A consortium of Maine schools has honored a Bates College student from Virginia and a Bates anthropology professor for their commitment to civic engagement.

The Maine Campus Compact, a statewide coalition of 18 colleges and universities, honored the pair in an April 7 ceremony at the Maine State House.

Sarah Davis, a senior from Great Falls, Va., was one of four students at Maine schools to receive the MCC’s Heart and Soul Award. During her time at Bates, she has led or taken part in programs that help integrate new immigrants and refugees into the Lewiston-Auburn community.

Elizabeth Eames, associate professor of anthropology, was one of three faculty members teaching in Maine to be honored with the Donald Harward Award for Faculty Service-Learning Excellence. The award salutes faculty who integrate community or public service into the curriculum and who work to institutionalize service-learning.

Among other endeavors, Eames has initiated research projects designed to lower the barriers that keep new immigrants from full participation in the local economy. For example, she led students to study ways that local banks can better serve Muslims, who are bound by their religion not to pay or benefit from interest payments.

Tapping the fields of sociology, anthropology and politics, Davis designed her own major at Bates, exploring how difference and inequality affect the advancement of social justice.

She espouses a deep interest “in connecting people who might initially see themselves as very different and allowing them to recognize that they’re not actually so different,” she explains, “and to realize that they can still build relationships and conduct really incredible initiatives.”

Davis was a coordinator for the New American Sustainable Agriculture Project in 2008, and is now president of the Bates Immigrant Rights Advocates, a student group.

Her own project, the Refugee Volunteer Program, works through the Lewiston/Auburn Time Bank to enable Bates students and immigrants, many of them from Somalia, to exchange services on an hour-per-hour basis. For instance, Bates students might help immigrants with English-language needs or homework. The immigrants, in return, offer cultural programs at Bates.

In the past two years Davis has recruited 33 students and 12 refugee families to the Time Bank, and matched them all with cross-cultural volunteer partners for service exchange.

“Sarah embraces all the qualities we look for in Heart and Soul Award recipients,” says Liz McCabe Park, executive director of Maine Campus Compact. The other recipients of the award are Rachel O’Brien of Unity College, Elaine Tsai of Bowdoin College and Christina Young of Southern Maine Community College.

What appeals to Davis about community involvement is the wealth of ideas and real-world perspectives that a diverse group of people can bring to an issue. “There’s tons of knowledge and wisdom that you can really only discover from actual hands-on experience and engaging with people,” she says.

Eames has been a robust and imaginative advocate for service-learning at Bates. In 2008, students in her course “Production and Reproduction” produced a widely distributed study that expanded and augmented a Maine Department of Labor report on Somali employment. In the 2009, the course worked with Androscoggin Bank and Somali immigrants to explore the requisites of Islamic banking practices.

Eames’ students have presented their results in such formal settings as bank meeting rooms and the Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce. “What I love,” says Eames, “is that, at such moments, my theoretical and geographically remote readings on alternate moral philosophies spring to life!”

Maine Campus Compact aims to lead the way in reinvigorating the public purposes and civic mission of higher education. Its participating institutions seek to transform their campuses so as to develop better-informed and proactive citizens, stronger communities and a more just democratic society.

The Donald Harward Award for Faculty Service-Learning Excellence recognizes faculty who integrate community or public service into the curriculum and who work to institutionalize service-learning. The award is named for Bates President Emeritus Donald W. Harward, a valued founder of Maine Campus Compact and former board member of national and Maine Campus Compacts.

This year’s other Harward recipients are Craig McKewen of Bowdoin College and Lorrayne Carroll of the University of Southern Maine.

The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away, a touring exhibition of photographs chronicling the migration of Somali refugees to Maine and other U.S. locations, opens at Bates College with events beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 23, in the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

The 55 black-and-white images created by Somali-born photographer Abdi Roble will be exhibited at the Bates College Museum of Art through May 29. The show opens with a 5 p.m. lecture about the U.S. intervention in Somalia, followed by Roble and his collaborator in a book project speaking at 6 p.m. Both events take place in Olin’s Room 104. A reception in the museum follows at 7 p.m.

