Jessica Davis, Danielle Wegman, and Michael Novasky arrived at the Center for Justice to put their ideals and passions to the tests. But that was only the start of their journeys.
By Tim Connor
For a young woman who was deeply inquisitive and who loved to write, Jessica Davis arrived at the Center for Justice in early 2006 with an awkward problem.
“I was afraid to talk to people on the phone,” she remembers. “I really had a fear of it.”
It’s a laughing matter now because I’m on the phone with her while she’s taking a short lunch break from her job as a one-woman news bureau in southern California’s Coachella Valley (Palm Springs, Joshua Tree National Park). Among other things, I’m asking her what was going through her mind in May of 2008 when, only recently having overcome her fear of telephones, she defied the military government of Myanmar (Burma) to smuggle in medical supplies and smuggle out video and news photos in the wake of a natural disaster.
“I didn’t realize how dangerous it was until I left [Myanmar],” she says, even though one of her vivid memories is of a Burmese soldier cocking his gun at her and a companion as they tried to circumvent a checkpoint and approach the house of dissident Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.
“Sometimes we have to address issues from the policy side because often things have a deeper root than just giving someone a plate of food for dinner. I was looking for that kind of experience as well. The Center for Justice offered an opportunity to engage with real people in the community but also experience in navigating a system and trying to bring about justice.”–Krista Colleague and former CFJ intern Danielle Wegman.
Suellen Pritchard leans back in her chair and smiles when asked what she remembers about meeting Jessica Davis for the first time. It was January 2006 and Davis, feeling bored and restless, wanted to do some community service. It just so happened that the university’s community service coordinator–fellow Whitworth student Alise Delzell–was on her way up to the Center to scout out possible internships. So Davis hitched a ride with Delzell and became, in short order, one of the first students from Whitworth to become an intern at the Center’s Community Advocacy (CA) program.
“Do you remember what she needed help with?” I ask Suellen.
“Talking to people,” Suellen replies. “She was very shy. Not really withdrawn but very shy. I remember that about her, because when I found out she was working for The Whitworthian (the Whitworth University student newspaper) I was shocked. I was like, ‘Jessica Davis is working for the Whitworthian? Are you serious?”
Alise Delzell, who’s now the Operations Director at the Spokane affiliate of Boys and Girls Clubs of Spokane, has a similar recollection.
“She’s not a wallflower,” Delzell says affectionately about Davis, “she has a strong presence, but it’s a quiet presence.”
And so they went to work. Suellen and Jessica. In 2006, all the CA interns were packed into the fishbowl and Suellen asked her shyest intern to watch and listen as she and the others took calls. And then Suellen would ask Davis to give it a try.
“It was kind of like watching a flower bloom,” Suellen says. “She was just kind of closed when she came in. And when she left, she was nothing like that. She was able to just rock on the phones. There was this remarkable change, all in one semester, and it flowed over into her Whitworth reporting as well, because I remember I was just like, ‘where did this girl come from?’ She was just amazing.”
“First, I’m a human being. And as a human being I value justice. I believe journalism provides justice in ways that are similar to the Center for Justice, because journalists give voice to the voiceless. We are often giving a voice to people who can’t speak for themselves.” –Jessica Davis
Suellen has vivid memories of both Davis and Delzell, who also went to work for her in the CA program. In her black binders and on her Facebook page, Pritchard now has hundreds of faces and names and stories of interns who’ve spent a good chunk of time not just learning the ropes in CA, but literally allowing the program to exist on such a modest budget relative to the hundreds of clients the program helps.
When Suellen became the Community Advocacy coordinator at the Center–not long before Davis and Delzell made their visit–she could only think in terms of the work the Center would be doing for our clients. What she didn’t anticipate is what it would do for the interns, how the experience in the trenches of fighting for the poor, disadvantaged, and disabled would propel them to make giant strides in their personal growth.
“I never thought of that portion of it when we started Community Advocacy,” she says. “At first, I was just overwhelmed. I thought ‘I’m never going to be able to pull this off because I’m going to be constantly training. And, you know, what is their (the interns) level of learning going to be? Am I going to have all these personalities to cope with. I’d never been in a manager’s position, or done anything like it. But Jessica was among the first students who came in and every single one of them was just amazing in their own way. For me it’s been such a gift to work with all these students who are on the same mission as I am, to change the world in the same way. They want to make a difference. They love it.”
