By Alice Lee

At UC Davis,  a group of dedicated students are using their time to not only raise money for all-expenses-paid children-care camps, but also provide emotional support to the children who need it.

Camp Kesem is a summer camp sponsored by Camp Kesem National for children with a parent who has or has had cancer. The free overnight camp is planned for children between ages 6 to 16 to enjoy a fun-filled week of enjoying life and just being kids. The camp is open to all children regardless of race, religion, national origin or financial status.

Fifty college students spend the entire year before summer raising $60,000 to send at least 90 well-deserving children to camp for free. They continue to help those children by working as camp counselors throughout the week at camp.

“Everything we do at Camp Kesem focuses on our goal of giving campers the most fun week possible, while providing the extra support and attention they need,” said counselor Ashley Wolf, a second-year biochemistry major.

Camp counselors are put into four groups: arts and crafts, drama and music, sports and nature, or adventure. Throughout the year, they join together to plan benefit concerts, a 5K race called the Caterpillar Run, formals, bake sales, a camp reunion with the kids, Relay for Life and Make the Magic, a live silent auction.

Executive members on Camp Kesem’s board plan and facilitate fundraisers, sometimes working with different clubs and organizations on campus throughout the year. They also plan and schedule camp activities, recruit counselors and campers, and plan reunions.

“There are way too many memories to narrow it down to just one. I do have one favorite activity, however. It is probably the funniest scene anyone could ever stumble upon. We call it [the] Messy Olympics, where there are a bunch of games and activities where everyone ends up getting covered in some of the grossest things — like spaghetti, mustard, chocolate sauce and whipped cream. By the end of the activity it is just a mob of kids and college students trying to hit each other with flying ketchup,” said co-chair Lauren Mackrell, a fourth-year community and regional development major.

An important activity during camp is the Empowerment Ceremony where everyone from camp comes together and shares their stories of why they are part of Camp Kesem. This night is often extremely emotional and kids of all ages lean on one another and look to each other for strength and comfort.

“Camp Kesem has been the defining experience of my time at UC Davis. It is through this organization I have met some of the greatest people and my best friends. It has also provided me with skills of leadership, honesty, hard work, organization, really more skills than I can even begin to describe, not to mention a family away from home,” Mackrell said.

The counselors do all that they can to hold fundraisers to raise money for these kids so that the kids can come to camp just to be kids and meet others who know what they are going through and share similar fears, according to Mackrell.

“ We have this camp so that the kids do not have to think about if their dad is going to have the energy to take them to the park or if they are going to have to make sure their younger sibling gets their homework done so that their mom can rest,” Mackrell said.

One of the biggest fundraisers coming up is called Make the Magic, a live silent auction that is projected to raise enough money to send 25 kids to camp. Ticket prices include a full-course meal, entertainment and notable speakers. Those who attend can learn more about the current mission and goals of the Camp Kesem Davis chapter as well as help send campers to camp for free.

“My sister went to a silent auction and she was won over by how caring and sweet the counselors were. By the end of the night, she donated a lot of money and gave me enough information that I tried to get involved as well,” said Mona Nguyen, a first-year psychology major.

In 2000, the first Camp Kesem project was founded at Stanford University. It was a project of Hillel at Stanford, a nonprofit organization serving Jewish students, and it was developed by a group of student leaders who sought to create a magical summer camp experience for children in need.

After assessing the needs of the community, the students found that children who have or had a parent with cancer could benefit the most from a summer camp experience with peers who faced similar challenges.

Camp Kesem at UC Davis was founded in 2005, and so far they have held seven camps.

“People should apply [to be a counselor] because when a parent is diagnosed with cancer, the whole family is affected. For children, the carefree joys and adventure of childhood are replaced with new responsibilities, anger, guilt and the fear of losing or loss of a parent,” Wolf said. “There are few services available to these children, and I am excited to have the opportunity to help make this summer’s session of Camp Kesem Davis a magical one for this often overlooked population.”

Applications are available during both Fall and Winter Quarters for those interested in becoming a camp counselor. Meetings are held throughout the year in Wellman 7 at 8 p.m. on Sunday nights.

“Even though I haven’t had a chance to be a counselor, I try to help out as much as I can by going to their fundraisers and small events that they have,” Nguyen said. “I sometimes go visit their table at the Quad and learn about the children who suffer such hardships simply by having a parent with cancer. Camp Kesem is an awesome experience that does incredible things for well-deserving kids.”