Museum admission is free. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, but is closed on major holidays.

Since the early 1990s, civil violence has forced hundreds of thousands of Somalis out of that African nation. Roble, who left Somalia in 1989 and now lives in Ohio, has documented the Somali diaspora for five years.

His images trace the refugees’ long hard journey from refugee camps in Kenya to such cities as Minneapolis; Columbus, Ohio; and Portland, Maine. One group of photographs tracks a single family’s journey from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya to California, and their subsequent resettlement in Maine.

Michael Paulovich, a retired Marine Corps colonel who served in Somalia with a diplomatic security team during the U.S. presence there in the early 1990s, offers the lecture “Challenges in Humanitarian Intervention: Cultural Lessons from Somalia 1992-1994″ at 5 p.m. Jan. 23. For more information, please visit the Web site.

Paulovich will be followed at 6 p.m. by Roble and writer Doug Rutledge, discussing their collaboration on the book The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away, based on the images Roble is showing at Bates (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

In a 2007 Associated Press article, Roble explained the importance of capturing the refugees’ experiences while they were happening. “If you have no record, you have no history,” he said. “We lost everything. We have no museum, no galleries, no record.”

In photographing the refugees, Roble told the AP, he found himself humbled by the stories he witnessed. The images represent “classic American stories of people landing in this country. It’s exactly the same, it just happened in a different time.”

Organized by the Columbus Museum of Art and Arts Midwest in partnership with the Ohio Arts Council, the exhibition appeared previously in Columbus and Minneapolis.

Roble was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1964 and came to the United States in 1989. He has freelanced for the Columbus Dispatch and the Columbus Post, and his images have appeared in Leica View magazine.

In 2003, with Rutledge and others, Roble founded the Somali Documentary Project, with the goal of photographically documenting members of the Somali diaspora while they are still engaging in the cultural practices of their homeland. For more information, see www.somaliproject.org.

Also opening at the museum on Jan. 23 is Recent Acquisitions: Collection Project III. Running through March 30, the exhibition was assembled by five Bates students invited by the museum to learn about curatorial practices. These interns created themed “cluster exhibitions” from recent museum acquisitions, exploring such ideas as gender, race, medium and provenance.

Featured artists include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Amy Stacey Curtis, Louis Hine, Cindy Sherman and Bates faculty members Paul Heroux and William Pope.L.

Amandla!, a Bates College organization addressing issues of people of black heritage, has launched a fund-raising drive to assist citizens of the Caribbean islands devastated by recent hurricanes and Sudanese refugees. All proceeds will go directly to the International Red Cross Emergency Relief Fund and Doctors Without Borders. For further information, call 207-795-5118.

Both the hurricanes in the Caribbean and the genocide perpetrated against the residents of Darfur, in eastern Sudan, “have placed millions of people in a situation of extreme hardship,” said Bates sophomore Lori-Anne Ramsay, an Amandla! student organizer from Brookline, Mass. “We need to do everything that we can right now to help.”

Two of the fund-raising events planned to date are suitable for both adults and children and open to the public.

A “Cultural Extravaganza” of songs, dances, storytelling, dub poetry, drumming and steel pans will be presented at 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 9, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St., Bates College. Dedicated to highlighting African and African diasporic heritage, the presentation will feature pieces from India, Latin America and the Caribbean performed by students, faculty and a New York-based group Songhai Djeli. No admission will be charged, but donations will be accepted.

A Bates student-vs.-staff and -faculty basketball game will be held at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 15, in Alumni Gymnasium. The public is welcome and admission is $2 at the door.

The basketball fundraiser is co-sponsored by the programs in African American and American cultural studies.

New York Times reporter Joseph Berger, author of the acclaimed memoir Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust (Scribner, 2001), will give a talk at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 24, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Avenue. The public is invited to attend the lecture, titled Exiles in Paradise: Growing Up As a Refugee in America, free of charge.

“The challenge for many of us in the Lewiston-Auburn area is to try to get inside the heads of  new immigrants who are coming to Lewiston to understand what they are thinking and feeling. Joe Berger will give us an opportunity to do that,” says James Carignan, dean of the college.