DANIELLE WEGMAN
In August of 2007, Danielle Wegman found herself near the middle of Narino, a mountainous district in southern Colombia, in the town of Samaniego. It was her fourth trip into Latin America and, by far, the most challenging. As part of her work for the Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America, she was there as the only American among a cadre of 18 observers who were trying to make a positive difference in the lives of poor Colombian communities being affected by mining operations run by multi-national corporations. The journey to Colombia had already had its tense moments when, during a community assembly to educate locals on the harmful environmental effects of open pit gold mining, a caravan of armed men in uniforms pulled up and the people attending the meeting literally ran off in fear. 
Samaniego was to be the last stop in their travels and, as it turned out, the Colombian military had come through the village the day before, accompanied by a squad of helicopters that sprayed herbicide from the skies. It was part of a U.S.-backed coca eradication effort (coca is the source for cocaine) but the herbicide also fell on food crops, thus decimating the work of now angry and displaced subsistence farmers.
“This place was known to be infiltrated with paramilitaries,” says Danielle, “so the big decision was do we go, or not go? We decided to go, with strict rules, like we weren’t allowed to talk to anybody on the streets. We gather as a group. Nobody goes anywhere by themselves. So we went, just for one day.”
They knew what they were there for, she says, but the anxiety and fear came from what they couldn’t see. Colombia has been embroiled in a civil war since the 1960s. The army wears uniforms but not the paramilitary group members responsible for much of the violence committed against the poor, or those who try to organize the poor.
“He [a paramilitary member] could be the guy selling you a coke in the store,” she explains. “So that was a little bit scary, just being in that context. Then the displaced people decided to do a march around the center of town and back to the main square. Kind of like a demonstration. And so we accompanied them and I remember one of my fellow caravaners who had worked quite a bit in this community, he was a Colombian, and he was wearing this bright red polo shirt. Once we got into the streets, everyone was silent. It was like everyone was afraid to be the one leading the chant, or to say anything to make themselves more visible than they already were. I just remember him eventually, maybe like five minutes into the march, he started to chant, he started to lead these chants. I just remember looking at him, in that red shirt, ‘you’re the one with the big voice, and you have to come back and live in this town.’”
The year before her sojourn to Colombia, Danielle was a senior at Whitworth and one of Suellen Pritchard’s gung-ho “kids,” interning at the Center for Justice.
“Jessica was among the first students who came in and every single one of them was just amazing in their own way. For me it’s been such a gift to work with all these students who are on the same mission as I am, to change the world in the same way. They want to make a difference. They love it.”–Suellen Pritchard
Danielle came to the Center for Justice fresh off an extensive trip to Central America as part of Whitworth’s Central America Studies/Service program, in which students are expected to immerse themselves in the culture and day-to-day reality of life in often remote Central American communities. She’d started out with two weeks in Nicaragua, then moved on to Honduras, Costa Rica and El Salvador, living much of the time in rural areas served by dirt roads and without electricity.
“What do you do every day for a month?” she says. “You talk to people, you help cook meals. It was a different kind of culture to get used to.”
Among her most poignant experiences was befriending the poorest woman in a Honduran village, a single mother who’d been abused by men and lived as somewhat of an outcast.
“I don’t know how she survived with all those children,” Danielle says, “but I remember one day, she said ‘wait, hold on a minute,’ and she came back with an egg and gave it to me.” Where anyone’s first instinct would be to not accept the egg, she says, the better response was to accept it, because it was important to the woman’s dignity.
“This place was known to be infiltrated with paramilitaries so the big decision was do we go, or not go? We decided to go, with strict rules, like we weren’t allowed to talk to anybody on the streets. We gather as a group. Nobody goes anywhere by themselves. So we went, just for one day.” –Danielle Wegman
“It’s pretty life-changing,” she says about the Central American trip that Whitworth annually prepares students for. “It’s kind of amazing how many people come back from that trip and how it shapes what they do.”
