 

unedited versions of Rand’s 

journals, Jennifer Burns reassesses 

this key cultural figure, 

examining her life, her ideas and 

her impact on conservative political 

thought. 

Goddess of the Market follows 

Rand from her childhood 

in Russia through her meteoric 

rise from struggling Hollywood 

screenwriter to bestselling 

novelist, including the writing 

of her wildly successful 

The Fountainhead and Atlas 

Shrugged. Burns highlights the 

two facets of Rand’s work that 

make her a perennial draw for 

those on the right: her promotion 

of capitalism, and her 

defense of limited government. 

“What Burns does well,” says 

Publishers Weekly, “is to explicate 

the evolution of Rand’s individualist 

worldview, placing her 

within the context of American 

conservative and libertarian 

thought: from H.L. Mencken to 

William Buckley and later the 

Vietnam War.” 

Burns is assistant professor 

of history at the University 

of Virginia. She has published 

extensively on the history of 

conservative thought, and her 

podcasted lectures on American 

history have won an appreciative 

worldwide audience. 

My Baby Rides the Short 

Bus: The Unabashedly 

Human Experience 

of Raising Kids with 

Disabilities 

“A View Through 

the Woods” 

Christy Everett ’901 

PM Press, 2009 

The stories in this collection 

provide parents of special needs 

kids with a dose of both laughter 

and reality. Featuring works 

by so-called alternative parents 

who have attempted to move 

away from mainstream thought, 

this anthology carefully considers 

the implications of raising 

children with disabilities. This 

assortment of authentic, shared 

experiences from parents in the 

know is a partial antidote to 

the stories that misrepresent, 

ridicule, and objectify disabled 

children and their parents. 

Christy Everett writes about 

her son Elias, who was born in 

2004 via emergency C-section, 

between 24 and 25 weeks gestation. 

He spent 94 days in the 

NICU and has multiple disabilities 

as a result of his premature 

birth. She started writing about 

Elias as a way to keep family and 

friends informed on his status. 

As the days in the NICU turned 

into months, she says she found 

the written outlet “as important 

for my own healing and growth 

as it was to tell my loved ones 

about Elias’s.” 

www.Parents.com started carrying 

her blog in 2007. In December, 

she gave birth to Olivia Everett 

Jordan. (Yes, Christy is the daughter 

of faculty emeriti Oliver “Jol” 

and Susan Everett.) 

You can read her current blog, 

as well as her earlier columns, at 

www.FollowingElias.com. 

Grow from Within: 

Mastering Corporate 

Entrepreneurship and 

Innovation 

Robert C. Wolcott and 

Mike J. Lippitz ’80 

McGraw-Hill, 2010 

Grow from Within is targeted 

to all those responsible for, or 

interested in, creating growth 

and future directions for their 

organization: internal venture 

leaders, business development 

managers, R&D executives, 

brand/channel managers, and of 

course the senior executives ultimately 

accountable for growth. 

It will substantially benefit budding 

corporate entrepreneurs 

looking for inspiration and strategies 

to build significant value 

through innovation and new 

business creation. 

There is no one-size-fits-all 

approach to building entrepreneurial 

capabilities within an 

established firm, Wolcott and 

Lippitz write. Instead, the book 

explains the four basic models— 

opportunist, enabler, advocate 

and producer—around which 

companies successfully drive 

new business creation and innovation 

initiatives more generally. 

Lippitz is a senior research 

fellow at the Center for Research 

in Technology at the Kellogg 

School of Management, 

Northwestern University, and a 

principal with Clareo Partners, 


LLC, a strategy consultancy 

based in Chicago, Illinois. 

For more information visit 

www.growfromwithinbook.com. 

Those Who Work, Those 

Who Don’t: Poverty, 

Morality, and Family in 

Rural America 

Jennifer Sherman ’90 

University of Minnesota 

Press, 2009 

When the rural poor prioritize 

issues such as the right to bear 

arms, and disapprove of welfare 

despite their economic concerns, 

they are often dismissed 

as uneducated and backward by 

academics and political analysts. 

In Those Who Work, Those Who 

Don’t, Jennifer Sherman offers 

a much-needed sympathetic 

understanding of poor rural 

Americans, persuasively arguing 

that the growing cultural 

significance of moral values is 

a reasonable and inevitable response 

to economic collapse and 

political powerlessness. 

Those Who Work, Those Who 

Don’t is based on the intimate 

interviews and in-depth research 

Sherman conducted while 

spending a year living in “Golden 

Valley,” a remote logging 

town in Northern California. 

Economically devastated by the 

1990 ruling that listed the northern 

spotted owl as a threatened 

species, Golden Valley proved to 

be a rich case study for Sherman. 

She looks at how the members 

of the community coped with 

downward mobility caused by 

the loss of timber industry jobs 

and examines a wide range of 

reactions. She shows how substance 

abuse, domestic violence, 

and gender roles fluctuated under 

the town’s economic strain. 

Compellingly written, shot 

through with honesty and empathy, 

Those Who Work, Those 

Who Don’t is a rare firsthand 

account that studies the rural 

poor. As incomes erode and the 

American dream becomes more 

and more inaccessible, Sherman 

reveals that moral values and 

practices become a way for the 

poor to gain status and maintain 

a sense of dignity in the face of 

economic ruin. 

Sherman is an assistant 

professor of sociology at 

Washington State University. 

The Dice Game of Shiva: 

How Consciousness 

Creates the Universe 

Richard Smoley ’70 

New World Library, 2009 

Richard Smoley examines the 

roles God has played for us and 

reconciles them with what we 

today know through science and 

reason. In the process, he shows 

that consciousness is the underlying 

reality beneath everything 

in the universe. 

In one of Hinduism’s great 

myths, Shiva plays a dice game 

with his consort, Parvati, and 

loses consistently. If he is the 

greatest god, why does he lose 

Through this story, Smoley 

explores the interplay between 

consciousness, represented by 

Shiva, and experience, exemplified 

by Parvati. He draws on 

numerous disciplines to offer an 

illuminating exploration of mind 

and matter and a provocative 

understanding of consciousness, 

the self, and the world. 

Publishers Weekly writes, “This 

is a serious, almost old-fashioned 

history of ideas about transcendent 

and human thought.” 

Educated at Harvard and 

Oxford universities, Smoley 

worked at a wide range of 

journalistic positions before 

becoming editor of Gnosis, the 

award-winning journal of the 

Western spiritual traditions. He 

is also the author of Forbidden 

Faith: The Secret History of 

Gnosticism, Inner Christianity, 

Hidden Wisdom; Conscious Love 

and The Essential Nostradamus. 

MAP: A memoir 

Audrey Beth Stein ’93 

It was 1996: the Indigo Girls 

had just performed their first 

explicitly gay songs, Ellen 

DeGeneres was preparing to 

come out on national television, 

and www.eHarmony.com and 

JDate did not yet exist. A time 

when being queer was a little bit 

easier than admitting you’d met 

someone through the internet. 

As a late-blooming, sexually 

confused senior at the University 

of Pennsylvania, Audrey Beth 

Stein was looking for love, but 

she never expected it to arrive via 

email. This coming-of-age memoir 

combines the exuberance of 

falling in love for the first time 

with the disorienting clarity of 

loss, and the triumph of letting 

go of the training wheels. 

Stein earned her MFA in 

creative writing from Emerson 

College and is a two-time 

national winner in the David 

Dornstein Memorial Short Story 

Contest. She teaches memoir 

and novel development at the 

Cambridge Center for Adult 

Education. For more information, 

visit www.audreybethstein.com 


For the latest news 

on campus events, 

please visit 

www.TaftSchool.org. 

around the Pond 

By Sam Routhier 

Taft Students Light the Night for Leukemia 

n Sophie Kearney on stage with her mother at the 

Light the Night for Leukemia walk in New York. 

Uppermiddler Sophie Kearney may have 

shared the stage with Tina Fey at the 

Light the Night for Leukemia event in 

New York in October, but she says it was 

standing up there beside her mom that 

was truly amazing. 

“After my mother was diagnosed with 

hairy cell leukemia in 2006,” Sophie 

explains, “she asked me to write a letter 

describing what it was like to be a cancer 

kid. Within the first month I had raised 

over $20,000 toward finding a cure.” 

Since her initial efforts were so successful, 

Sophie decided to bring the issue to 

Taft and organize a contingent to participate 

in the walk. 

“Most people at Taft never knew 

my mother was sick. It was hard telling 

everyone because I didn’t want that to 

have any effect on people when my family 

came to visit. But Mr. Hayward, being 

the greatest adviser ever, pushed me to 

expand my comfort zone and trust the 

community around me.” 

The Taft community responded, and 

more than 50 of Sophie’s friends and 

classmates accompanied her to South 

Street Seaport in the freezing wind and 

sleet to listen to her talk about the hardships 

of being someone whose life is 

affected by this disease. 

“At first, I thought everyone would 

think this was just another community 

service project, but I was pleasantly surprised,” 

she says. “When we got there I 

was rushed on stage (with Tina Fey) and 

within ten minutes I was looking out at 

a crowd over a thousand people. After 

my speech, the walk began and we followed 

the crowd through the streets of 

the Lower East Side onto the Brooklyn 

Bridge. That night was the most magical 

night of my life. 