Born in the Soviet Union in 1945 to Jewish refugees from Poland, Berger wrote Displaced Persons about his family’s experience as immigrants in New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. It was selected as a New York Times “notable” book and warmly praised by reviewers in the Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune. Elie Wiesel called the book “a powerful and sweetly melancholic memoir, brilliantly written.” Previously Berger wrote The Young Scientists (Addison Wesley, 1993), a study of the country’s top science high schools and their students.

Berger has been a reporter and editor with The New York Times since 1984. He was a religion correspondent from 1985 to 1987, covering the Pope’s trip to 10 American cities in nine days, and national education correspondent from 1987 to 1990, a period when American school curricula were under attack as too European-focused. From 1990 until 1993, he covered New York City’s schools and colleges, when there were bitter controversies over condom distribution and AIDS instruction.

Berger received the 1993 Education Writers Association award for exposing abuses in bilingual education. Also in 1993, he was named Times’ bureau chief in White Plains, the bureau that covers Westchester and upstate New York. In September 1999, he was appointed deputy education editor where he helped direct coverage of the changes in national education policy, the firing of one New York schools chancellor and the shaky tenure of another, and a series on the first-year of a new teacher. Since the summer of 2002, he has been a senior Metropolitan reporter specializing in feature stories growing out of New York City’s changing neighborhoods and ethnic composition.

Prior to joining the Times, Berger worked as Newsday‘s religion writer, where he three times won the Supple Award given by the Religion Newswriters Association, its highest honor. Berger also worked at the New York Post, covering such assignments as the 1973 Middle East War and Watergate. From 1967 to 1971, he was an English teacher at a Bronx junior high school. Berger grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, City College and the Bronx High School of Science.

Prize-winning Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison and New York Times reporter Joseph Berger, author of the acclaimed memoir Displaced Persons: Growing Up American After the Holocaust (Scribner, 2001), will give a talk about life  as a refugee in the U.S. at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 24, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave. The lecture, titled Exiles in Paradise: Growing Up As a Refugee in America, is open to the public and free of charge.

“The challenge for many of us in the Lewiston-Auburn area is to try to get inside the heads of new immigrants who are coming to Lewiston to understand what they are thinking and feeling. Joe Berger will give us an opportunity to do that,” says James Carignan, dean of the college.

Born in the Soviet Union in 1945 to Jewish refugees from Poland, Berger wrote Displaced Persons about his family’s experience as immigrants in New York City in the 1950s and ’60s. It was selected as a New York Times “notable” book and warmly praised by reviewers in the Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune. Elie Wiesel called the book “a powerful and sweetly melancholic memoir, brilliantly written.” Previously Berger wrote The Young Scientists (Addison Wesley, 1993), a study of the country’s top science high schools and their students.

Berger has been a reporter and editor with The New York Times since 1984. He was a religion correspondent from 1985 to 1987, covering the Pope’s trip to 10 American cities in nine days, and national education correspondent from 1987 to 1990, a period when American school curricula were under attack as too European-focused. From 1990 until 1993, he covered New York City’s schools and colleges, a period when there were bitter controversies over condom distribution and AIDS instruction.

Berger received the1993 Education Writers Association Award for exposing abuses in bilingual education. Also in 1993, he was named Times bureau chief in White Plains, the bureau that covers Westchester and upstate New York. In September 1999, he was appointed deputy education editor, a role in which he helped direct coverage of the changes in national education policy, the firing of one New York school chancellor, the shaky tenure of another and a series on the first year of a new teacher. Since the summer of 2002, he has been a senior metropolitan reporter specializing in feature stories growing out of New York City’s changing neighborhoods and ethnic composition.

Prior to joining the Times, Berger worked as Newsday’s religion writer, where, three times, he won the Supple Award given by the Religion Newswriters Association, its highest honor. Berger also worked at the New York Post, covering such assignments as the 1973 Middle East War and Watergate. From 1967 to 1971, he was an English teacher at a Bronx junior high school.

Berger grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx. He is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, City College and the Bronx High School of Science.