By Muna Sadek

Higher education can expect to be hit in two major ways because of the sequestration — cuts in financial aid and research funding. Pell Grant awards will begin to lose funding after one year, affecting over 1 million California students, and funds for new research projects will decrease by millions.

In 2011, Congress passed the Budget Control Act, outlining a series of budgetary cuts — projected at $1.2 trillion — that President Barack Obama said were designed to be “unattractive and unappealing” to compel parties to arrive at a compromise of sensible cuts.

Congress did not strike a compromise by the March 1 deadline. The original January 2013 deadline was extended by the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012.

According to University of California Federal and Governmental Relations, there is little information from the Office of Management and Budget regarding how the cuts will be implemented, but it is expected that federal agencies will have a level of discretion in doing so.

Gary Falle, associate vice president of Federal Governmental Relations, said that because agencies are still deciding on how sequester cuts will be distributed, it is too early to know what the broad impact will be on the UC Fall Year 2014 Budget. But it is clear that research funding will be heavily impacted by the sequester, as will student financial aid programs, he said.

“The automatic across-the-board federal cuts will harm funding to researchers across the university system. We are very concerned about new grants that may not be funded by agencies, graduate education opportunities as well as federal student financial aid, particularly in federal fiscal year 2014 and beyond,” Falle said in an email interview. “UC continues to urge Congress to stop the sequester and protect education, research and healthcare which are critical to California, the nation and our economy.”

It is expected that non-defense discretionary accounts, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy Office of Science, will be impacted by cuts of five to six percent.

UC receives over $3 billion in research funding.

In 2010 the UC Davis School of Medicine became one of the top 40 schools in the U.S. for NIH funding, ranking 37th of 134. Currently, of the $200 million the School of Medicine receives in annual research funding, $120 million is from NIH, according to Dr. Lars Berglund, senior associate dean for research at the School of Medicine.

Berglund said that a lot of uncertainty still remains as to how existing research projects will be affected, as a grant from NIH can span from two to five years, but new research projects may be most impacted.

“Every year there is new research being done, new research being started and [since] there is less money, there will be less of those projects starting, so it’s really critical,” Berglund said. “There might be an impact already, in that some of our investigators who have applied for funding might not get any information … it takes a longer time for NIH to make decisions in funding now, so the process is slowing down.”

Berglund said that five percent of cuts in NIH funding will correspond to a loss of $6 million.

“It’s a lot of funding … We’re doing whatever we can to encourage people to apply for other types of funding and … be as efficient as possible in this situation,” he said.

In a Feb. 25 teleconference, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins said the agency will be unable to give funding to hundreds of new grants that would have otherwise been funded.

“This is a serious problem, and of course it is interesting when you look across the world and you notice that other countries have read our playbook for the last 50 years, even though we seem to have forgotten it,” he said.

In addition to research, financial aid programs will also be struck, resulting in 8.2 percent cuts to educational programs that assist California college and university students.

According to the California Student Aid Commission (CSAC), Pell Grant awards will face reductions after the first year of the sequestration.

There will be 5,700 Federal Work-Study recipients that will see a 9.8 percent cut in funding and 15,000 Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants that will encounter cuts of 8.7 percent — $16.7 million in total.

TRIO and GEAR-UP, programs benefiting California low-income and underrepresented students by the U.S. Department of Education, will also face considerable reductions.

“The Commission sent a letter urging the president and to the U.S. Congress to take all steps necessary to protect students from the harmful sequestration cuts to financial aid and educational support services proven successful in California and across the nation,” said Patti Colston, CSAC spokesperson, in an email interview.

Outgoing UC President Mark Yudof also sent a letter on Feb. 26 to members of the California delegation urging for an agreement to be reached and to “ensure that federal research and educational funding is not indiscriminately harmed.”

The House and Senate each plan to develop budget resolutions by April 15.

By: Elissa Torres

The refrigerator door swings open and a robust odor hits you like a ton of bricks completely disorienting your senses. What is that smell? It’s rotten food.

Was it the chicken you made a few days ago or the Chinese food that you forgot to throw out a week ago? Or was it those rotten tomatoes, once red, but now are a light brown-ish color?

Take it in. That’s the smell of overconsumption.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, American consumers have been buying hundreds of calories more than those who lived in the 1950s, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. The total food supply in 2000 delivered 3,800 calories per person per day. The USDA states, of those 3,800 calories, roughly 1,000 calories were lost due to spoilage, plate waste, cooking and other losses. The average family of four wastes about 20 pounds of food each month, nearly $2,275 a year.