“My mother is one of the strongest 

people I know,” adds Sophie. “She spends 

every day trying to send a message to 

people affected: You can never give up on 

life—every day is a gift.” 


Holiday Goes Hollywood 

Courtesy of Film 44 

Director Peter Berg ’80 and Hollywood 

legend Will Smith pulled a few strings 

and convinced Mr. Mac to declare 

a Headmaster’s Holiday—a day off 

from classes—in mid-November, and 

filmed the announcement at Paramount 

Studios. 

After playing the video in Assembly, 

Headmaster Willy MacMullen ’78 urged 

students—five days into a campus outbreak 

of H1N1—to get plenty of sleep. 

“It was great fun talking to Peter about 

this announcement,” MacMullen said 

later. “He’s a great friend of Taft, and 

while I might be popular for an hour or 

two because of this announcement, he is 

a god in the kids’ minds today.” 

The announcement had apparently 

been in the works for weeks, ever since 

Berg’s October visit to campus to host a 

special screening of his film Friday Night 

Lights for the senior class. To kick off the 

holiday, the school showed Berg’s film 

The Kingdom in Bingham Auditorium. 

To view the video, visit 

www.TaftSchool.org and type “Berg” in 

the search box. 

Swine ’09 Comes and Goes 

Taft Papyrus/Andre Li ’11 

Sports teams opted for post-game 

fist-pounds instead of the traditional 

handshake, and apple bobbing was abandoned 

from the annual Super Sunday 

festivities as Taft, with fingers crossed, 

watched H1N1 sweep the country and 

begin to affect peer campuses. 

For weeks, it seemed that all our precautions—hand 

sanitizers and continued 

emphasis on cleanliness and sleep—might 

save us, but on October 29, Taft had its 

first confirmed case. 

Most cases were very mild, reports 

Health Center Director Lisa Keys. 

Students exhibiting fevers were sent home 

if they lived close enough, so the health 

center’s dozen beds, though fully occupied 

for several days, were always sufficient. 

“In total we had about 80 students with 

flulike symptoms, lasting about 3 to 4 

days,” says Keys. “I believe what saved us 

were the isolation techniques: we did not 

send ill students back into the dorms.” 

As an additional precaution, students 

enjoyed a delayed start to classes during 

the week before Thanksgiving, to encourage 

more sleep. 

“It was not a surprise to me when it 

started,” said senior Katie Carden, “but at the 

same time, we lasted so long without it I was 

a little shocked when it finally hit us. I think 

the school handled the situation well.” 

To be sure, the nature of Taft as a 

close-knit community was cause for concern, 

but continued vigilance and good 

planning meant the school never needed 

to cancel events, and, for the most part, 

school life proceeded as usual. 

Twenty students in higher risk categories 

took advantage of early vaccines in 

November, and 50 more doses were made 

available in December. 


around the POND 

Blake Joblin ’13 

Look Who Came to 

Meeting 

Morning Meeting 

speaker Ian Pounds 

recently returned from 

Kabul, Afghanistan, 

where he lived and 

volunteered for nearly 

five months in Mehan 

Orphanage, one of 

three run by Afghan Children Education 

and Care Organization (AFCECO). 

Isolated in a section of the city otherwise 

off limits to Western workers, Pounds 

taught English, drama, photography and 

computer skills to 180 children. He could 

not stray outside the gates of the family’s 

house where he lived for fear of kidnapping 

or worse, had contact only with 

Afghans, studied the language and history 

and had daily talks with a man who lived 

in Kabul through the Soviet era, civil war, 

Taliban and the present war. 

After his talk he spent time with 

Chaplain Bob Ganung’s philosophy and 

Buddhism classes. Pounds’ visit was supported 

by the Paduano Lecture Series in 

Philosophy and Ethics. 

Other outside speakers at Morning 

Meeting this fall included Charles Rose 

and City Year corps members, Patrick 

Atkinson, executive director of God’s 

Child Project, as well as representatives 

from The Curriculum Initiative, which 

supports Jewish culture and identity at 

independent schools. 

In addition to student and faculty speakers, 

a number of alumni gave Meetings 

as well. Recently named Rhodes Scholar 

Willy Oppenheim ’04, also a Paduano 

speaker, spoke about his work with 

Omprakash Foundation (see Alumni 

Spotlight), Kate Jellinghaus ’89 (see p. 16) 

discussed her work with Artistic Noise in 

Boston in connection with their exhibit in 

the Potter Gallery and former Navy pilot 

T.J. Oneglia ’93 spoke to the school about 

the history and meaning of Veterans Day. 

To listen to a Morning Meeting talk, visit 

www.TaftSchool.org/students/meetings.aspx. 

Sarah Nyquist ’12 

Climate 350 

Scientists believe that 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere is the 

safe limit for humanity—a limit we have already surpassed. The mission of 

www.350.org is to inspire the world to rise to the challenge of the climate 

crisis—to create a new sense of urgency and of possibility for the planet. 

Toward that end Taft students, motivated by TEAM (Taft’s Environmental 

Action Movement), planned events as part of that organization’s International 

Day of Climate Action on October 24. 

Booths were set up outside the dining hall with various products, information 

and demonstrations. “We Add Up” T-shirts were sold at the event, which 

were a way of demonstrating support for the UN meeting in Copenhagen in 

December. A portion of the profits go to Taft’s sustainability fund, which will 

be used to buy recycling bins for Taft’s athletic fields and gyms. Another 15 percent 

goes to an organization of the action described on the shirt, for example 

“recycle” or “drink tap.” 

TEAM also worked closely together with the dining hall to create a local 

dinner. One of TEAM’s main goals for the evening was to teach the Taft community 

about the amount of carbon that is emitted in producing the food we 

eat and which foods lead to a larger carbon footprint. Eating locally is a great 

way to reduce one’s footprint, so the dining hall served butternut squash soup, 

apple crisp and winter squash all grown locally. 

To relate the sustainability back to the dorms, TEAM set up a station 

that showed students how much electricity each appliance uses up when it is 

plugged in or left on. TEAM wanted to emphasize how much energy can be 

saved by unplugging appliances and how the little things really add up. Each 

event like this one makes Taft a more sustainable community. 

— Ali Connolly ’10 


h Jane Yeager ’10 and 

members of A.P. Studio 

Art paint a mural at the 

Watertown Convalarium. 

Loueta Chickadaunce 

Community Service Day Spreads the Good Vibes 

Math teacher Jeremy Clifford, now in 

his fourth year here, stepped up to lead 

the school’s 15th Annual Community 

Service Day. “I passionately believe that 

Community Service Day is an important 

event for our community,” said Clifford, “so 

it was an easy decision to agree to help out.” 

Creating a top-notch team, Clifford 

was joined by teaching fellow Kendall 

Adams ’05, who spent her afternoons 

on the organizational side of things, 

along with students Becca Brinkley ’11 

and Deirdre Shea ’11. In addition, faculty 

member Kristin Honsel pitched 

in to inventory all supplies, Director of 

Information Technology Mark Bodnar 

provided all support for managing the assignments 

database, and Librarian Lillian 

Serafine managed all plant donations from 

local nurseries to Community Service Day 

projects, such as landscaping the front of 

the Woodrow Wilson School. 

Clifford estimates that the day involved 

roughly 3,000 man-hours of service, with 

700 people spreading Taft’s motto to the 

surrounding community. 

“The day is a profound opportunity,” 

Clifford says, “to explore and embody 

the unique Taft motto, to ourselves and 

to others. 

Cum Laude 

Eleven seniors were inducted into the Cum Laude society this 

fall. The society welcomes a maximum of 20 percent of a senior 

class each year, with more students added at graduation. Students 

are chosen in the fall based on their academic records from the 

mid and uppermid years. Class of ’10 inductees, so far, are Alice 

Cho, Brian Jang, Hailey Karcher, Haroon Khera, Carly McCabe, 

Aislinn McLaughlin, Ron Park, Toan Phan, Kristen Proe, Cara 

Welch-Rubin and Rei Yazaki. 

Yee-Fun Yin 



Dance Club 

Uppermid Ally Hamilton, a Jamaica native, has added new spunk 

to the community’s dance repertoire with the Dance Club this 

Spotlight fall. The group consists of roughly 15 members of varying abilities 

and ages who all have one thing in common: a desire to 

improve in a wide variety of dance genres. 

The club’s chairs announce each week what they will be learning, and so they 

attract both the regulars as well as students interested in adding that one perfect 

move to their arsenal. The group’s greatest success so far has been a performance 

at the annual Hotchkiss Day Big Red Rally. Said Hamilton, “We worked extremely 

hard on the combination, and every one gave it 100 percent. We were so proud 

of our hard work.” 

Courtesy of Taft Annual 

Club 

Cover image by Andre Li ’11 

Global Journal Takes Off 

Last spring saw the first edition of the 

Global Journal, a periodical capturing Taft 

students’ and teachers’ thoughts on international 

issues, travel and volunteering. 

