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December 6, 2002
Out
of Africa: Rachel Brulé '03 Wins Marshall Scholarship
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Photo: Fred LeBlanc
Rachel
Brulé '03, wearing a necklace made from the seed
of the baobob tree, has won a Marshall Scholarship. Senegalese
say the tree's seed brings good luck.
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Senegalese
say that wearing a necklace made from the seed of the baobab tree
will bring its wearer good luck. Sporting one certainly didn't
hurt Rachel Brulé '03, who owns just such a piece of jewelry.
Rather than dumb luck, however, it is more likely that smarts—as
well as pluck, planning, and a passion for making a difference
in developing countries—brought about the Mount Holyoke senior's
latest academic triumph. Last spring, Brulé received the
prestigious Truman Scholarship, an award of $30,000 for graduate
school leading to a career in government or public service. Last
week, the international relations and African studies double major
received word that she had won a Marshall Scholarship, placing
her in an elite group of forty college seniors from across the
United States who were selected for graduate study at a British
university of choice.
Marshall Scholarships,
which reward intellectual distinction and leadership potential,
are worth about $60,000 and are financed by the British government.
The scholarship will enable Brulé, beginning in the fall,
to pursue a master of science degree in forced migration at Oxford
University's Refugee Study Center. During the 2004–2005 academic
year, she will earn a second master of science degree, this time
in development management, at the Development Studies Institute
of the London School of Economics. Brulé then plans to
return to native soil to work for a nongovernmental organization,
perhaps the Carter Center, for a few years before putting her
Truman Scholarship to use, pursuing a Ph.D. in public policy,
and later securing a regional posting with an international organization
such as the World Bank or the United Nations. "My ultimate
goal, she says, "is an appointment to a U.S. presidential
administration that would allow me to realize my dream of advising
and enacting U.S. foreign policy toward the developing world."
While Brulé's plan is quite ambitious, it seems entirely
doable for a young woman who began planning young—choosing
the language (French) she would study as an eighth-grader with
an eye toward visiting Francophone Africa one day.
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Rachel
Brulé '03 and friend Moustapha Seye enjoy a
beach by Joal, the birthplace of Senegal's first president,
Leopold Sedar Senghor.
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Brulé's inspiration
and determination to reach out to cultures other than her own
began even before middle school. As a child growing up in Fayetteville,
New York, she absorbed a culture of travel and service to those
in other countries through her grandparents, who lived in the
Philippines for extended periods. There, Brulé's grandmother
founded the first school for the blind and her grandfather taught
at a university in Cebu. By the time she was in high school, Brulé
had found her passion, international affairs, inspired by immersion
in her school's Model United Nations Club and National Federalists
Association conference, which led her to found a lobbying group:
Partners for Global Change. "In high school, I began imagining
other countries' political responses and moved to rallying around
actual policies such as nuclear disarmament," says Brulé.
"I found that my interest in international politics was driven
more by a concern for the effects of foreign policies and international
humanitarian aid than by a desire to immerse myself in politics."
Her past and current
interests also draw from her identity as a Jew. "I have always
felt connected to the personal experience of dislocation,"
she says. "Growing up in a strong Jewish community, I read
whatever I could find about the Holocaust's devastation of towns'
and cities' populations, and how surviviors then created entirely
new lives. This injustice, the Holocaust, remains engraved in
my identity as a horrific lack of international conscience that
caused many of my relatives' deaths. With reflection, I have realized
that one of the things that really troubled me was why civil society
groups and national politicians were unable to satisfy so many
people's needs. On a personal and political level, I want to understand
why people migrate from their homes and communities and the impact
that national and international policies have on amelioration
or deterioration of local conditions."
Brulé's first
trip outside the United States solidified many of her beliefs
and intensified her determination to make a difference in the
world. In the summer of 1997, through the National Federation
of Temple Youth's Exodus program, she spent six weeks in Israel.
While many of the other teens on the trip focused on socializing
within the group, Brulé, always a deep thinker, was consumed
with considering what struck her most about Israel, "the
violence of the society, the high amount of hatred there, and
how the deep-seeded conflict affects people's lives on a daily
basis."
