Amid the chatter of students telling tall tales of summers spent interning at corporations, participating in study abroad programs or partying the nights away, there is a student who did something out of the ordinary that “started almost on a whim.”
Spurred by interests in volunteer and documentary work, junior Brian Wright dedicated several weeks from May through July to living with nomads in Mongolia and filming AIDS patients in China.
His adventures, Wright said, made his summer more unique than most.
It all started May 10, when Wright and 12 other members of the Students of the World team-—a group of students that conducts research-based documentary work in various parts of the world each summer—flew to Beijing, China to film and document the stories of HIV/AIDS victims. There they discovered how shortcomings in the health system contributed to the spread of the disease.
“China has opened up a whole lot about public health since the SARS thing,” Wright noted. “But there are some ugly spots in the past, like mess-ups with blood-selling.”
In one case, impoverished peasants in Henan province were encouraged to sell their blood to a government-affiliated organization that then mixed all the samples together by type and used it as needed, without properly screening for HIV. Within a few years, up to a quarter of the population of some villages in the region were infected with the virus.
Wright and his teammates spent weeks struggling against the Chinese bureaucracy to get access to the region, hoping-through film—to tell the story of the people living there.
Finally, with only a few days left in the country, four members of the team succeeded in visiting the area.
“We met with the head of the village and with the village council. We thought they wouldn’t want to talk about the situation,” Wright explained. “But they sat us down and said they wanted to discuss it. They wanted people to know about it. They told us to take pictures.”
Safety was often a concern for the team, Wright added. They were sometimes warned that they “needed to suddenly disappear” to avoid trouble with government officials. Still, they continued working to give the villagers an outlet to tell their story.
At the end of May, the SOW team dispersed to different posts across the globe, and Wright went to live with Mongolian nomads, who he was able to reach through Duke’s Career Center.
“It was unorganized enough for it to be my experiences, my adventure,” he recalled.
During Wright’s time in Naadam—a town in Mongolia—he focused on capturing the everyday lives of the family members and their neighbors, who lived in animal hide tents and only kept the belongings they could pack up and move in a single day. One of his goals was, Wright said, to emphasize the contrast between the nomadic lifestyle and that of the average Duke student.
“I lived there for three weeks, completely alone with a family in the desert,” he recalled. “They had, like, 120 goats, 60-odd sheep and dozens of camels. For most people, they go on vacation, they see how local people live for maybe a few hours and then they leave. I actually got to live with them.”
Despite the relative poverty of Wright’s host family and a fairly significant language barrier—he communicated by learning basic words, using a phrasebook and making “lots of pictures in the sand”—the people he met were almost always open and hospitable, Wright said.
“I would say that the Mongolians are some of the happiest people out there,” he noted. “They visit each other. You sit and you chat. If you’re tired, you just lie down on the floor and sleep. They make social occasions out of everyday things.”
Wright attributed the relaxed and welcoming environment in part to the physically and economically demanding lifestyle the nomads face.
“People aren’t competing for resources; they’re banding together to keep it alive,” he said. “Anytime you see a gur [a traditional Mongolian house] you stop and chat. You get the same reception no matter how well you know the person.”
In mid-July, Wright rounded out his adventure with a week-long hitchhiking trek back to Beijing and a 13-hour plane flight to North America.
Though he may be back to the normal routine at Duke as the semester gets underway, Wright said his memories of the summer will last a lifetime.
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