Travel, study common for professors' winter break

By MARTHA MARTINEZ

One week into Fresno State English professor Steve Adisasmito-Smith and his family’s winter break in Indonesia, the massive and infamous tsunami struck. But they were fortunate to be about one thousand miles away from where the tsunami hit.

“That disaster can happen anywhere, anytime. It’s part of the world,” Adisasmito-Smith said. “We were sitting on major fault lines.”

Adisasmito-Smith didn’t know people would be alarmed, so he was surprised when he had “tremendous amounts” of phone and e-mail messages waiting for him at his office and home.

He called his mother – who had been contacted by U.S. officials asking if she had heard from her son – 24 hours after the tsunami hit. But later, U.S. officials were able to find out about his whereabouts by obtaining his passport.

The first 48 hours were the most upsetting for Indonesians due to the lack of news coverage that two-thirds of the casualties were in Indonesia, Adisasmito-Smith said. Instead, he only caught a glimpse of the disaster on the local new stations when he returned home.

“The impact of seeing death, especially kids,” he said, “is going to stay with me for a long time.”

For other Fresno State professors, that kind of impact during their winter break was not that dramatic.

Work was typical.

Several professors spent their break doing research for school or worked on projects.

Ellen Gruenbaum was one of them.

Gruenbaum, a professor from the anthropology department, wrote two articles about female genital cutting practices, which she researched during her sabbatical in the Sudan, Africa, in the spring of 2004. Her goal was to persuade people to stop performing the female circumcision.

Other than work, Gruenbaum spent time with her family, watched movies and made cookies.

“Many batches, many dozens. A few pounds,” Gruenbaum said of baking cookies.

Other plans during the winter break seemed to have kept frequent travelers close to home – at least kept them in the United States.

Jacinta Amaral, a professor from the foreign languages and literature department, usually travels out of the country during the winter break.

This break, however, she was in Philadelphia with colleague Sanl Jimenez-Sandoval, interviewing candidates for a teaching position for a Spanish class.

“Nothing prevented me from traveling,” Amaral said of her two-day work-related trip.

Amaral also spent a lot of time with her widowed sister-in-law in Santa Clara, who recently adopted a little girl.

“It was fun,” Amaral said of visiting her new niece. “The baby came from China after spending the first year of her life in an orphanage there.”

Writing seemed to be a common theme among instructors.

Barbara Birch, chair of the department of foreign languages and literature, wrote a proposal requesting to be released from one of the two classes she teaches.

With the time off, Birch plans to devise a new program for students to minor in European Union studies.

The new minor program would concentrate on European studies such as art, music, literature, and culture in its history, economics, geography and political science.

“The European Union is a new global partner with the US, which is growing in importance,” Birch said. “We would do well to be more informed about it.”

Communication instructor Kevin Ayotte went to North Carolina to visit family for Christmas.

Other than that short five-day vacation, he researched for articles for the book he is writing, which concentrates on weapons of mass destruction.

This semester, he will teach rhetoric and theory classes.

“The nice thing about winter break is the time without classes to have work done,” Ayotte said.