Due to overbuying, more food resides in landfills and incinerators than any other material in municipal solid waste. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 34 million tons of food waste were produced in 2010.

EatingWell.com states that most wasted food items are vegetables. Sour cream, bread, herbs and citrus are among the most wasted foods in the U.S. Many of these items are perishable and have a sell date that states food needs to be eaten before a certain time.

“In terms of a solution, the simple most straight forward solution is to shop smart and plan out your trip to the grocery store. For things you can’t consume, use your freezer. Also, the thing we found that was most intriguing was that the sell date, date by, all those things aren’t federally regulated, besides baby food. Often food is still good weeks after the sell date says. What I usually tell people is to use your nose, smell that gallon of milk. It’s better to use your senses as a determinant,” said Policy Advocate Sasha Lyutse for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The real problem lies within the consumption itself. Restaurants and individuals who buy perishable foods often do not eat all of them. For example, restaurants are known to collect huge trash bags full of discarded food every night. And doing that every night for a few weeks, months or years it adds up to more than 15 percent of all trash in landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

When food is disposed into landfills, it rots and becomes a source of methane. Landfills are a major source of human-related methane, producing 20 percent of emissions in the United States according to the EPA. Also by wasting food, we are wasting the valuable resources that went into making it. Fertilizers, energy and water are all wasted. Around 14 percent of greenhouse gases associated with global warming are created during the growing process of food. Not to mention the health hazards that come with disposing of bad food; there’s the smell, or the rodents and insects that find a dinner in your trash.

There are many solutions to overbuying food. First, buy less. It’s as simple as making a grocery list and sticking to it, and using a cart or basket that is small enough to only fit the essentials. Second, take advantage of your freezer. If you know you aren’t going to finish those hamburger buns you bought, freeze them and reuse them in a week. Third, be mindful of the expiration dates, but know that it’s not set in stone.

Finally, compost your spoiled food. By composting, you are reducing the amount of waste being directed into landfills by transforming it into organic waste, which can be used as fertilizer. By composting, you are saving money on trash bags, waste disposal fees and hauling costs.

So think long and hard before you buy that extra loaf of bread or king-sized tub or cream cheese. Do your part to help reduce the roughly 40 percent of food that goes uneaten in this country.

By Hope Quinn

Up before the crack of dawn. Up before the rooster crowed, while the night mist settled over green grass to become morning dew. Up before the milk cow shifted uneasily from the weight she carried in her utters. Up when the creak of leather harnesses and horses’ breath were the sole sounds accompanying the crunch of boots over hay and the moan of a barn door opening.

The farmer awakens before everyone else to tend his herd and his crop, to sew the land with seed and reap the fields’ bounties. The farmer feeds his family and his community. The farmer eats seasonally and he eats locally. The farmer leads a simple life… Or so the story went sixty, fifty, and even forty years ago.

This is what “Eating Alabama,” a film in the Southern Independent film circuit, showed to students in the nearly full Western Carolina UC Theater on Feb. 19. The filmmaker, Andrew Grace, was at Western to introduce his film and answer questions after the show.

“Good food goes a long way toward a good life,” a phrase often repeated throughout the film, explains what director and producer Grace and his wife set out to do over 4 and half years ago. They returned to their home state of Alabama in search of what was missing. To find out why exactly food matters and to return to the way their grandparents ate: like farmers.  They wanted to go back to a simpler way of life and so they challenged themselves: for one year, they would only eat food grown locally by Alabama farmers or food manufactured in Alabama. While both of their family histories were steeped in agriculture, neither of them then imagined how the agribusiness had changed since their grandparents’ time.

“Every time we ate together, we felt like we were finding something that had been lost,” said Grace in the opening scenes of his documentary. He and his wife spent over a year traveling the state of Alabama in search of the almost nonexistent farmer to learn, not only about food, but about a disappearing lifestyle and a disappearing history.

“Eating Alabama” is a film of trial and error, chronicling the journey it took to discover the “rhythm and progression” of finding something more important, something that’s been lost.

“I really see my opportunity as a filmmaker to share a story with you,” said Andrew Grace in a question and answer session after the viewing of the film.