For Danielle, it was the energy she had off that trip that made her eager to want to do something more with her time back in Spokane.
“So it was really cool,” she remembers, “to find a place like the Center for Justice where you could address issues at their root, to some degree.”
And that she did.
“She was just so passionate about people and social justice,” Suellen remembers. “She was when she came here. She was when she left.”
“Sometimes we have to address issues from the policy side,” Danielle says, “because often things have a deeper root than just giving someone a plate of food for dinner. I was looking for that kind of experience as well. The Center for Justice offered an opportunity to engage with real people in the community but also experience in navigating a system and trying to bring about justice.”
When I caught up with Danielle it was in mid-January and she was visiting Spokane as a “Krista Colleague,” one of a select group of students to have been chosen by The Krista Foundation to receive a small grant to support their work and studies abroad. The Krista Foundation is named after Krista Hunt, the daughter of recently retired Whitworth professor Jim Hunt and his wife Linda. Krista died tragically at age 25 in a bus crash in Bolivia while she was working as a volunteer. The day I talked to her she was on her way up toward the Whitworth campus to where she and other Krista colleagues would be sharing stories and lessons from their travels.
Her most recent travel was to Nicaragua where she worked for an organization called Seeds of Learning in a small city north of Managua.
I asked her why she found it so rewarding to experience life and challenges in some of the hemisphere’s most remote and least developed communities.
“I guess I go back to Honduras and feeling like I was going through this process of getting out of myself,” she replied, just experiencing the world through a new lens, you know? And I really like that lens and feeling, like, wow, these people are living really simply and I can do that too. You know? I can choose that as well. That feels like it is really liberating, to just live in that kind of environment. On the one hand I feel like there’s so much to learn from people who live without so many of the material resources that we have. On the other hand, it also feels so good to just simplify. It’s so liberating. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that when I’m back here with all these comforts. I have heat in my house, and the nice beds. But I try to remember. Every time I go I remember what that feels like. It’s good.”
MICHAEL NOVASKY
When he arrived to work as an intern at the Center for Justice is 2006, Michael Novasky had the classic immersion experience working with Suellen Pritchard. As she does with almost everyone who comes by to help, she threw him right into the fray.
“It grows you up in a hurry,” is how Michael puts it.
“I learned a lot from it, absolutely,” he says. “And what I learned at the Center for Justice, more than anything was the confidence I gained in having the experience and learning how to work with people.”
By the time Michael arrived at CFJ, he’d already traveled to Africa with a contingent of other Whitworth students to learn about South African culture, history and government. He’d enjoyed it so much that he wanted to go back and as he approached graduation in 2007 he and two of his fellow Whitworthians decided to look for ways to return to South Africa to work.
“We didn’t have much of a plan,” Michael recalls, “It was pretty much that we wanted to do Peace Corps type work, but do it in our own way.”
Their plans for South Africa unraveled but, in short order, an opportunity opened up for them in Uganda through their contact with a new Steamboat Springs, Colorado, based organization named Come Let’s Dance, a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering African youth.
The new plan was for the three of them to go to Kampala and work with orphans and cast off children struggling to survive on the crowded streets of Uganda’s capital. And they did. Much of the work for Michael was as a patient advocate for children who needed medical assistance. He would take them to hospitals, stay with them, advocate for their care, and make sure their bills got paid. It was, he says, a terrific way to get to know Ugandan youngsters and understand what their lives were like.
“What I learned at the Center for Justice, more than anything was the confidence I gained in having the experience and learning how to work with people.”–Michael Novasky
As per their plan, Michael’s two friends from Whitworth chose to leave Uganda after a year. But he decided to stay. In simplest terms, he was enjoying the experience. Living in English-speaking tropical Uganda was not, he found, “a huge culture shock,” once he learned how to get by with less than he was used to in the states and enjoy staples like boiled plantain. He’d also made friendships among Ugandans who took time to care and look out for him. Among other things, they’d learned of his education in religious studies and invited him to visit their churches.
“I felt a lot was unfinished,” he says about his decision to stay in Uganda and move from the inner city of Kampala out to a less developed (electricity, but not running water) village just on the outskirts of the city.
