El Greco

I've not been very good at updating this blog-- it's hard to get the energy I guess! We went with Ummanim and James to two museums today: the Worcester Art museum (a small museum we happened to pass), and the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, Central Mass (where we had a tour).

Above is on of the greatest paintings in the Worcester Museum, a painting by el Greco, Penitent Magdalene. El Greco is known for having weird perspective-- almost as though the canvas is curved.

The Museum of Russian icons is very interesting: a wealthy businessmen from Clinton collected so many Russian icons that he decided to create his own museum to display them. In a regular museum, such icons would be in storage most of the time. Icons are venerated (but not worshipped) in the Russian Orthodox church-- they're becoming really popular again since, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Russian churches need icons one again.

I'm really enjoying my Women and Health Policy class-- I have found something I enjoy and am good at in that class, and am trying to think of how to use it well and learn more. It's been a long time since I was happy with a paper/essay I wrote, so I am really excited. I am so glad I'm graduating, but I do wish I could continue to study with the people I am studying with right now.

Brain Drain and Leaving Home to Study

Jo Hunter Adams

I want to challenge the notion that getting excellent training is the best way to contribute to one's home country. If my objective is to get skills to return home with, those skills should be concrete and readily translatable. There is something important to be learned by being invested in your home. Being away quickly became an investment in myself, and not in the purpose I left with. It quickly becomes grounds for arrogance.

I don't believe I am unique in this. Preparing, and working hard involves a tremendous amount of adaptation to a new environment. The skills you get are not the skills you want. You begin to think globally, but the way you thought before was important too, and you can't go back to that. Most important, work and study overseas is life, and you are changed by it. You are not only learning new things, you are putting down new roots and becoming a different person.

Studying about the whole world, as one does in the US, separates you from the colleagues you want to work with later in your career. And you are, in a very real way, closely tied to another community: a community that has no geographical roots, and no sense of investments in problems that you know well. You look outwards and analyze, rather than inwards, to think in a down-to-earth way.

We have forgotten that the right to critique a society in a valid and helpful way depends on our participation and investment in that society.