“Before seeing this film, I thought that it would be easier to find local food because there are still a lot of farmers left in the South, but I realize now that is not necessarily the case… The [filmmakers] wanted to try to support their community of farmers by only eating locally grown food and I think that is really important in the economy that we live in today. We need to support our farmers who work so hard in order to put food on the table… It might be easier or cheaper to find [imported food], but it is important to me to support my community, just like they did in the film,” said Christa Lindsey, WCU freshman.

Described as “visually stunning” by an audience member, “Eating Alabama” was able, through humorous scenes of their own trial and error and through interviews with real, local farmers, to weave a story of family, food, tradition and discovering what it means to find the “simpler way of life.”

“Eating Alabama” will be played on public television in July 2013.

To find more information, like “Eating Alabama” on Facebook, follow them on Twitter or go to their webpage www.eatingalabama.com.

Garrett Randall(bottom) lifts Atasha Bozorgzad with his feet while she finds balance. They were doing acroyoga in the quad at San Francisco State University on Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2013. Photo by Mike Hendrickson / Special to Xpress

By Alyssa Kuhlman

A loud truck blaring music pulls up outside the house where Mike Eidlin, a third-year economics and Japanese double major, sits with his friends. Girls in bikinis hop out, passing out free Monster energy drinks.

No, this isn’t your average frat party.

After Eidlin did his research, he discovered it’s actually a little something sweet called product sampling.

“[Product sampling is when] the [company] gets the products into the potential users’ hands; it’s a very efficient form of marketing,” Eidlin said.

Eidlin, a member of Delta Sigma fraternity, decided to start his own company, GreekDrop, using this strategy of product sampling.

“We feature clothing, accessories, events, bicycles, hotels, but all [at] discounts. For people who want something familiar [to compare it to], think about Groupon or Gilt.com or JackThreads, but for Greek life members,” Eidlin said.

Liz Zimmer, a third-year mechanical engineering major and member of Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, loves the idea of having an online catalog where Greek students can score deals.

“I will definitely use this site when it gets launched. My twin brother goes to UC Irvine and the only way I can visit him is if I fly,” Zimmer said. “When this site gets going I will definitely look into cheaper airline tickets so I can visit him more often.”

Until March, students like Zimmer can read and browse information about the online catalog on GreekDrop.com or their Facebook page, Instagram or Twitter.

Eidlin first incorporated GreekDrop in August, putting in his paperwork to the Secretary of State after researching from June through July on how to make the idea of deals on any and every products for Greek students a reality.

“I did my research and found out there wasn’t already something going on like this,” Eidlin said.

Eidlin then applied to a start-up accelerator in December called Davis Roots. Run by two UC Davis professors, including entrepreneurship specialist Dr. Andrew Hargadon from the Graduate School of Management and a CEO, Davis Roots is going to help Eidlin officially launch his company this March.

“[They] take a small company that still isn’t really running yet, just an idea, and help them become established. They are going to give me office space in downtown, and that’s where I’ll have my interns or employees work at,” Eidlin said.

Currently the program is gearing up with clients and student customers in order to rev up a solution to the needed revenue cycle, Eidlin explains.

“Right now, it’s a chicken-and-egg problem. We need users for them to buy our clients’ goods. We have our students who are users, and we have our clients who are brands. We can list all the brands we want, but if we don’t have people to buy them, then it’s not going to do us any good,” Eidlin said.

Eidlin currently has a team of students helping him fuel GreekDrop, and hopes to expand with more interns and employees.

Eliot Shoet, a first-year computer science major, works as Eidlin’s web designer and programmer.

“I met Mike through [the ASUCD entrepreneurship] competition and then after I presented my project, he contacted me,” Shoet said.

Shoet is one of many students who are helping to build GreekDrop before the official launch in March when Greek students will be able to order online from it.

Shoet is responsible for helping prepare the website for smooth running and making it ready for customers once March hits.

“[We want to] set up a site that’s easily scalable, so that our site can know how to handle many servers,” Shoet said.

Eidlin has become busy with balancing school and GreekDrop, and admits that while it may be hard starting a business, he doesn’t regret the exciting experience.

“It’s always on my mind. I’m probably spending more time on GreekDrop than school, which is why I convinced my dad to let me defer next quarter so I will be able to work on this full-time,” Eidlin said.

Taking next quarter off and also having the summer to test GreekDrop’s productivity and success will allow Eidlin to see if he should continue with the company or return full-time to school, studying investments and finance.

