Hello all!  My name is Mona Yeh, and I will be one of the fellows for the fall/winter term with Dave.  This is my first time in India, and I am thrilled and honored to have been given this opportunity by PIya and Remy to help The Modern Story grow and flourish.

I live in Chicago, IL and my hometown is South Bend, IN.  I am a child of the cold, windy midwest, so this will be one of the warmest winters I have ever spent.  I am the oldest of three children, my sister is 16 and my brother is 12.   I spent my high school years keeping busy with academics and music.  Yes, I am a band geek and completely proud of it.  I continued playing the clarinet as a hobby at Northwestern University, where I majored in Radio/Television/Film and graduated from in 2007.

While in college I was actively involved in Alternative Student Breaks, an organization that sends students on service learning trips.  I had the opportunity to lead three of the five trips I participated in, including a drug rehabilitation center for men on a farm in Colorado, and a trip to New Orleans to help run a soup kitchen for hurricane victims.  In addition, I have spent several sumer working with the Civic Education Project, a summer program for high schoolers that teaches them about service learning and civic engagement.  I’ve made some of the best friends of my life from these programs, and I definitely believe that a large part of that comes from the openness of the human spirit when put into situations where one or both of the parties involved is challenged, and out of their comfort zone. Any fronts a person may come with quickly disappear and you are left with real nitty gritty face-to-face, person-to-person interaction.   Participating in these programs really drove me to search for work at a non-profit whose mission is based in people learning together and promoting mutual empowerment.

This past year I was a fellow with the Northwestern Public Interest Program and worked with a non profit in Chicago called Free Spirit Media.  I gained my first teaching experience with this organization as a video production co-instructor at a high school. The first year teaching high school is by far one of the most challenging experiences one can ever have.  While I probably lost a lot of hair from pulling it out from anxiety and frustration, I also learned so much about people interactions, particularly with youth.  Sometimes you feel like you have spent an entire hour just mind-wrestling with a student, while other times you really find a connection/  I had the privilege to work with amazing students and staff and a newfound interest has been sparked in me to perhaps pursue a career in education.

There is nothing I love more than some intrigue, a good adventure, and a hearty chuckle. This term I hope to really challenge the students to rethink traditional storytelling and to really produce creative stories that they are passionate about.  Judging from the extensive groundwork that has been laid by Piya, Remy, Sarah, and Ioana, I can see that these students are intelligent, enthusiastic, and truly eager to express themselves and to have a voice.  I can’t wait to build new relationships and connections with the new communities I will be living in for the next 4 months!

Hello everyone! My name is David Kutz and I will be joining Mona Yeh in participating in The Modern Story program this October – March. I am very excited and grateful for this opportunity. I just graduated from the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH where I studied English, History and Philosophy. I have never been further from the United States than Canada, so I am very excited to soon be in India and am anxious to learn about a new culture and way of life.

Here is a little bit about me – I am 23 years old. I was born in Fall River, Massachusetts. I have one sister, Kristen, who is two years older than me. Kristen, my parents and I are very close and my family has been very important in my life and continues to motivate me to be a better person. As a child, I loved to play sports and spend time with my friends. I especially loved basketball. I went to public schools from kindergarten through High School in Somerset, Massachusetts and was always on some kind of school sports team – whether basketball, soccer, or football. During this time in my life, I was often shooting basketballs in my back yard and watching football on television.

By the end of High School, I began to change. I fell in love with reading and writing and took as many English classes as I could. During this time, I also became interested in international affairs and how the United States interacted with other countries throughout the world. In the thick of my new interests, I decided to quit sports my sophomore year in High School. To fill up my free time, I began playing drums and worked in a local drum shop, where I would eventually teach drum lessons.

After senior year in High School, I was very nervous about going to college and was especially scared of a relatively large state university, like UNH, where there are over 12,000 students. However, after some time I came to love the school and during my years there made the best friends I’ve ever had. It was my involvement in various clubs at UNH, as both a member and a leader, which really helped me to be comfortable being myself around others. I eventually learned the importance of learning from and instructing my peers whenever possible.

My freshman year at UNH, I got involved in creative writing classes. The following year, I began to help the campus television station and spent a lot of time working on student-run television shows and short film projects. I eventually became comfortable enough with the equipment and with my own ideas to produce several short films and a television show. In my free time away from school, I was able to play shows as a drummer in several different bands with my friends. The idea of performing in front of others was at first one of the scariest things I could imagine. After several years of drumming in front of crowds, however, I became more comfortable with the experience and now look forward to any opportunity to perform in front of others. It’s still scary, but it’s also always rewarding and never fails to invigorate the spirit.

My experiences with creative writing, working for the campus television station and playing music have made me respect the value and importance of creativity and art in all forms. This is especially why I am excited to participate in The Modern Story – creative expression is the best way to empower yourself and to instruct and interact with others. That’s all for now. Looking forward to meeting the wonderful students and posting from India!

Hi everyone, my name is Sarah Calvert and along with Ioana, I will be participating in the Modern Story Project for the summer term. I am a recent graduate from Middlebury College where I majored in Geography and minored in African Studies. This will be my second trip to India and in the last few days the anticipation of returning to this magnificent country has kept me up at night. I am so grateful to have an opportunity to work with this project and extremely honored that Remy and Piya have trusted me and Ioana with their brain child. What follows is a brief introduction to me and a small snip-it of my life story.

