“I remember a lot of people thinking after a few days in the village, what am I going to do here for four weeks or three weeks or whatever it was? And well, gee, Gaudino will be coming in a few days and we’ll talk about it and he will come up with an answer to that. And it was always good to see him that way and to share the experience. He’d ask questions and you’d feel that you were getting a little more out of it. But in terms of offering a solution, at least for me, and the problems I was having in terms of what I wanted to get out of the program, those visits weren’t satisfactory. He never really had an answer for me. I found the whole academic experience sort of collapsed there and I was frustrated by my inability to come up with a project and do something that I thought was academically credible. I thought I had learned more in the fall and should have been in a position to study something and do something so at the end I could have this product, this academically credible work product, and I couldn’t. And what you encounter were all the barriers of doing something like, you know, you didn’t have the language and you didn’t have the contacts, and you didn’t have a real set of skills that were thought out. You found yourself just sort of floundering and you realized, at least I realized what a hothouse environment Williams was. You sort of have a certain academic environment. People pick texts that work together and that structure allows you to learn something and when you’re sort of thrust out there by yourself it’s hard to make it work, and you realize how much support you need.

I mean it’s one thing to sit in a classroom and read about certain aspects of the village or the caste system. But if you’re thrust into it and you don’t have the language and you think you’re going to understand and be able to generate something that’s worthwhile you’re just thrust up against all your limitations. Now I found that very frustrating while other people in the group obviously it didn’t bother them at all.

I always thought Bill and Scott were remarkable in what they did there. Bill kept a journal that was vignettes of different people he met and they were just really well done. I thought he did a good job of seeing what was possible in that format and really capitalized on it. I think Babson did a study of a leprosy colony and I was impressed that he actually put together a project that seemed to hang together pretty well.

–Wynne Carvill '71