While Shoet does not get paid, he does get experience as an intern with the promise of pay once the company officially launches.

Eidlin, who was born in Tokyo to a Russian father and Japanese mother, grew up speaking Japanese fluently alongside English. He aspires to use his Japanese background to contact business clients in Japan and further spread the benefits of GreekDrop internationally.

For now, Eidlin looks forward to taking a break from his Japanese classes and focusing solely on reaching out to more clients and students for GreekDrop.

“Business opportunities are few and far between, and I don’t wanna ‘half-ass’ school and ‘half-ass’ business relationships, because there are gonna be people who are counting on me,” Eidlin said.

by Nelson Oliveira

LONG BEACH, N.Y. – When Sandy hit the East Coast on Oct. 29, Long Beach homeowner Chris Maksymowicz had his basement flooded, but he was not worried about the thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to the furnace, heaters and walls.

Maksymowicz said the worst losses were his family photos, some of which dated back to the 1920s, an electrical train set from 1942, his wife’s dissertation work, several documents and other mementos.

“It was all in mud and sand,” he said. “I found some stuff from when I was a kid … my essays, my writings, my awards, my certificates. It’s all gone.”

Maksymowicz, who owns a house right across from the ocean on Broadway in Long Beach, was not alone in his loss. While the hurricane coverage focused on the number of damaged cars, flooded basements and contaminated house appliances, many residents feel like they lost some of their memories along with sentimental objects like photo albums and collectibles.

The hurricane, also known as a superstorm, caused about $200 million in structural losses in Long Beach, according to preliminary estimates.

A help sign stands on top of a pile of garbage and storm debris outside an apartment building on Broadway in Long Beach, N.Y., on Saturday, Nov. 24. Almost four weeks after Sandy hit the East Coast, the building still did not have power, gas or heat. Photo by Nelson Oliveira.

Mike Skivington, who rents a house on Broadway, said Sandy caused him about $75,000 in damage to personal property, including two totaled two vehicles. But when the Navy veteran was cleaning up his basement two weeks after the hurricane, his biggest surprise was to find out that the boxes where he kept his books, notebooks, and other memories had “floated and opened and spewed everywhere. “

“They were scattered everywhere,” he said. “Lots of memories, navy memorabilia, my college graduation pictures. I got a toolbox in there with about 10 grand in tools that I haven’t even opened ‘cause I don’t want to start crying.”

Tara Rider, a history professor at Stony Brook University, said that not being able to replace mementos like those make it much harder for people to recover from a natural disaster.

“For many people it’s about those smaller items: the picture albums, the ring that they can’t find … because you can rebuild a house, you can buy a new car, but you can’t necessarily recreate that memory, that image that was captured,” Rider said.

Amy Pecker, another Long Beach homeowner who lives on Michigan St., had moved all of her albums and collectibles over four feet above the floor in her basement, but the water reached about 7-foot high and she lost most of it.

Pecker said the water, which included sand and sewage water, washed away her parents’ memories, a lifetime of pictures, baseball cards and her children’s classwork.

“Stuff like that, that you can never replace, just drowned,” she said.

For Maksymowicz, one of the hardest things is feeling guilty for not taking better care of his mementos.

“It’s those things that you don’t know what they are until they’re gone,” he said. “In terms of monetary value – family albums and pictures of 100 years ago – that didn’t cost me any money. But a part of you is gone.”

Rider said that rebuilding the physical things, however, is the first step toward full recovery.

“Rebuilding the physical house [and] buying the car remind you that this is more than a house. It is a home,” she said. “And homes are memories.”

By Ben Haines

I didn’t become thoroughly educated about sex from public school.  Sure, in 7th grade they taught us about the human body and the biology of sexual reproduction, but that was strictly the most basic information.  I learned about birth control and different forms of sexual expression the same way most kids my age did: from my friends and from media, because it certainly wasn’t from school.

I grew up in North Carolina when state law required schools to teach only one kind of sex education in the 7th through 9th grades: abstinence.  It was a system rooted in fundamentalist traditions and contingent on willful ignorance, mandating adults to tell teenagers that the only way to avoid pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections is avoiding sex; to pretend that sex is only ever safe when the participants are married to each other; and to believe that hormone-driven teenagers won’t have sex if they’re told not to.