“Faculty members from a range of departments wanted to see the college take a pause from normal academic activities in order to offer a program that concentrates campus energies and interests on an issue of importance and real world consequence,” said Donald W. Harward, president of Bates College. “The series is an opportunity to show how complex issues need to be examined from interdisciplinary perspectives, blending intellectual approaches.”

“International conflicts have created refugees all over the world,” said one of the conference organizers, Elizabeth Tobin, professor of history at Bates. “Although the conflicts sometimes find resolution and sometimes do not, life for these refugees and for those in permanent diasporas are forever changed. This series should be especially interesting for area residents, in light of the controversies that surfaced this summer about whether refugees from Kosovo should be settled in Lewiston.” This series of events will explore the historical and contemporary problems of refugees and the responsibilities and policies of the U.S. government, its immigration agencies and citizens. Primary events for the series include:

7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 3, Room 104 Olin Arts Center
“The Port of Last Resort” (1998): This film documents the lives of nearly 20,000 Jewish regugess who survived the Nazis in Europe by fleeing to Shanghai. Steve Hochstadt, professor of history at Bates, will introduce the film and lead a discussion after its conclusion.

7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 4, in Room 104 Olin Arts Center
“Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Palestinian Family” (1984): Following the story of one extended family, this documentary film explores the problems of Palestinian refugees living permanently in a refugee camp.

7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Room G52, Pettengill Hall
“Taxi to Timbuktu” (1984): This documentary film examines African men living away from their homes and families, dispersed among strangers. Due to a drought in their village in Mali, they are forced to travel abroad, looking for work as migrants. The film focuses on the difficulties of these Malian men who earn a living for themselves and their families by driving a taxi in New York City and Tokyo.

7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 10, in Room G52, Pettengill Hall
Dawn Calabia, senior officer of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, will discuss “Conflict, Displacement and the Long Road Home for Refugees: Whose Rights? Whose Wrongs? Who’s Responsible? What Should We Do?“ Calabia handles government and nongovernmental relations in the United States and Caribbean for the U.N. commissioner. This past summer she led a delegation of congressional staff members and NGO representatives to Cairo, Macedonia and Kosovo to consider refugee protection and reintegration issues. She has served as director of refugee policy and international affairs for the U.S. Catholic Conference Migration Office, one of the nation’s oldest service organizations for refugees and asylum seekers.

Calabia also has served as a staff consultant to the House International Relations Committee and as senior legislative staffer to former U.S. Rep. Stephen Solarz. One of the founders of the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, housed at the International Rescue Committee, Calabia has led numerous fact-finding missions to Central America, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa.

4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 11, in Carnegie Science, Room 204
“Catholic Charities, Maine Refugees and Immigration Services,” a panel discussion with Sandra Hollett and other members of the Catholic Charities on the difficulties refugees face in southern Maine and the roles Maine residents play in creating or solving problems for refugees.

7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 11, in G53 Pettengill Hall Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini will present “Well-Founded Fear,” a documentary film about political asylum in the United States – who deserves it and who decides. The film provides an intimate, close-up view of what goes on behind the doors of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the dramatic real-life stage where American ideals about human rights collide with the nearly impossible task of trying to know the truth. It is a world never before seen on screen – asylum officers, lawyers, translators and foreigners trying to exploit a fragile system, as well as legitimate refugees looking for protection in the United States. The film will be aired on PBS in June 2000. The filmmakers will answer questions and lead a discussion after this special screening.

Bates offers more than 15 courses this fall that include consideration of current and past events leading to the large-scale displacement of populations and the creation of refugees.

“We want to encourage faculty who are teaching these courses to entertain questions regarding refugees in a wider context, and we believe that this series will be a very effective means of doing so,” Harward said.

The Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation in New York was established in 1952 by Christian A. Johnson, a leader in the public utility and investment company industries. A financier with wide-ranging interests, Johnson derived great personal pleasure from nurturing the curiosity and intellectual development of young people with whom he came into contact, as well as from providing for many whom he did not know the financial means to help them achieve their educational goals.

For more information about the series, call 207-786-6069.