The journal was founded last year as a way 

for students to share their amazing experiences 

in other cultures. 

Advised now by Tom Adams, the 

journal’s first edition of the 2009–10 year 

includes reflections on home countries 

from international students, write-ups of 

summer travel experiences to Germany 

and Ireland, a recipe for making fresh 

pasta and a report on volunteering in 

Vietnam from Senior Thu Pham. 

“The world extends far beyond the 

town where one lives,” Adams writes in 

his own contribution to the journal, “and 

exploring it is an invaluable path to understanding 

others and oneself.” 

Taft Volleyball Digs Pink 

Assistant athletic director, 

admissions officer 

and everyone’s favorite 

volleyball coach Ginger O’Shea is widely 

known around campus for injecting 

enthusiasm and love into everything she 

does. In that vein, it’s no surprise that 

her varsity volleyball squad has spent the 

fall raising awareness for breast cancer 

through various events and fundraisers, 

all tied to the Side-Out Foundation. 

O’Shea was inspired last year by the 

story of Rick Duretz, a volleyball coach 

in Virginia, whose mother suffered 

from breast cancer. As a result, she has 

found various ways for her team to get 

involved. Taft’s varsity volleyball squad 

hosted four fundraisers this fall: a “Dig 

Pink” game against Hotchkiss, a 50–50 

raffle during their night game against 

Choate, an interscholastic tournament 

featuring a star-studded faculty team 

and a “denim day” in which students pay 

to wear jeans for a day. 

The comprehensive effort made a 

tangible impact on the community. Said 

O’Shea, “I hope my players are able to 

look back at high school and see that 

they were ahead of the proverbial breast 

cancer game; that they brought awareness 

up to the front and perhaps saved a 

life by encouraging someone to consult 

her doctor.” The team raised nearly 

$4,000 over the course of the season. 

For more on the team’s season, see 

page 18. 


Taking Risks With Ragtime 

When faculty member Rick Doyle looks for a musical each year, his 

highest priority is finding something with a strong and compelling 

storyline. “If you are lucky enough to find a good story in a musical, 

then you are truly blessed,” says Doyle. “With that in mind, we 

could not pass up the opportunity to perform Ragtime last fall.” 

Ragtime, as Doyle puts it, is the story of America as “the melting 

pot before it melted.” The story follows three different groups—a 

white Westchester family, an immigrant Pole and his family, and a 

group of urban African-Americans—through their interactions in 

the early part of the 20th century. It demonstrates the profound differences 

between the three groups, but also gives hope to the idea 

of racial integration in America. 

The show certainly had its challenges. Cast member Peter 

Tweedley ’11, an experienced actor in Taft musicals, says that 

“doing Ragtime at Taft was a big risk.” It was extremely difficult at 

first for the cast to fully embrace the script. 

“When we started this rehearsal, it was somewhat difficult to get 

used to the language,” Doyle notes in the program. “We needed to 

use those ‘hateful’ words that were, and sometimes are, a part of our 

history. So all of us, a very diverse group of actors, went through a 

period of a little uneasiness with the dialogue, but it was truly well 

worth it because it all lent itself to a better understanding and appreciation 

of our relationships with one another.” 

Ultimately, the cast braved these challenges and was flying high 

as show time arrived. 

“Once the run-throughs in Bingham began,” said Tweedley, “we 

simply felt exhilarated to be together.” 

Peter Frew ’75 

Physics Olympians Go to Work (Get it Work) 

Peter Frew ’75 

On October 24, four Taft students competed 

in the 12th annual Yale Physics 

Olympiad. The team—featuring Toan 

Phan ’10, Brian Jang ’10, Haroon Khera 

’10 and Alyssa Chen ’11—placed second 

overall in the 40-team competition, 

behind top team Shelton High School. 

The group worked on problems ranging 

from determining the time it would 

take for a given volume of water to pass 

through a funnel to actually engineering 

a structure from glue and toothpicks that 

satisfied certain requirements. According 

to Yale Physics Professor Peter Parker, 

“There is an emphasis on thinking outside 

the box and being creative. There is no 

right way to solve each problem.” 

The Taft group should certainly be 

proud of their accomplishments. Said Jang, 

“As much as we would have loved to have 

finished first, it was great working so hard 

on those interesting, creative problems all 

day, and we were happy to represent Taft.” 



Board of Ed 

Longtime math teacher Susan 

McCabe successfully ran for a seat 

on Watertown’s Board of Education 

this fall. Although a number of 

faculty are involved in local civic 

organizations, Susan is the first 

to hold elected office since Bill 

Nicholson served on the board in 

the 1990s. 

Walker Hall Concerts 

The Music For a While series kept 

Walker Hall hopping in the fall, 

with performances by noted jazz 

artists Five Play, Chris Norman’s 

authentic Scottish tunes on the 

wooden flute, and of course Taft’s 

own Jazz Band hosting a holiday 

celebration after the annual Service 

of Lessons and Carols. To see a list 

of upcoming events, visit 

www.TaftSchool.org/walkerhall. 

www.ChrisNorman.com 

Artistic Noise Resounds in Gallery 

Last fall, the Mark W. Potter Gallery 

featured works from Artistic Noise, a 

nonprofit organization that brings the 

wonders of visual art to children in the 

juvenile justice system in Boston and 

New York. The exhibit, “Ubuntu: I Am 

Because We Are,” features 20 pieces of 

varying media by children ages 13 to 18. 

The art evokes feelings of community, 

empowerment for the downtrodden, and 

collaboration toward a better future. 

One project was a quilt made by more 

than 50 people. Girls from the Spectrum 

Detainment Center in Dorcester 

partnered with college students from 

Wheelock and Boston College, as well 

as artists like Kate Jellinghaus ’89, and 

spent more than a year building the quilt. 

The content of the squares focuses on 

hair-braiding in Africa and describes how 

it is a process that is both difficult and 

community-building. 

Other pieces on display included works 

by both professional artists like Jellinghaus 

and individual students. Ashley, 14, created 

a photo collage called “Color Don’t 

Matter.” In its caption, she writes uplifting 

messages in spite of her situation in the 

juvenile justice system. Jellinghaus’s work 

included a mixed-media piece called “Sit 

Down!” in which she explores the idea of 

forcing at-risk youth into confinement. 

She writes, “The chair represents both 

how we choose to discipline our youth 

and questions what such confinement can 

do, long-term, to the human person.” 


, Girls’ cross country, 

at the starting line of 

the Founders League 

Meet, experienced a 

dramatic turnaround 

from their 1–8 season 

a year ago to finish 6–2 

this fall. Marylou Iannone 

For more on the 

fall season, 

please visit 

www.TaftSports.com. 

fall SPORT wrap-up 

By steve Palmer 

Girls’ Cross Country 6–2 

The 2009 team represented a dramatic 

turnaround for girls’ cross country, posting 

a 6–2 and placing 3rd in the Founders 

League after winning one meet in 2008. 

In addition, the junior varsity team was 

undefeated, attesting to the Rhinos’ newfound 

depth and unity. Highlights of the 

season included wins over Choate (25– 

36) and at home against Kent (18–43), 

and even the two losses were close ones to 

strong teams from Loomis (30–25) and 

Hotchkiss (32–25). This success was due 

to a mixture of solid veterans in Emma 

Nealon ’11, Abby Purcell ’11, Kristen 

Proe ’10, Chelsea Maloney ’10, and Zoe 

Hetzner ’10, and competitive newcomers 

in Sara Iannone ’13 and Courtney Jones 

’13. Nealon and Iannone were Founders 

League All Stars, placing in the top 15 at 

that meet and helping Taft to its strongest 

finish in several seasons. Although the 

team will lose three seniors it hopes to 

improve on this fine season next year. 

Boys’ Cross Country 6–2 

The Rhinos opened the season with a 6th 

place finish at the 31-team Canterbury 

Invitational, and followed that up with a 

tough one-point loss to Choate, 29–28. 

In perhaps their best race of the season, 

Taft defeated solid teams from Suffield 

(27–29) and Berkshire (23–34), led by 

senior Hunter Yale’s win and new course 

record at Berkshire. Both Yale (7th) and 

co-captain Tom O’Mealia ’10 (9th) were 

Founders League All Stars for finishing 

in the top 15 at the championship meet. 

Along with the fine races of Max Kachur 

’10 (23rd) and Chris Yang ’11 (24th), Taft 

finished third in the nine-team Founders 

League. The boys finished the season in 

the mud and rain at Northfield Mount 

Hermon, placing 7th in the New England 

Championship. The team will surely miss 

four-year runners O’Mealia, Kachur, and 

co-captain Ben North ’10. 


fall SPORT 

h 1976 Girls’ Soccer 

Award recipient 

Jenny Janeck ’11 anchors 

Taft’s defense 

against Hopkins. 