That outdated, defunct formof sex education opts to disregard the reality of human sexuality in favor of chasing an arbitrary idealism.  It’s based on the mindset that teaching teens about safe sex techniques is tantamount to encouraging their sexual activity, as if not teaching them will somehow guarantee their abstinence.  Ultimately, it all comes down to the erroneous notion that it’s better for students to know less about sex than for them to be more informed.

For that reason, it was refreshing for me to see Western Carolina University host its first-ever Sexual Empowerment Week in the A.K. Hinds University Center from Feb. 4 to Feb. 7.

Among the featured events were a question-and-answer workshop on sexual relationships on Monday, Feb. 4 in the U.C. Multipurpose Room, titled “All You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex but Didn’t Learn in High School.”

The main event was the Sexuality Exploration Fair in the U.C. Grand Room on Thursday, Feb. 7, featuring booths with information on sexuality, sexual options, sexual identity, and sexual health.

Sexual Empowerment Week was organized by Dr. Marilyn Chamberlin, associate professor of anthropology and sociology at WCU.

“I hoped to have students gain the knowledge about sex so they can have physically and emotionally safe relationships as well as learn about the diversity of sexual identities,” said Chamberlin.

Many students with uncertainties or questions about sex avoid seeking out answers for a number of reasons. Sometimes it’s out of embarrassment, due to either shyness or shame of not knowing. Other times it’s out of conditioning, having been raised to regard sex as a taboo subject and simply not talking about it.

“I wanted to have something where students could come with a level of anonymity and find outwhat they want to know,” said Chamberlin. “They don’t have to feel awkward. They can get that information.”

Dozens of students turned out for the Sexual Empowerment Week events to learn about a wide range of sexual topics and gain new perspectives on their own sexual identities.

“I received overwhelming positive feedback from students,” said Chamberlin, “ranging from ‘You told us it was okay to not have sex,’ to ‘Wow, I didn’t know some of this and I plan on being a sex educator,’ to ‘You answered our questions honestly.’”

Any form of non-traditional sex education in a public institution is bound to incur the wrath of at least one requisite moral objection. There were no complaints about Sexual Empowerment Week from within the community, no protests on the WCU campus, and Chamberlin never received any hate mail. Of all the places for the token opposition to come from, an article titled “S&M at WCU” was posted to TownHall.com by Dr. Mike Adams, a professor of sociology and criminology at UNC Wilmington.

It’s unusual for WCU to receive attention from the world outside the Great Smoky Mountains for anything that doesn’t pertain to our rival basketball team’s free-throw prowess. The article is more amusing for Adams’ sensationalist rhetoric, factual errors and paranoid overtone than his repeated attempts at lowbrow sex jokes.

“Each day will feature an event funded by North Carolina taxpayers,” Adams wrote of Sexual Empowerment Week with zeal. It’s an alarming proclamation that stirs up just the right level of gut recoil when taken at face value, but it’s also misleading.

Of the five events featured during Sexual Empowerment Week, only one of them cost any money, with a budget of $400. That came from the Women’s Studies budget, which is partly made up of money provided by the state but also includes tuition paid by the students taking the classes as well as a development fund that is based on donations only.

Dr. Marsha Rand

The whole $400 budget was spent bringing guest speaker Dr. Marsha Rand, a marriage and family specialist and certified sex therapist in charge of the Sexual Well-Being Asheville clinic and the founder and clinical director of the Maitri Center for Women, both in Asheville, N.C.

“The $400 came from the Women’s Studies budget that is set aside for guest speakers,” Chamberlin explained, “which include speakers for Women’s History Month, the Gender Conference and to support other programs in bringing in visiting scholars.”

Rand hosted a group discussion on healthy relationships in the U.C. Multipurpose Room last week. Sitting in a circle of chairs, more than 25 students joined Rand to talk about relationship norms on campus and share personal experiences.

The rest of the Sexual Empowerment Week events were entirely the result of volunteer work. Several of Chamberlin’s students along with two nursing students volunteered their time and began organizing the week’s events in September 2012.

Barbara Starnes hosted a panel on safe sex methods in the U.C. Multipurpose Room on Wednesday, Feb. 6. Jennifer Berry and Ashley Reddy, two nursing students who took part in the safe sex panel, also hosted a booth at the Sexuality Exploration Fair with information packets on safe sex techniques and sexually transmitted infections.

“STIs are really rampant,” said Berry. During their time in the WCU nursing program, she and Reddy have seen many students come into the health center with advanced infections that have gone untreated.