“I learned a lot about the value of human relationships,” he says, “about the importance of dropping in an visiting people, about slowing your day down to make time to visit.”
And this was also a part of the Michael Novasky that Suellen Pritchard recognized from his days working in Spokane at the Center for Justice.
“He was a very caring soul,” she says. “He really was. He was never hurried about anything but a very smart, unflappable and very articulate.”
And voraciously curious. One of the reasons Michael wasn’t ready to leave Uganda is that “by accident,” he says, he stumbled upon the literature department at Kampala’s Makerere University. A Religious Studies and Speech Communications major at Whitworth, he says he was drawn to study African literature and was able to do so because the teachers at Makerere allowed him to audit their classes. This is how he was able to study novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o, dramatist Francis Imbuga and a number of the continents poets, including Ugandan Okot p’Bitek.
For the next two years he lived on the outskirts of Kampala on a subsistence budget, studying African literature and, in general, learning about himself and the lives of the people around him.
Ask him the obvious question, “why?” and he doesn’t settle for an easy answer. Above all, he says, his experience in Uganda provided a learning experience on how to fit into a new society and, with that experience, reflect on how “I fit into my society.”
“It’s a hard question to answer,” he says. “Inevitably some people see it as running away. Some people even cynically say ‘you were running away.’ The truth is that maybe there is some of that. I wasn’t quite ready to engage my career path. To me it’s about learning about yourself in a lot of different contexts, how you’re adjusting, and how you’re contributing.”
Michael continued to think about the question after our interview and, a few hours later, sent me a note. He said he didn’t want to be portrayed as having gone to Uganda for purely humanitarian reasons or on some exalted journey to find himself. He summed up his two “key lessons” this way:
1) The value of learning to continually, or at least periodically, challenge and question yourself…and even the people, society, or structures around you. This CAN be a healthy thing.
2) The need to build quality relationships and the skill it takes to maintain them.
“Many people may notice that this aligns with the Center’s values,” he added.
JESSICA DAVIS
As a young woman doing her internship at a law firm, Jessica Davis says her experience at the Center for Justice gave her several important lessons and one of them, a bit ironically, is that she really had no interest in becoming a lawyer.
“When I did the work for the Center for Justice,” she says, “I realized that my talents weren’t in the law. It helped me realize that I was going in the right direction.”
The direction was toward journalism. But even that path led her to what can, for some, be a sticky dilemma in that there can be a big difference between exercising compassion and the ostensibly dispassionate practice of reporting.
Jessica doesn’t see it that way, or at least not in a way that presents her with an irreconcilable conflict.
“First, I’m a human being,” she says. “And as a human being I value justice. I believe journalism provides justice in ways that are similar to the Center for Justice, because we [journalists] give voice to the voiceless. We are often giving a voice to people who can’t speak for themselves.”
As Jessica got deeper into her studies and her work as a reporter for the student newspaper at Whitworth she says she began to realize she had “a huge hole in my education” and that she “really needed to travel abroad and challenge my world view.”
For her senior year she had the opportunity to study either in Asia or Africa. She chose Asia and relocated to the University of Hong Kong where she shared her dormitory room with Chinese medical students.
“Because I was such a fast writer,” she says, “I finished my course work early.”
And that gave her an opportunity to do other things, including teaching English in southwest China and traveling to Malaysia and Singapore. What she discovered she enjoyed the most was her time in Muslim parts of Asia where she found the people remarkably friendly and laid back.
“I’d never been to a country where the was the call to prayer, such a change in the rhythm to time, and the remarkably different architecture. Their whole way of approaching life is so different than ours.”
She decided to stay in the Far East longer than she’d originally planned, making trips, blogging and freelancing articles.
Jessica had already made arrangements to visit Myanmar on a tourist visa, to attempt some surreptitious journalism, when a category 4 typhoon, Cyclone Nargis, got to Myanmar first, striking hard in the Irrawaddy Delta region, killing thousands of Burmese people.
She found herself grounded in Bangkok, with the airport closed in Myanmar.