Brian Boland 

ATHLETIC AWARD WINNERS 

The John B. Small Award 

Thomas G. O’Mealia ’10 

The Girls’ Cross Country Award 

Zoe K. Hetzner ’10 

Kristen E. Proe ’10 

The Field Hockey Award 

Erin M. Flanagan ’10 

The Livingston Carroll Soccer Award 

Brooks Taylor ’10 

The 1976 Girls’ Soccer Award 

Jennifer J. Janeck ’11 

The Black Football Award 

Christopher J. Evans ’10 

Jake A. Cantoni ’10 

The Cross Football Award 

Conor J. McEvoy ’10 

The Volleyball Award 

Carolyn F. McCabe ’10 

Field Hockey 7–8 

This was a team that never gave up and 

found themselves locked in so many onegoal 

games that came down to the last 

seconds. Taft opened the season with a 

come-from-behind 3–2 win over Sacred 

Heart, followed by wins over Suffield (2– 

1) and Greens Farms Academy (2–0). The 

Rhinos then came within inches of tying 

Greenwich Academy in the final seconds 

of a 1–2 loss. In their most exciting game, 

Taft defeated a strong Kent team 2–1 

when Jordan McCarthy ’12 tipped in an 

Erin Flanagan ’10 cross with 27 seconds 

left. Tri-captain Flanagan led the team 

in points (15), while McCarthy had the 

most goals (8). Flanagan and tri-captain 

Claire Queally ’10 were named Western 

New England All Stars, while goalie Emy 

Farrow-German ’11 was a Founders 

League All Star. 

Volleyball 10–9 

New England Quarterfinalists 

Taft made the New England Tournament 

for the sixth time in the past eight years, 

a testament to the unity and spirit of this 

well-balanced team. Though the Rhinos 

would drop the first-round match to 

rival Choate, they played with heart all 

season, not the least when they donned 

all-pink uniforms in their home match 

against Hotchkiss to raise Breast Cancer 

awareness, and almost $4,000 for the Dig 

Pink-Side Out Foundation in the process. 

The highlight of the season was the double-header 

win over Greenwich Academy 

(3–2) and Sacred Heart (3–1)—both 

tough contests. In these matches, newcomer 

Idara Foster ’11 had several key 

kills (against her former GA team), while 

seniors Danielle Donnelly and Carly 

McCabe were the team’s best server and 

blocker respectively. Seniors Kendall 

Cronin, Sarah Maxwell, Pam Scalise and 

Lucy Morris all played key defensive roles 

in those big wins and throughout the season. 

McCabe, Maxwell and Donnelly were 

all New England All Stars. 

Girls’ Soccer 9–7–1 

New England Quarterfinalists 

This was an uneven season for this talented 

team, but the final two games showed their 

real character. The regular season finale 

was a critical game against rival Hotchkiss, 

with the winner earning a spot in the New 

England Tournament. Taft would take that 

one, 3–1, on a water-logged field behind 

goals by Ellie O’Neill ’11, Sophia Garrow 

’11, and Laurel Pascal ’12. The next game, 

a first-round tournament game against top 

seed Loomis, was nothing short of spectacular. 

Taft battled the undefeated New England 

finalists all the way, finishing regulation in a 

1–1 tie before dropping a 2–3 double overtime 

loss. Shelby Meckstroth ’13 and Jenny 

Janeck ’11 both scored great goals in that 

game, a contest that showed just how strong 

this team was. Bess Lovern ’11 and Janeck 

were named Western New England All 

Stars for their fine play all season. 

Boys’ Soccer 8–3–4 

The 2009 team was wellbalanced from front 

to back, with Omar Bravo ’11 (7 goals) 

and co-captain Brooks Taylor ’10 (6 goals) 

leading the way to a 4–0–1 start to the season, 

including a 2–0 win over Deerfield, 

an exciting 2–2 draw with Avon, and later 

on a convincing 3–1 win over Choate. The 

strong defensive play of Thad Reycraft ’10, 

Max Brazo ’11, co-captain John Barr ’10, and 

Kevin Spotts ’10 was also critical throughout 

the season, as was the all-around play of Bo 

Redpath ’10, Sebby Orman ’11 and Brandon 

Sousa ’12. In their final game, the Rhinos 

faced top-ranked and eventual New England 

champion Hotchkiss. The game was one to 

remember in the wind and rain at Lakeville, 

as Taft gave up an early goal but evened 

things when Alex Bang ’12 scored with 

seconds to go in the first half. Will Orben’s 

crew then played their best soccer of the 

season, taking control in the second half and 

winning the game 2–1 on a beautiful header 

from John Wyman ’11. For their strong allaround 

play, Spotts and Taylor were named 

Founders League All Stars. 


Football 6–2 

This special season started with a bang 

as Taft fully displayed its offensive power 

in a 41–7 win over perennial Erickson 

Conference leaders Avon Old Farms. In that 

game, quarterback Jake Cantoni ’10 ran for 

141 yards and three touchdowns and would 

throw for another two TDs to receiver 

Chris Evans ’10, and Alex Kershaw ’10 returned 

a kickoff 85 yards for another score. 

Along with running back Quincy Bagsby 

’10 and leading defensive players Kershaw 

(team-leading 83 tackles), co-captain Conor 

McEvoy ’10 (61 tackles) and Reed Shapiro 

’10 (60 tackles), this relatively small but 

fast team showed that it was as talented and 

hungry as any team in New England. Taft 

would roll over Choate (19–0) and Loomis 

(39–13), while winning tight battles with 

Deerfield (20–14) and Trinity-Pawling (31– 

23). On a wet Parents’ Day game, the 4–1 

Taft team went down 0–19 in the first half to 

a strong 4–1 Kent team. The many fans who 

stayed through the early going were witness 

to one of the great games on the Rockefeller 

Field, as Taft stormed back to take a 20–19 

lead on Evans’ touchdown catch—he 

would finish the game with 186 receiving 

yards (and the season with 810 yards on 40 

receptions). Kent again took the lead, 27–20, 

with a few minutes to go, but Cantoni led the 

Rhinos back down the field, made the score 

26–27 on a short TD run, and punched in 

the two-point conversion with 1:30 left to 

play to put Taft back up, 28–27. Kent was 

not done, and a good kickoff return and 

fantastic fourth-down reception put them 

on Taft’s one-yard line with 6 seconds to go. 

The short field goal looked almost certain, 

but several Taft linemen burst through the 

Kent line, and McEvoy squarely blocked 

the kick to decide this great game. For their 

inspiring play, Cantoni, Evans, Kershaw, and 

all-around specialist/kicker Mike Moran ’11, 

were named Erickson Conference All Stars. 

Cantoni was also named the Conference’s 

Offensive Player of the Year, for his 438 

rushing yards, 1,434 passing yards, and 16 

touchdowns. Cantoni and Evans were also 

named to the All-New England team. 

Following this special season, the 

Western Connecticut Football Officials 

Association recognized Athletic Director 

David Hinman ’87 with an award: “In 

recognition of your outstanding service, 

commitment, dedication and loyalty to 

the sport of football at The Taft School.” In 

Hinman’s acceptance speech, he gave much 

deserved credit to coach Panos Voulgaris. 

CAPTAINS-ELECT 

Boys’ Varsity Cross Country 

Christopher C. Y. Yang ’11 

William P. Luckey ’11 

Girls’ Varsity Cross Country 

Emma K. Nealon ’11 

Abigail S. Purcell ’11 

Varsity Field Hockey 

Katherine P. Bermingham ’11 

Kelley E. Quirk ’11 

Julia C. Van Sant ’11 

Boys’ Varsity Soccer 

Omar Bravo ’11 

Maxwell D. Brazo ’11 

Girls’ Varsity Soccer 

Caroline C. O’Neill ’11 

Annie L. Oppenheim ’11 

Varsity Football 

John S. Beller ’11 

Michael R. Moran ’11 

Varsity Volleyball 

Anna E. Ortega ’11 

h The varsity football team celebrates 

its fifth win of the season, 

a 28–27 victory over Kent after 

holding opponents off at the 

one-yard line with only seconds 

remaining. Peter Frew ’75 


Photography by Phil Sandick and Harrison Glazer ’12 

Chaba’s Story 

Launching Africa’s Leaders, One Orphan at a Time 

by Andy Taylor ’72 

I want to tell you the story of one 

16-year-old boy; a boy by the name of 

Chabaesele Makoti, or “Chaba.” 


h The campus of Maru-a-Pula 

School in Gaborone, Botswana. 

v Chaba meeting with Maru-a-Pula 

Principal Andy Taylor ’72 when he 

first arrived at the school. 

haba was born in a small village perched on the edge of 

C 

the vast Kalahari Desert—think of lots of red sand covered, 

in most places, by some very thirsty bushes and 

the occasional thorn tree. 

When he was just six years old, Chaba lost his single-parent 

mother to HIV/AIDS. His surviving family decided that an 

aunt should adopt him; she decided that Chaba should work 

as a herd boy. 

“The work was difficult,” Chaba explains. “The goats would 

run away. I would run after them to show them the way.” 

Showing goats the way is not the kind of work experience 

you would put on a CV. 

Luckily, Chaba had another aunt who came to hear about 

his job and she did NOT like what she heard. So, she stepped 

in and changed his life. She asked that Chaba be sent to stay 

with her. This new, second aunt didn’t have that much to offer, 

apart from the absolute belief that Chaba deserved better. 