I was born and raised just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My two older sisters were 14 and 11 years old when I was born and quickly became my second and third mothers. I came into the world in the middle of my family’s story, having missed what I like to call “the lost decade” (the 1970s).  I took it upon myself, at an early age, to write my character into the subsequent chapters of my family’s story in a significant way.

Following in my sister’s footsteps I attended the Agnes Irwin School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania from Kindergarten through my senior year. Throughout high school my primary distractions from  my school work were rowing for both school and club crew teams and being a leader in my school’s community service organizations, which was somewhat of a tradition in our family. When it came time to decide on college  in my senior year, having been bitten by the travel bug early in my life,  I knew that going straight from Wayne, Pennsylvania to four years of college in the US was not what I wanted to do. With the unconditional support of my parents I embarked on a gap year adventure that took me first to Atenas, Costa Rica with the School for Field Studies, then on to Harlan, Kentucky where I was a teaching intern at the Pine Mountain Settlement School and finally on my first trip to India where I taught English and Art at the Little Stars School in Benares.

In addition to teaching while I was in India, I also worked with the National Polio Eradication Campaign helping volunteer nurses and doctors vaccinate children with the oral polio vaccine. While I had traveled in the developing world before this was one of my first experiences traveling independent of my family and it shook up everything I had believed to be true about the world. Overwhelmed by all that was learning, I decided to dive headfirst into my work with the Polio campaign and attempt to determine where my skills could be of use.  This experience helped me to identify my passions and interests in international public health.

While at Middlebury College, despite a strong desire to return to India, I got sidetracked and focused my studies within the Geography major on sub-Saharan Africa. In my Junior year I spent the fall semester studying at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and my spring semester with the School for International Training in Cape Coast, Ghana. When the opportunity presented itself to return to India on the eve of my graduation from Middlebury I jumped at it immediately. I had been waiting four years to return and thought that the opportunity to teach, which is something I love to do, was the perfect way to begin my post-college life. I can not wait to meet our students in just a few days now and to share their stories with you. That is all for now from the US!

Hello, my name is Ioana Literat and, together with Sarah Calvert, I will be continuing the Modern Story project at the C. Ramchand Girls High School in Hyderabad, and A.P. Boys Residential School in Nalgonda from June to August. I am really excited to be part of this wonderful project, as well as extremely thankful for being trusted with furthering this initiative, and I would like to take this opportunity to introduce myself briefly before I leave Uruguay, where I am currently spending my semester abroad, and embark on my Indian journey.

So let me tell you my own modern story. A modern story in which the messengers are not doves but internet cables, and Prince Charming fights for his love not with a mighty sword but with an air mile account. A modern story where you might need a visa to pass from kingdom to kingdom, but where it’s okay to talk to strangers while going to your grandma’s house. A modern story that is just beginning, or perhaps keeps beginning with every stranger you talk to or every forest you cross.

I was born and raised in Romania, in a beautiful city called Timisoara, where I attended a bilingual English-Romanian school with teachers who used “oh gosh” a lot, pupils whose dreams took place at Stonehenge, and an impressive number of portraits of Shakespeare per square meter. As the representative of my school in the Municipal Youth Council, I became very involved in issues concerning social change, and the improvement of opportunities for young people in my country. This is when I found my voice, or rather, realized that I had a voice which was mine to use, and therefore it was then that I became the narrator of my own story. I also got a taste of other kingdoms, traveling extensively around Europe and participating in international projects and events at the European Parliament and the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

And when I was given the opportunity to represent Romania at the United World College in Canada, my parents – the sweetest and most selfless king and queen that ever lived – let me go to the ball, and without a chaperone and without having to come home at midnight. So for the next two years, I studied the International Baccalaureate curriculum together with 200 young people from 100 different countries, and engaged in activities that combined academics, social activism and intercultural learning to fulfill the school’s goal of fostering international understanding starting from the individual. And before I knew it, when I left this amazing international community to continue my education at Middlebury College, I had become a woman, and a global citizen, and an observer – and my accent, after being surrounded by 100 completely different types of English accents, was much worse than when I was auditioning for Lady Macbeth back in eighth grade.

At Middlebury, I discovered my interest in film, which, combined with my passion for creative writing and fiction, led me to focus on a career in screenwriting, majoring in Film and Media Studies and minoring in Political Science. Staying true to my interest in human rights and global affairs, I hope to produce works that will be able to convey socially significant messages in a culturally relevant and creative form – something that, although perhaps in a different way, I believe The Modern Story project is all about.

And like any little girl that treaded into any woods in any story, I also hope to return home one day and give back to my parents and to Romania everything that they have given to me. I miss people, I miss places, I miss smells and flavors and customs, but the moment I won’t miss anything, I know I’ll miss this feeling… of missing. And at the end of my Indian story, perhaps I won’t have found my way home, and perhaps my carriage will still be a pumpkin, but the realization of enabling these young people to tell their own stories and find their own voices is the most genuine and fulfilling happy ending I can hope for.