“I was just kind of in shock,” Jessica remembers. “I was horrified about it when I learned about the number of people who’d died. I just felt I had to do something.”
A major complication in visiting Myanmar, even on a good day, is that since 1962 the country has been governed by a military junta. In modern times, the regime is something of an international pariah because of its brutal human rights abuses. Since 1989, the military leadership has confined the leader of the Burmese Democracy Movement, Aung San Suu Kyi, to her home. The residence is a living shrine to those struggling, at great risk, to bring democracy back to the nation. Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.
In the wake of Cyclone Nargis, the toll of the natural disaster was exacerbated by the Myanmar regime which, having thumbed its nose at the international community for criticizing its human rights record, was determined not to show any signs of weakness by accepting foreign assistance. It told the world it could handle the tragedy on its own. There wasn’t going to be any news footage of foreign relief aid being handed out to Burmese cyclone survivors.
But that wasn’t going to stop her. She went to work organizing her fellow travelers waiting in Bangkok to smuggle first aid supplies into Myanmar.
“We went to a drugstore in Bangkok,” she says, “and just cleaned it out, basic medical supplies. We shared them on the plane and split them among many people, in different compartments, in our clothing and spread them out to make it look like they were personal supplies.”
For Davis, she had planned to wear the traditional loose, flowing clothing of the region anyway, so it just allowed her all that much more room to hide things on herself.
“I was trying not to look like a U.N. volunteer or an American tourist,” she said.
She also wanted to bring things out of Myanmar. In a real sense, she was a humanitarian mission going in, and a human package of smuggled journalistic cargo, including her own photographs, coming out. She did almost all of her traveling on foot to avoid being in a car that could be searched. Her small and easily concealed Canon SD 870 camera was perfect for her photography.
“The gist of it was that I went to Burma because I was curious to learn what had happened and I still chose to go [after the Cyclone struck],” she says. “I thought that if I could get some images, then I can get out what was really going on. I felt really compelled to release the images and get those images out.”
None of which surprises Suellen Pritchard.
“Oh, yeah, that’s Jessica,” she said when she heard about Davis’s adventure. “That’s the girl who left here.”
The images would show that the Myanmar government was failing, miserably, to do what it said it could do, which was to address the needs of cyclone victims without outside help. But Jessica’s guides also led her to Burmese nationals who wanted to smuggle out other images.
“I had a few close calls,” she says. “I wound up meeting a smuggler with video of people talking about being beaten. I smuggled that out. He had interviewed monks in hiding. I mailed the videos to an advocacy organization when I got out.”
“I was just kind of in shock,” Jessica says about what she felt upon leaning about the devastation the cyclone had wrough. “I was horrified about it when I learned about the number of people who’d died. I just felt I had to do something.”
She stayed a week before she had to return for a meeting in Hong Kong. Jessica says she didn’t fully realize how much danger she’d put herself in until she got out, but vividly remembers being confronted at gun point when she and a British national tried to get close to the house where Aung San Suu Kyi is detained. Fortunately, she says, her British companion was able to calm the guard by speaking in Burmese while Davis held her hands out to show the guard she was submitting to his demands to leave.
As she talks about it a year and a half later, though, the memories that are the most vivid to her are from the days she spent with the Burmese people in the countryside near where the cyclone hit.
“I was struck by the generosity of the Burmese people,” she says. “It was one of the most beautiful cultures I’ve ever experienced. They were in the midst of this horrific crisis and they were offering me food. It just blew my mind. They’re so strong, that’s what became apparent to me.”
She confesses to being somewhat torn between her promising and successful life, now, as a busy American reporter in Southern California, and the urge to return to Burma and other places in southeast Asia where she experienced a joy and richness to life that she genuinely misses.
“I try not to think about it too much,” she says, with a wistful laugh.
For now, she says, her main objective is to become a better writer, with a clear understanding that this is her gift, and the best way she can improve the world around her.
“It was really tough for me when I worked at the Center for Justice,” she says about the tension between her wanting to directly pitch-in and help people, and the broader good she realizes she can do by writing about peoples’ experiences.
“Helping people is really where my heart is. But my talents are in journalism. I have to focus on that because that’s how I can help people.”
–CFJ