She was taking care of 16 children at the time and living 

in an overcrowded set of three rooms—one of these rooms, 

Chaba’s bedroom, shared by at least three other children, 

was little more than a shack with a roof of plastic sheeting 

to keep out the hot sun and the cold rain. So Chaba left his 

goats and came to live in his new home in Botswana’s capital 

city of Gaborone. 

This aunt served as Chaba’s guardian angel; she’s a cross 

between Mother Teresa and the “old woman who lived in a 

shoe.” You might remember how the old nursery rhyme goes 

on to say—she “had so many children, she didn’t know what 

to do.” Well, Chaba’s aunt knew what to do. She wanted to give 

Chaba some love and attention and some basic meals; a bit 

more than a herd boy might expect. 

But even this kindness wasn’t easy. She could only hug 

Chaba with one arm—she’d lost her right arm in a factory 

accident. She wanted to feed him, but food was too costly. 

Her family survived on monthly government food rations 

after the accident left her unable to work. “We would eat 

bread for a whole week or soft porridge sometimes,” Chaba 

says. “We only ate good food at the end of the month.” 

But Chaba’s aunt knew that he hungered for more. So 

she saw to it that he went to the local primary school—48 

children to a class—in one of Gaborone’s poorest areas, 

Old Naledi. 

Alumni in AFRICA 


opportunity I see it as Africa’s greatest opportunity. Why 

Because when you see Africa’s orphans—those with the fewest 

advantages in life—being given a world-class education, 

there is cause for hope. 

A fundamental measure of the greatness of a nation, or of 

a school, is how it treats those who are the most vulnerable. 

In short, Africa needs leaders whose voices are informed by a 

rigorous education and tempered by personal experience. We 

believe that students who have suffered the most profound deprivation 

will emerge as the most passionate advocates of change. 

As the playwright George Bernard Shaw observed: “Some 

people see things as they are and ask why; others dream of 

things that never were and ask: Why not” 

“These ripples will create a wave, school by school”; says Taylor, “a wave that 

will break down the walls of privilege and exclusion, that will wash away 

the spoken and unspoken stigma of being an AIDS orphan.” 

This is where I caught up with him. At the suggestion of 

a social worker in Old Naledi, where Maru-a-Pula’s students 

run a weekly feeding program, I went to visit Chaba’s school. 

We opened the classroom door and, sure enough, there was 

Chaba, sitting right at the front, dead center, totally focused, 

soaking up everything his teacher had to say. Chaba was the 

star pupil in his class. You could have kindled a fire with the 

determined look in his eyes. 

So, Chaba came to Maru-a-Pula, where he passed our entrance 

test and earned a place in our Form 1 class. He is just 

one of 28 orphans currently attending Maru-a-Pula. We’re 

aiming to enroll 60 orphans by 2012. 

Maru-a-Pula is trying to respond to one of Africa’s greatest 

challenges: the fact that one in six children in sub-Saharan 

Africa is an orphan; in Botswana, it’s closer to one in five. 

Is this Africa’s greatest tragedy Or is this Africa’s greatest 

We need to take this tiny ripple of hope and join it with 

many others. These ripples will create a wave, school by 

school; a wave that will break down the walls of privilege 


Chaba’s story 

Clockwise from top left: A verdant corner 

of campus; Gobakwe Montshiwa, Taft ’09 

leaping above 6’ or so at the MaP House 

Games in 2007; a recent photo of Chaba; and 

Ponatshego, another AIDS orphan at MaP, at 

a soccer tournament in South Africa. 

and exclusion, that will wash away the spoken and unspoken 

stigma of being an AIDS orphan, that will open the doors of 

schools across the continent to Africa’s most needy children. 

And it won’t end there. Once orphan scholars are in the classroom, 

their very presence changes the understanding of their 

classmates. It makes other students aware, as so few students at 

world-class schools are, of the most fundamental challenges of 

their communities, their countries and their continents. 

So what about Chaba 

He loves the plot and the language of Macbeth, his first taste 

of Shakespeare. His favorite out-of-school activity is our reading 

project in Old Naledi, where the children ask him about 

Maru-a-Pula. He tells them to work hard so that they might follow 

in his footsteps. 

Before he came to Maru-a-Pula, Chaba had never put his 

finger on a computer keyboard. He now has 245 friends on 

Facebook, one of whom is Gobakwe Montshiwa ’09, himself 

an orphan scholar, who attended Taft last year and is now at 

Stanford on a full scholarship. 

Chaba says that before coming to Maru-a-Pula, his dream was 

to be a football star. Now his career plans are more ambitious: 

“I would like to be an engineer or a doctor.” What changes 

does Chaba want to see in the world “I would build roads and 

schools, supply food and houses to poor families and stop the 

sale of alcohol,” he says. 

Chaba has seen the damage alcohol can do. His crowded 

bedroom in Old Naledi was close to noisy local shebeens—or 

bars—and Chaba found it difficult to study. Now that he stays in 

our Boys’ Boarding House, he is able to focus on his work. Chaba 

is also enjoying our cafeteria food because, he says, “It’s good 

throughout the month.” 

The new school year has started, and Chaba is back working 

on a basic life skill: swimming. When he first came to Maru-a- 

Pula, his “swimming” was more like controlled drowning. After 

considerable effort he learned to float. He’s able to thrash across 

a pool’s width now and, later in 2010, we expect he’ll make it the 

full length of the pool. 

Andy Taylor ’72 is the principal of the Maru-a-Pula School in 

Gaborone, Botswana. To find out more about the orphan program at 

Maru-a-Pula, contact Andy at principal.map@gmail.com or visit 

www.maruapula.org. j 



The 

Water 

x The terraced 

rice paddies of 

Manandriana that 

Libby Cox ’92 walked 

past on the way to and 

from school every day 

during her time in the 

Peace Corps. Located in 

the south-central highlands 

of Madagascar, 

the area is renowned 

for rice farming. 

Carriers 

Learning To Fit In In Madagascar 

by Libby Cox ’92 


I 

t’s 2004 and I am in Madagascar. My stint with the 

Peace Corps—if I make it through—will last two years. The day 

after my arrival I move into a house that lacks indoor plumbing 

to live with a family I cannot communicate with. Humbling does 

not quite sum it up. 

For the next ten weeks I spend 10-hour days studying the local 

culture and language, pedagogy and important but un-sexy 

topics such as water purification, diarrhea prevention and how 

to winnow rice. 

Peace Corps training seems designed to take all the fun out of 

Madagascar. The message, though never explicitly stated, is clear 

enough: if you came to snap photos of lemurs and blog about 

your adventures in humanitarianism, you joined the wrong club. 

It’s an exhausting experience. 

During training, I find myself constantly setting goals—some 

are ambitious, but most are practical and a few are a little silly. 

By the time I leave this island, I resolve, I will be able to kill and 

butcher a chicken, speak Malagasy fluently, clean floors with a 

desiccated coconut and, above all, learn how to carry a bucket of 

water on my head. 

Photographs courtesy of Jamie Cox ’87 and Sarah Takats 



”…if you came to snap 

photos of lemurs and blog 

about your adventures 

in humanitarianism, you 

joined the wrong club” 

Every day I watch women and children roll up 

a piece of cloth, place it on their heads, perch a full 

bucket on top and walk smoothly, almost elegantly 

from Point A to Point B. Sometimes they brace 

the bucket with one hand but mostly they balance 

hands-free. 

I soon learn that many of my students wake 

at 4 a.m. to fetch water before school, making a 

hilly trip of several kilometers in the dark, usually 

barefoot. To the Malagasy, matsaka (to fetch water) 

is the most mundane of tasks, left to women 

and children, but to me it is supremely exotic and 

difficult—a cross between magic and art. 

Looking back through my three journals now, 

I notice that every third or fourth entry includes 

some mention of water: 

September 12 

I have a mpatsaka (water fetcher) but I don’t 

know her name. 20¢/day for two buckets. 

It’s definitely worth it. 

September 19 

A quiet Sunday. No water. Not sure what’s 

going on there. A friend told me I was being 

overcharged—should be 5¢ for two buckets—so 

I paid the 5¢ yesterday, but no water 

fetcher or water today. 

September 20 

No water, so no coffee. 

September 22 

My neighbor helped me fetch water. I tried to 

offer her money. No go. 

September 25 

Yesterday some of my students showed up 

and tried to fetch water for me but the well 

water was dirty. 

And so on. 

Really! Was my life—in Africa—so dull that all 

I could find to write about was water 

v The arrival of lychees at the market means a welcome 

break from bananas. “Everyone gorges on them for a 

week or two,” says Cox. “You’d walk around town and the 

road would be littered with the bright red rinds.” 


v Omby, or zebu as the 

French call them, 

at the weekly cattle 

market. The local 

Betsileo people are 

very proud of their 

omby, which are a 

form of wealth and 

status. They were, for 

Cox, a constant source 

of entertainment and 

fascination, “especially 

as there were often 

rumors of cattle rustlers, 

some of whom 

were allegedly assisted 

by witches.” 