True to her early
intentions, as a Mount Holyoke student Brulé has focused
on exploring the role of state development policies in preventing
the circumstances for conflict leading to forced migration. "I
questioned the process of Balkan ethnic integration among friends
and professors and applied their strong and often conflicting
opinions to my logic in speech and debate tournaments," she
says. "I spent late nights in the art studio, learning colonizers'
perspectives of the development of colonies through the styles
of their paintings and prints of Polynesia. During my breaks,
I found internships in the U.S. [at the Central and West Africa
Bureau of the National Democratic Institute for International
Affairs] and abroad [at the International Institute for Labour
Studies in Geneva] that taught me about the effects of foreign
policy on economic and political development."
Her concentration
on Africa developed through coursework both at MHC and at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst (through the Five College
exchange), where she has worked closely with Ralph Faulkingham,
the chair of the anthropology department.
Faulkingham has the highest praise for Brulé. "Rachel's
combination of insightfulness, humanity, and intelligence are
wonderful and rare," he says. "She ranks among the top
five students I have worked with in thirty years of teaching,
and I am not at all surprised that she has won both a Truman and
a Marshall fellowship." As a first-semester sophomore, Brulé
enrolled in Faulkingham's course Cultures of Africa. "Almost
all the other students were senior anthropology majors,"
says Faulkingham. "I asked a lot of the students: seven short
papers, and two essay examinations, as well as panel presentations
to the class as a whole. Rachel more than held her own, garnering
the highest grades in the course in each category."
Brulé was inspired
by her courses, internships, and leadership activities on campus
(among other things, she facilitated the campuswide initiative
for Fair Trade-certified coffee, cofounded and has written articles
for the student activist paper the Catalyst, has participated
in economic justice campaigns as part of the College's Student
Coalition for Action, and is a writing mentor and member of the
student advisory board of the Weissman Center for Leadership).
To understand the daily problems that cause groups to stay or
leave their homes, "so that I could eventually make policy
to empower populations facing pressures to migrate," she
says, she felt she needed to experience the culture of a developing
country firsthand. Her choice was the College's program at the
Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, West Africa. She
spent her junior year there, getting to know the people and culture
of Senegal; studying African institutions, Islamic philosophy,
and Senegalese history, literature, and language; and working
as an apprentice in a cloth market as part of her thesis research.
One of the things
about her experience that impressed Brulé the most was
the degree of culture shock she experienced and the realization
that, as a Westerner and a white woman, she would never "fit
in" in Senegal. "I was overwhelmed by my own incomprehension
of so much: the laughing tones of the Wolof language, the strength
of the Saharan sun, and the accusing stares I attracted in the
market's jostle," she said. "I was not an equal member
of Senegalese society, and I had to acknowledge that I had traveled
for purely my own educational benefit . . . " Nevertheless,
she grew accustomed to Senegalese ways and put her status as an
observer to good use. "My place outside the traditional community
allowed me to constantly question Senegalese perceptions of everything
from Senegal's regional and religious politics to U.S. domestic
and humanitarian policy," she said. "I viewed individual
experiences of dislocation as personal illustrations of how high-level
policy is locally meaningful."
Now trying to adjust
to the culture shock of returning to campus, Brulé is focusing
on her senior honors thesis. To understand major trends in sub-Saharan
economic development, she is using a case study approach—examining
linkages in Senegal's textile industrialization through the value-added
chain of cotton cloth. To understand the cultivation of cotton,
she talked with cotton growers. She studied production, following
cotton through the various stages of its harvest, processing,
and sale to various middlemen, then its spinning and weaving into
cloth, then its printing and wholesaling to traders, and on to
its retail sale to consumers in Senegal and beyond. Notes Faulkingham,
"Such a vertical view of Senegal's economy has given Rachel
an unusual purchase to interpret and explain how that economy
works." Impressed with both Brulé and her thesis work,
MHC Professor of Economics and Brulé's thesis adviser Eva
Paus noted, "Rachel is a courageous young woman; unassuming
but determined; with great intellectual abilities complemented
by a love for hiking and painting landscapes; with moral standards
beyond reproach; and with an unwavering motivation and drive to
excel and to make the world a better place."
Coming full circle
in her journey of cultural exploration, Brulé's next trip
will be to the Philippines in January, where she will travel with
her grandfather, who will once again bring the culture to life
for her. This time around, she may even teach him a thing or two.
Brulé is the
eighth Mount Holyoke student to receive a Marshall since the scholarship's
founding in 1957. Among the MHC winners is Elizabeth Topham Kennan
'60, president of Mount Holyoke from 1978 to 1995, who was awarded
the scholarship during her senior year and attended Oxford University.
The last time an MHC student won the award was in 2000, when Julianya
Jay '00 became a Marshall Scholar.
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