Ellington

This year’s Bonderman Fellows are all looking to learn something different from their travels.

The winners of the Bonderman Fellowship were announced last week. Seven UW undergraduate honors students and seven graduate students were selected.

“No two fellows are the same,” said Brook Kelley, lead coordinator of the 20-person Bonderman selection committee.

The Bonderman Travel Fellowship offers graduate and undergraduate students in the UW Honors Program the opportunity and the funds to travel abroad. The fellows are given a stipend of $20,000 to travel for a minimum of eight months in at least six different regions. They may not stay in one region for more than two months.

Several of the fellows chosen said they applied for the Bonderman to pursue interests they have fostered here on campus.

Dean Chahim, a UW undergraduate selected for the Bonderman this year, said he applied for the fellowship because of his interest in development, or social solutions to poverty. Chahim said he chose to create his own major — development studies — to address the social issues that underlie the problems his civil and environmental engineering major also address.

Chahim also helped to found the Critical Development Forum, a group that brings together UW students and faculty to discuss social issues in the United States and abroad.

“I want to understand how other people see the world and how they imagine it to be,” Chahim said.

Chahim’s trip will be very different from that of Nikki Thompson, another 2011 undergraduate recipient, who said her general theme for her trip is to visit places where people are being displaced from their homes for a variety of reasons, including political turmoil, environmental degradation or economic hardship. Thompson plans to travel to many countries in Asia and Africa.

“I want to see people’s connection to their homeland,” Thompson said. “I think that’s the fundamental question of traveling: exploring identity and location.”

Another 2011 fellow, James Schreck, said he chose places outside of the well-traveled western world. He said he tried to combine his interest in theater with his hobby as an avid backpacker obsessed with outdoor landscapes.

“Every place I’m going to has something interesting about theater I wanted to study,” Schreck said. “I don’t think I can make any claims to being an artist without broadening my horizons.”

Schreck, a drama major specializing in sound design, also plans to take sound recordings of cities as well as the wilderness he will be exploring.

“I’ll be traveling around with a sound recorder, trying to get a feel for the sonic life of the city, as well as high up, distant places,” Schreck said.

The fellowship encourages first-hand experience of the world by not allowing fellows to participate in any organizations or programs while traveling. Fellows are also not allowed to visit their countries of origin or ancestry.

Charmi Ajmera, also a 2011 recipient, said that she had grown up visiting family in India, and so, as part of her itinerary, chose places that she had never seen before. She plans to travel Sub-Saharan Africa, up through Egypt, then take ferries across the Mediterranean to visit the islands of Greece and Turkey before heading to Russia and through central Asia.

“I wanted to see what it was like to travel to places where I had no familiarity,” Ajmera said. “This trip has so much personal meaning for me.”

Kelley said the students are encouraged to heavily research the places they will be visiting, especially regarding safety precautions. The recent deaths of two Bonderman fellows — Alena Suazo, a Bonderman graduate student on her fellowship in Guatamala, who passed away in February 2011; and former fellow Jennifer Caldwell, who decided to return to South Africa after finishing her fellowship, where she died in September 2009 — are sobering for this year’s fellows.

“We lost two of them in the recent years,” Kelley said. “That’s been really hard. … We get to know the fellows and you get to see and hear their adventures. It was devastating.”

Kelley said that the current fellows are expected to take all of the precautions they possibly can, adding that the Bonderman selection committee is “really upfront with the fellows about safety and health concerns.”

To prepare for her travels, Ajmera said that she “[plans] to do extensive research on all of the places I’m going to.”

However, Kelley said that one of the most important things this year’s Bonderman fellows can do is to prepare to be open to whatever ways their upcoming travels will change them, and that many fellows end up changing their career plans upon returning home from their trip.

It remains to be seen what this year’s fellows will learn or where they will go after their travels, but all of them said that they were optimistic and excited for the upcoming experience.

“It’s easy to sit here in our world and have easy answers,” Chahim said. “I want to complicate myself.”

Reach contributing writer Katherine McKeon at development@dailyuw.com.