Thinking back, I knew my life in Madagascar 

had rarely been dull. In addition to learning a new 

language and culture and teaching full time, I had 

seen lemurs dance through the trees, dodged a 

rogue zebu as it stampeded through my village, 

been interrupted mid-lesson by a chicken wandering 

into my classroom and attended my first 

famadihana, a ritual in which families honor and 

commune with the dead by throwing a huge party 

and dancing with their ancestors’ bones before 

returning them to the family tomb. 

And this was only three months in. On top of 

this I experienced a sometimes crushing combination 

of loneliness and homesickness, which made 

my first six months in country a bit of a blur. 

Slowly I adapted to my new reality. My mpatsaka 

never returned, but often my students 

would show up unexpectedly, clean my floor (a 

chore that involves at least four steps and is less 

about aesthetics than warding off an infestation 

of biting fleas), fetch water and then hang 

around studying People magazine, practicing 

their English and keeping me company as we 

watched the sky change color and the zebu process 

back into town after a day of grazing. This, 

I thought, is what you do when you don’t have a 

TV or the Internet. 

I also learned to set priorities and ration accordingly. 

First to go was the hair. I’d wash it at 

most once a week. My dishes and my body were 

rarely as clean as I expect them to be in the States. 

Occasionally, I even resorted to buying bottled 

water. (Looking back, I wonder at my stubborn 

reluctance to purchase water; every shop in town 

stocked it and I certainly had the money. I realize 

now that I was simply desperate to fit in, and in a 

place where most people live on approximately a 

dollar a day, nobody was running out to buy water. 

In fact, in two years I never saw anyone in my village 

purchase a bottle of water). 

Eventually, I learned to fetch my own water. 

I bought a huge plastic barrel for storage and 




“In the end, I realized 

I could never fully 

know what it is to be 

Malagasy.…For me, it 

was enough to gain 

some understanding 

of how people in my 

village…struggle with 

something we take for 

granted: water.”

discovered the best spots to position buckets during 

the rainy season’s daily downpours. 

In my later journal entries, water does not figure 

as prominently. Instead, I struggled to capture the 

spare beauty of my village and the odd, wonderful 

things that occur daily when you are the only 

American in a small African village. 

A year later… 

October 15 

A uniquely Malagasy night. Sun setting 

as I look out my back window, and when I 

turn and look out the front, an almost full 

moon in the pale blue of the still daytime 

sky. The hills rolling on forever like a topographic 

map. Zebu strolling by—stately. 

The sunlight glowing on the red earth 

brick houses and the vivid fires of tavy in 

the hills. 

I also wrote a great deal about all I read, 

saw, and experienced of poverty, and of the 

frustrations and problematic aspects of development 

work. While it’s interesting to trace my 

evolving thoughts on these issues, none of these 

entries is as evocative or powerful as my simple 

notes on water. 

I, like most Peace Corps volunteers, worked so 

hard to fit in and understand the people I lived with 

for two years. In the end, I realized I could never 

October 24 

Walking home I pass terraced rice paddies— 

pockets of green that shift shades as the 

growing season progresses. Men urge zebu 

back and forth to turn the red earth. Women 

stoop to plant each individual rice seedling. 

November 16 

Walking home at the end of the day I am 

swarmed by the Catholic schoolkids— 

all little ones in their royal blue smocks. 

Francine, name embroidered in white on 

her smock, maybe 6 or 7, says “Goodbye 

teacher” again and again as she walks me 

all the way home. The boys are kicking a 

homemade soccer ball (plastic bags tied up 

with string or rubber bands) around and 

somehow I get drawn into the game. They 

run ahead and place the ball—very carefully—for 

me to kick and then run ahead and 

place it again. The kids are cracking up 

and adults along the way are smiling and 

laughing at me and my posse. 

I often wrote about sunsets and the electricityfree, 

star-studded night sky. Some of these entries 

are very embarrassing, but it’s difficult to avoid romantic 

hyperbole when describing such a strange, 

beautiful place. 

fully know what it is to be Malagasy. It’s simply 

impossible. For me, it was enough to gain some 

understanding of how people in my village—like 

millions of Africans and people all over the developing 

world—struggle with something we take for 

granted: water. 

I never learned to carry a bucket of water on 

my head. In fact, somewhere between watching 

the sunset and simply living, I completely forgot 

about that ambition. And while it would have 

made a neat party trick, in the end, I’m okay with 

that one small failure. 

Libby Cox now lives near Boston, Massachusetts, and 

teaches at an alternative high school. j 



Confronting a 

Pandemic 

Technicolor 

Linda Zackin ’80 Propels 

Health Programs Against the 

Beguiling Backdrop of Namibia 

by Phoebe Vaughn Outerbridge ’84 

v Linda Zackin 

’80, front right, 

at the opening of 

the first military 

HIV/AIDS clinic in 

Namibia. 


W 

hen Linda Zackin 

’80 moved from the capital of 

the United States to the capital 

of Namibia, she had to get over 

somewhat of a reverse culture 

shock. “The hardest part was convincing 

my older family members 

that there weren’t any lions in the 

Dark 

Amidst a 

Dreamscape 

mission, however, but a professional 

one. Zackin has spent the 

last two and a half years helping 

the Namibian government improve 

healthcare delivery to its 

population, specifically through 

HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis 

(TB) programs. “It’s essentially 

backyard,” she jokes. Unlike the 

commotion and traffic she left behind 

in Washington, D.C., Zackin 

says the efficient city of Windhoek 

has no traffic and no pollution. 

One can even eat a salad and drink 

the water. “When I first got here,” 

she states, “I wondered, ‘What 

took me so long’” 

It’s known as “the land of 

contrasts,” and anyone who has 

seen Namibia understands such a 

characterization: it is the richest 

source of diamonds on the planet 

yet half its population lives below 

the international poverty line; 

traditional tribal outfits juxtapose 

western dress in its modern capital 

city; and as Zackin points out, a 

popular local activity is skiing…on 

the sand dunes. “Sandboarding is 

popular in Namibia,” says Zackin, 

referring to snowboarding’s warmweather 

cousin. Zackin adds: “It’s 

actually one of the things I’m most 

looking forward to.” 

Linda Zackin didn’t come 

to Namibia on a recreational 

their government’s program, and 

we’re helping them strengthen 

their capacity to expand it, and 

eventually run it on their own,” 

says Zackin. 

Zackin and her colleagues— 

about 100 strong in the Namibia 

office—work for International 

Training and Education Center 

for Health, or I-TECH, part of 

the University of Washington’s 

Department of Global Health. 

I-TECH, which also supports 

offices throughout Asia, Africa, 

and the Caribbean, operates 

through funding from the U.S. 

government (specifically the State 

Department) and the President’s 

Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, 

or PEPFAR, one of the largest national 

health initiatives launched 

to combat the AIDS pandemic. 

I-TECH strives to support and 

develop a skilled health workforce 

and delivery system in developing 

countries, with a specific focus on 

integrating HIV/AIDS prevention, 

care, and treatment. 

h The Sousouvelt sand dunes, popular for 

sandboarding, but also tough to travel through. 

Keith Levit Photography / www.worldofstock.com 



Developing a skilled healthcare 

workforce in a country like 

Namibia is the challenge, says 

Zackin. Namibia, the size of Texas 

and Louisiana combined but with 

a scant population of 1.8 million, 

is the second least populated 

country in the world (Mongolia 

is the first). “Because of Namibia’s 

small population, and the fact it 

has only been an independent 

country since 1990, there has been 

no medical, lab tech, or pharmacy 

school,” explains Zackin. “Very 

few Namibians go overseas to train 

and of those, even fewer come 

back to Namibia. So there are no 

trained locals.” 

Zackin states that a medical 

school and a lab technology school 

will be opening next year, and 

I-TECH will be providing scholarships 

to qualified students. In the 

meantime, Zackin and I-TECH 

have been focusing their energy on 

“task-shifting,” whereby the task 

normally carried out by a doctor 

is carried out by a nurse, the task 

of a nurse is shifted to a volunteer, 

and the workforce is modified to 

match the abilities of workers that 

are actually available. 

Zackin’s job at I-TECH isn’t 

just a desk job; between managing, 

budgeting, and coordinating 

projects she travels to different 

sites around the country every 

month. Her last project allowed 

her a chance to play film producer, 

a role she relished. The movie was 

shot with a specific audience in 

mind—the Namibian military— 

with the goal of erasing the stigma 

and discrimination associated with 

HIV among the soldiers. 

Despite the serious nature 

of the film, Zackin enjoyed the 

shooting. “We had so much fun 

filming it,” she recalls, adding that 

the film production was a far cry 

from slick Hollywood, especially 

in the casting department, for example. 

“We got a curveball thrown 

at us when we learned that all the 

roles, save the two leads, were to 

be played entirely by Namibian 

soldiers. Even the child extras had 

to be military children!” She adds, 

“Thankfully, we had a director 

with the patience of a saint!” 

Dealing with surprises, contrasts, 

and cultural differences 

is part of what makes life in 

Namibia continually intriguing 

for Zackin. Those differences 

can crop up in her job regularly, 

like in the shooting of the HIV 

film. “One part in this film was a 

funeral scene,” she recalls, “We 

had dug a grave and had a cameraman 

in it shooting upwards. 