Students with STIs commonly have misconceptions about how they can spread, the signs and symptoms of different kinds of STIs, and how they can be treated.

“I think people are becoming more concerned and want to get educated,” said Reddy.

Jessica Lloyd and Heather Rice demonstrate bondage techniques at the Sexuality Exploration Fair. Photo by Ben Haines.

One of the sexual practices showcased at the Sexuality Exploration Fair was BDSM, a portmanteau of bondage and discipline (B&D) and sadism and masochism (S&M). BDSM has recently gained widespread mainstream attention due to being featured in the global bestseller Fifty Shades of Grey, a 2011 novel by author E. L. James.

“We decided to do the bondage booth because Fifty Shades of Grey hit so big and there is so much misinformation in there,” said Chamberlin.

Rather than accurately reflecting a real-life BDSM relationship, the book “actually presents an abusive relationship,” said Jessica Lloyd, one of the students minding the BDSM information booth at the Sexuality Exploration Fair.

“When it comes to the BDSM culture, everything is negotiated. Everything is known,” said Heather Rice, the other student hosting the booth. She explained that the book’s depiction of one-sided decision-making and characters who ignore their partner’s use of safety words fails to illustrate the trust that BDSM relationships are built upon.

“The reality is that Fifty Shades both misrepresents dominant/submissive relationships, and is also very popular,” said Tiffany Thompson, a WCU graduate with a master’s degree in professional writing who now lives in Los Angeles. A copy of the book featuring handwritten liner notes by Thompson and two other WCU students was featured at the BDSM booth at the Sexuality Exploration Fair.

“Without educational panels, such as the ones being organized at WCU, young girls may think it’s both sexy and okay to be controlled by jealous men prone to violence,” said Thompson. “Certainly, the cultural perception of what is perverse adds to the psychological stimulus of participating in behaviors thought to be ‘wrong’ or ‘dirty,’ but the focus of these relationships, much like any other, should be trust, vulnerability, and communication.”

Chamberlin and her students hosted a book discussion titled “Shades of Grey: The Reality” with attendees in the U.C. Grand Room immediately following the Sexuality Exploration Fair.

At the beginning of each semester, when Chamberlin gets a new roster of students in her marriage and family class, she gives them a 28-question survey to gauge where they stand with regard to sexual knowledge and misconceptions. Her students are typically unsure of or mistaken on more than 20 of the questions.

“I am amazed at how many students are confused and just don’t have the information,” said Chamberlin. “I think the reason is the lack of education about this.”

North Carolina recently made breakthrough progress on sex education. In 2009, Gov. Bev Perdue signed the Healthy Youth Act into state law, requiring schools to offer comprehensive sex education that teaches students about contraceptives and STIs in addition to abstinence, beginning with the 2010-2011 school year.

But students at WCU today who grew up in North Carolina received a very different kind of sex education. For fifteen years, a 1995 state law required schools to teach abstinence-only sex education in the 7th through 9th grades.

I attended a public middle school in North Carolina from 2000 to 2003. From my own firsthand observation, I can attest to the inefficiency of abstinence-only sex education and its failure to connect with students.

One day in 7th grade at Cleveland Middle School in Garner, we students were dismissed early from our 4th block classes, divided into several alphabetical groups by our last names, and relocated to a few select classrooms. Through the school’s closed-circuit television system, we were shown a video about why abstinence from sex was the one and only safe choice for us young teenagers, complete with ham-fisted dialogue and gloriously bad acting.

One of the skits featured a teenage girl pressuring her boyfriend to have sex with her. He responded to everything she said with “No, I don’t want to get you pregnant,” until she finally smiled and exclaimed, “Oh, you’re so sweet!” End skit. Every 7th-grader in the classroom burst out laughing.

In 8th grade, they gathered all of us into the cafeteria for a discussion panel on sexual abstinence featuring several young adults who became parents when they were teenagers.

At the beginning of the panel, the host encouraged us to listen to the guest speakers’ stories and ask them questions, but she quickly clarified to the audience of 8th-graders, “We’re not allowed to talk to you about birth control or anything like that.” Any approach to sex other than abstinence was treated as though it did not exist, which sucked the credibility out of that panel right from the start.

The years that followed showed just how well that abstinence-only sex education worked. In 2006, North Carolina had the ninth-highest teen pregnancy rate in the United States. I attended West Johnston High School during that time, less than five miles away from Cleveland Middle, and I couldn’t walk through the halls between classes without passing by at least one pregnant student.