The bystanders were really upset. 

They said ‘If you dig a grave 

you’re inviting someone in it.’ 

I’m sure we were all damned to a 

premature death!” 

It is largely the cultural contrast, 

however, that prompted 

Zackin to set her sights to working 

overseas in the first place. 

Zackin, who has a master’s degree 

in public health from Johns 

Hopkins University, had been 

working in the international 

health arena for various NGOs 

and their implementing partners 

for many years. “I really enjoyed 

communications and working to 

change people’s behavior about 

health-related issues,” she says. 


, Shooting a graveside 

scene for their film, 

Remember Eliphas, a 

number of bystanders 

were upset by the fake 

grave, believing it to 

bring bad luck. 

“I was looking to move overseas,” 

she explains. “My partner, 

Dennis Weeks, got his job here 

first, coordinating U.S. government 

assistance for HIV and 

AIDS, and I moved with him.” 

Her first position in Namibia was 

for the ministry of health working 

as a consultant on TB policy and 

on a drug resistance survey. Since 

she had been working on infectious 

diseases in Washington and 

California, the overseas job was a 

“perfect fit.” 

Zackin finds her work in 

Namibia invigorating and gratifying: 

“Actually seeing projects 

in action is energizing. Even the 

office work with my Namibian 

counterparts is more interesting 

than my work in the States,” she 

says. Given southern Africa’s reputation 

for having the highest rates 

of HIV, opening the first military 

HIV/AIDS clinic in early 2009 

was a project Zackin deems a real 

success story. She and her colleagues 

refurbished the wing of a 

hospital and trained staff, a project 

that took about a year. 

The rewards extend beyond the 

workplace for Zackin, who in her 

off hours has a most captivating 

African country as her playground. 

“The Namibian geography is fascinating, 

with every corner of the 

country offering something different,” 

describes Zackin. “The north 

is more humid with wetlands; 

there are beautiful mountains rising 

from the desert…some dunes 

even spill out into the ocean,” she 

says, referring to the dramatic 

beauty of the Skeleton Coast, 

where the Namib Desert meets the 

Atlantic Ocean. “Where else can 

you go on vacation and stay in a 

lodge by a river, listening to hippos 

at night” says Zackin, describing a 

slice of her recreation life. 

The Namibian people, too, 

are a complex and diverse people 

depending on what part of the 

country you’re in, and if you can 

find them, muses Zackin. “I’ve 

traveled to more than 25 countries, 

and upon returning here, I 

wonder where the people have 

disappeared to, because the population 

density is so low,” she says, 

adding that the bulk of the population 

in Namibia live in the north 

region, far from Windhoek. 

Working in Windhoek has 

given Zackin a window into the 

cultural norms and how they 

contrast from city to country, and 

from Africa to America. “In the 

capital city, women hold powerful 

positions in government and business,” 

she explains. “In rural areas, 

girls and women don’t enjoy the 

same rights and opportunities as 

their counterparts in the U.S. The 

stark contrast makes me grateful 

for the opportunities and education 

I enjoyed in America.” 

In the end, it is those crosscultural 

contrasts and differences 

that Linda Zackin says are among 

the most interesting aspects of her 

tenure in Namibia. “You learn a lot 

from others, and also about yourself. 

And you question things you 

always took for granted.” 

Phoebe Vaughn Outerbridge ’84 is 

a freelance writer in Pennington, 

New Jersey, and mother of Bailey ’12 

and Whitney. j 



An Advocate for Africa 

Jennifer Cooke ’81 Helps Shape U.S. Policy 

by Tom Frank ’80 

n Though she lives in Washington, Jennifer Cooke ’81 is no stranger to Africa: at left with HIV positive community health workers in Kenya’s 

Mariakani District, and (right) on a trip last year with Congressman Keith Ellison (in the green shirt) to Dadaab refugee camp in northern Kenya, 

home to some 300,000 Somali refugees. 

“Unlike many think-tank 

analysts who promote a political 

agenda, Cooke strives to 

develop a consensus of opinions 

and to convert that consensus 

into policy recommendations 

that have wide support.” 


he clinic sits next to an electronics shop in downtown 

T 

Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya. 

Passersby would barely notice the storefront, but it 

was there that Jennifer Cooke spent a day last summer 

talking to 20 commercial sex workers—mostly women, but a few 

men—about their jobs and their practices. 

“There’s a certain frankness about it. It’s the hard reality of life 

that presses you into that type of work,” Cooke says. “Most have 

families to feed, and there are not a lot of jobs out there, even for 

the educated.” 

Cooke was not there to proselytize but rather to learn. 

Africa. The variety can be mind-boggling. 

“One day it’s Qaddafi, one day it’s Madagascar, one day it’s São 

Tomé,” Cooke says. 

Unlike many think-tank analysts who promote a political 

agenda, Cooke strives to develop a consensus of opinions and to 

convert that consensus into policy recommendations that have 

wide support. The consensus often gets written into one-page 

papers—an ideal length for Congressional staffers with little time 

and opinion-page editors with a 700-word hole to fill. 

“It’s not deep thoughts from the mind of Jennifer Cooke,” 

Cooke says of her writing. “We bring together experts from the 

n Cooke in northern Nigeria’s neighborhood of Kano surrounded by local children, and, at right, with Somalian President Sheikh Sharif at a CSIS panel in 2009. 

The clinic ran a program, partially funded by the U.S. government, 

that provided health services for sex workers and supported 

safe-sex protocols. Cooke wanted to know how well the program 

was working so she could take the findings back to her Washington, 

D.C., office and incorporate them into a paper that would try to 

shape U.S. policy toward Africa. 

As one of Washington’s leading experts on U.S. policy toward 

Africa, Cooke spends a lot of time dispelling myths and judgments, 

particularly about activities such as sex work. 

“Often times, there are not a lot of choices for young women,” 

Cooke says. “Even as we empower them to have other options, 

we also should be working to make sure they’re healthy and safe.” 

Since August 2008, Cooke has been director of the Africa 

Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 

a serious-minded nonpartisan think tank whose scholars the 

Washington Post has dubbed “brainy insiders.” 

From her small office in downtown Washington, Cooke sits 

at the center of the city’s community of Africa experts, speaking 

regularly to scholars, journalists, members of Congress and nongovernmental 

organizations such as CARE that do humanitarian 

work in Africa. She does everything from interpret the latest 

events for journalists to lead high-level trips of U.S. dignitaries to 

administration, the corporate world and academia. We try to 

ensure our policy recommendations are based on a broad set of 

views and interests. We see ourselves as trying more to offer constructive 

criticism.” 

Before President Barack Obama traveled to Ghana last July, 

Cooke organized a seminar of experts who discussed issues 

Obama would face in his trip. She organized a similar event a few 

weeks later before Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 

trip to Africa. Both were well-attended, and the Clinton seminar 

was televised on C-Span. 

“She is recognized as being very well-informed, fair-minded 

and insightful on a broad range of foreign-policy issues pertaining 

to Africa,” says former boss Stephen Morrison, now head of the 

Center’s global health policy. “She’s a pretty nonpartisan personality. 

People go to her for a balanced, objective analysis of what’s going on.” 

When USA Today foreign-affairs reporter Ken Dilanian was 

assigned a story last year about the piracy epidemic in Somalia, 

Dilanian found Cooke through an internet search. It was a beneficial 

discovery. 

“She explained the history of U.S. involvement in Somalia, the 

current political situation, the role of African peacekeepers and 

how pirates were in Somalia with encouragement of some local 



authorities,” Dilanian recalls. “Our phone interview was so useful 

that her quotes were featured high in my story.” 

Carolyn Gramling, a reporter for Earth, a monthly science news 

magazine, called Cooke in November to get quick background on 

Chinese investments in the African country of Guinea. “She was 

incredibly informative and helpful,” Gramling says. 

The job is a logical outgrowth for Cooke, whose father was a 

foreign-service officer and who spent many years of her childhood 

living in Côte d’Ivoire on Africa’s west coast. She also lived 

in Rome, Brussels, Canada and the Central African Republic. 

But her years in Africa left the most-lasting impression, particularly 

the contrast between the relatively affluent Côte d’Ivoire and 

the impoverished Central African Republic, which was ruled by 

an Idi Amin-like strongman. Cooke recalls wondering, “What accounts 

for the different choices that leaders and countries make” 

Arriving at Taft in 1977 as a lowermid was culture shock, Cooke 

says. Taft was her first American school, and Cooke was startled at 

how “socially advanced” students were about matters such as dating. 

“I think I was quite shy my first year there,” Cooke says. 

But Cooke overcame any initial reticence, flourished into a 

three-sport athlete, winning letters in cross-country, volleyball 

and track, and was a singer with the Hydrox girls’ a cappella 

group. As a senior, Cooke was co-captain of the powerful girls’ 

cross-country team. And she got into Harvard. 

Cooke came to Washington after college and landed an internship 

with the House Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health 

while working a paid job as a waitress at a trendy Georgetown 

restaurant. The mid-1980s were an exciting time for U.S. African 

policy, as a Democratic Congress overrode President Reagan’s veto 

of a bill placing sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid government. 

Cooke eventually earned a master’s degree in African studies 

and international economics from the Johns Hopkins School of 

Advanced International Studies, and started working in the news 

office for the National Academy of Sciences. 

Cooke’s move in 2000 to the Center for Strategic and 

International Studies as deputy director for the Africa program 

was a homecoming of sorts. “Africa was always my core interest,” 

Cooke says. 

More recently, Cooke has also rediscovered her love of running 

and logs 50-mile weeks through Washington’s Rock Creek Park. This 

year she ran the Cherry Blossom 10-mile race in 1:09—a sub-sevenminute-mile 

pace—and finished the Boston Marathon in 3:19, a 

pace of 7:36 per mile. That placed her 15th in the 45-to-49 age group. 

While Cooke may be politically nonpartisan, she is a fierce 

advocate for what she calls a thoughtful, long-range U.S. policy 

toward Africa “and not treating it as an afterthought.” 

Cooke saw short-sightedness when it came to dealing with piracy 

off the coast of Somalia or U.S. counterterrorism concerns. U.S. 

policy focused on “cordoning the country off and taking care of the 

most immediate threat without solving the bigger problem that will 

keep generating the threat,” Cooke says. The U.S. government ended 

up “abdicating our Somalia policy to the intelligence and defense 

establishment rather than investing diplomatic resources we need to 

build a long-term, strategic policy.” 

“There tends to be an ad hoc approach to Africa without 

thinking through how short-term actions affect long-term interests,” 

Cooke says. 

Despite the continent’s long problems with poverty and violence, 

Cooke sees the main problem as corrupt and incompetent 

governments. “In Africa, the key is governments that are competent, 

capable, accountable and able to manage challenges such as 

security, population growth and climate change,” Cooke says. 

Cooke’s goal in critiquing U.S. policy is to steer it toward promoting 

“a democratic, prosperous Africa.” 

“In some ways,” she says, “I sometimes feel more like an Africa 

advocate than a U.S.-interests advocate.” 

Tom Frank ’80 covers homeland security and aviation for USA Today. j 

“[Cooke] spent many years of her childhood 

living in Côte d’Ivoire on Africa’s west coast. 

She also lived in Rome, Brussels, Canada and the 

Central African Republic. But her years in Africa left 

the most-lasting impression, particularly the contrast 

between the relatively affluent Côte d’Ivoire and the 

impoverished Central African Republic…” 




from the Archives 

—continued from page 38 

“In addition to the typical a cappella 

standards of the time for a singing 

group like ours, we had one number, 

‘Get A Job,’ which was inspired and 

arranged by Art Mellor, I believe. It 

was a popular hip rock number of 

the day and stood out as entirely 

original for a group like the Oriocos to 

perform. It always brought down the 

house as a favorite.” 

1958 cover art by Deane Keller ’58 

—John Fink ’58 

From the Taft Papyrus 

Other digitized recordings: 

Taft Dance Orchestra, ca. 1932 

Taft School Dance Orchestra, 1935 

The 1952 Glee Club and Concert Band 

The Taft Dance Band, 1953 

Taft School Song, ca. 1955 

Oriocos, 1956 

The Taft School’s Oriocos, 1958 

The Taft School Oriocos, 1961 

Bing Bingham & Joe Knowlton, Daybreak, ca. 1964 

To listen, visit www.TaftSchool.org/about/archives 

“I remember we went to a radio station 

in Hartford to make the recording. We 

had no time for mistakes, so we just sang 

each song once and that was it. 

Mr. Noyes had prepared us well and the 

session was flawless.” 

“The Oriocos of 1958 sang at banquets 

and dances, but the most memorable 

time for me was going on tour after 

graduation. We sang at a number of 

graduation parties in New York and 

Connecticut, and we spent some time 

on Neal Love’s farm in Goshen, New 

York. When we went into the city of 

New York, we had dinner (and I think 

we sang) at a restaurant called Bill’s 

Gay Nineties, wearing cardboard 

moustaches. We had whiskey, too, 

and smoked cigars. After that the 

1958 Oriocos finally dissolved, having 

consummated some of the themes of 

our songs, namely ‘Down over the hill 

there is a little still.’” 

—David Burt ’58 

1958 Oriocos 

First Tenors 

Don Bartlett ’59 

Dave Burt ’58 

Lind Swenson ’60 

Second Tenors 

John Gillespie ’59 

Neil Love ’58 

Mac Mellor ’59 

Baritones 

Jack Bomer ’58 

John Fink ’58 

Harry Leonard ’58 

Basses 

Randy Collins ’59 

Jim Foote ’58 

John McAdams ’58 


from the ARCHIVES 

The Oriocos on Record 

The tradition of a cappella singing at Taft started 

with the Octet around 1935. Soon after, the 

Oriocos replaced the Octet, allowing for more 

or less than eight members. From 1950–75 the 

Oriocos were directed by French teacher John 

Noyes; since then they have been student-directed. 

In addition to their regular performances at dances, 

Fathers’ Days and various off-campus venues, the 

group has occasionally made recordings. Two 

of them, from 1956 and 1958, are featured here. 

Recently we converted these albums and seven 

other Taft student musical recordings to digital 

media to ensure their preservation and playability. 

—Alison Gilchrist, Leslie D. Manning Archives 

1956: “…(Oriocos) rehearsals take place in the depths of the new 

building (CPT) basement each night after dinner. (They) are very 

informal. The First Tenors tend to be highly temperamental— 

particularly fond of warming up their voices at odd times—and the 

crooner soloists are natural targets for well placed jokes.” 

—from the 1956 album cover notes. 

If you know who created 

the 1956 cover, or where the 

name Oriocos comes from, 

please let us know! 

n 1955–56 Oriocos 

1956 Oriocos 

Frank Chapin ’56 

John Davies ’56 

Roger Hartley ’57 

Jim James ’56 

Dick Johnson ’56 

Jack McLeod ’56 

Miles McNiff ’57 

Jeff Paley ’56 

Larry Pryor ’56 

Steve Spencer ’56 

George Waters ’57 

Bill Weeks ’57 


continued on page 37—

Alumni Weekend 2010 

Thursday, May 13 

6:30 pm: 50th Reunion 

Dinner, Class of 1960, 

Choral Room 

6:30 pm: 60th Reunion 

Dinner, Class of 1950, 

The Heritage Hotel, 

Southbury 

Friday, May 14 

8:00 am: Alumni Golf 

Tournament 

8:00 am–6:00 pm: 

Registration 

9:00–11:30 am: 

School Tours 

11:00 am–1:00 pm: 

School Lunch 

Noon: Reunion Class 

Luncheons, Classes of 

’35, ’40, ’45, ’50 & ’55, 

Choral Room 

(Non-Reunion classes 

also welcome to attend) 

Noon: Class of 1960, 

Watertown Golf Club 

5:00 pm: Service 

of Remembrance, 

Christ Church on 

the Green 

6:00 pm: 

Old Guard Dinner 

Evening: Reunion Class 

Dinners, Classes of ’65, 

’70, ’80, ’85, ’90 & ’95 

Saturday, May 15 

7:00–8:00 am: 

School Breakfast 

7:50–11:45 am: 

Classes open to 

visiting alumni 

8:00 am–3:00 pm: 

Registration 

8:00 am–5:00 pm: 

Mark W. Potter 

’48 Gallery: Eladio 

Fernandez ’85, 

Caribbean Nature 

Photography 

9:00–11:30 am: 

School Tours, 

Archives Open 

9:30–10:30 am: 

Class Secretaries’ 

and Agents’ Breakfast 

10:00–11:00 am: 

Collegium Musicum 

Revisited 

10:30–11:15 am: 

Taft Today and 

Tomorrow Panel 

hosted by Headmaster 

Willy MacMullen ’78 

11:30 am: Dedication 

of HDT Dining Hall 

Noon: Alumni Parade 

12:30 pm: 

Alumni Luncheon 

and Children’s Program 

1:30 pm: School Tours 

2:00 pm: 

Alumni Lacrosse Game 

2:15 pm: 

Alumni Crew Race 

3:00 pm: 

Student Athletic Games 

5:30–8:00 pm: 

Headmaster’s 

Buffet Dinner 

Evening: 

Reunion Class Dinners, 

Classes of ’75, ’00 

and ’05 

Gund Partnership 

Come see the new dining halls!



110 Woodbury Road 

Watertown, CT 06795-2100 

860.945.7777 

www.TaftAlumni.com 

Nonprofit Org 

U.S. Postage 

PAID 

Burlington, VT 

Permit No. 101 

Change Service Requested 

Taft wins at FenwAY 

h Taft claims first ever hockey 

win in Boston’s Fenway Park at 

December’s Prep Winter Classic. 

The team took the ice against 

Avon in the shadow of the Green 

Monster as Bruins legend Cam 

Neely dropped the opening puck. 

Taft had the edge in the exhibition 

match, 9 goals to 5, held 10 days 

before the NHL’s winter classic on 

New Year’s Day. Leah Latham

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