Such a high rate of teen pregnancy could have been avoided if my middle school generation had been educated about ways to prevent pregnancy. If that abstinence panel in 8th grade had also included an informational booth about contraceptives, like the one that was available to WCU students in the U.C. Grand Room last week, there could have been significantly fewer pregnancies among my peers in high school.

That is the kind of educational outreach Chamberlin sought to achieve at WCU with Sexual Empowerment Week. It’s easy to dismiss sex education as unnecessary or unimportant if one feels that they already have all the knowledge about sex that they will ever need, but the reality is that not everyone is as informed as everyone else, especially if they grew up with inefficient sex education.

Although Chamberlin had not planned to make Sexual Empowerment Week into an annual event at WCU, the enthusiastic response from the community seems to have already decided that for her.

“I’ve talked to students and faculty who’ve said they would love to get involved next year,” said Chamberlin, “so we’ll see.”

By Sam Molmud

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country,” the late Kurt Vonnegut said.

The Twittersphere and news world erupted after Marco Rubio’s grasp for a drink of water during the Republican response to the State of the Union address. The kind of society that aims the news spotlight at this sort of minutia makes information seeking unsavory. To a journalism student, it’s outright ridiculous.

The boom of technology has solidified our ability to find out everything about anything. Despite this gift, the general public and media often perpetuate an age-old human tendency to simplify, even marginalize complex issues.

Those issues are then expressed as simple soundbites, one-liners, memes, hashtags — or just plain, pithy projections of one’s intelligence.

It takes a few minutes to see the extent of the simplifications: the sensationalism of Marco Rubio’s water moment last week; the reduction of Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony to the hashtag #WhatDifferenceDoesItMake; criticism that Obama dare cry over Sandy Hook deaths, but not for the unknown amount of children dead from his drone strikes — and even Mitt Romney’s infamous 47 percent video.

Except Rubio’s drinking water, each of those mentions have more complexity at stake than a single clip, tweet, meme, or news article could begin to explore. Limiting an understanding and analysis of one of these situations makes oneself a less-informed and assumptive media consumer.

This isn’t a total damnation of Twitter, Facebook, or the Internet as the root of all evil. James Martel, a political science professor at SF State, pointed out there have always been forms of memes and gesture-focused political speech. Prime examples include Civil War propaganda and tabloids from the ‘50s and ‘60s.

“There’s always been an emphasis on style and non-verbal communication,” Martel said. “I don’t think it means people your age are shallow or lack political thought.”

Though digital media are not the root issue, the instant gratification aspect makes digital media a popular vehicle. Its nature to confine an expression to no more than 140 characters or a single frame, enables many who would not normally share an opinion to do so. This melting pot of easy access and boxing-in abbreviated thought often delivers simplified opinions.

The tools for information and knowledge are more abundant now than any other time in human history. Distortion and oversimplification of world and political issues are also just as prevalent.

As we advance alongside our technology, our understanding and opinions of world events should be as informed as our tools allow. Simple and regurgitated opinions are easy to come by and yield easy results. Complex and self-discovered opinions are multilayered and sometimes without finite conclusion, but create a philosophical, critical, and balanced citizen.

It’s that type of citizen that will keep Vonnegut’s fear from becoming reality.

By Naomi Nishihara

To dorm room and apartment complex dwellers, the grassy pathways to the Baggins End Domes and the clotheslines hanging across Tri-Cooperative bedrooms seem like a remarkable way of life.

Both residences are cooperative communities which practice sustainable living. They follow Student Housing’s established practices, and are open to only UC Davis students. The Tri Co-ops are three on-campus houses across from the Regan Hall Circle which each rents out to 12 to 14 students. The 13 polyurethane-insulated fiberglass Domes are slightly farther from campus, and are home to 26. Both communities are now accepting applications for potential residents with an interest in cooperative and low-impact living.

“[Sustainability] is a concept that we’re really trying to work into our daily lives,” said Hillary Knouse, a fourth-year Spanish and education double major and Tri Co-op resident. “Some of the ways we do that are more attractive than others. There are cool things like gardening and getting food from our own gardens, and then there are things like, we don’t typically flush the toilets when there’s only urine in them.”

Both the Tri Co-ops and the Domes raise chickens and bees, and Knouse said that many of their sustainable practices are related to cyclical concepts — like using compost and the nitrogen in the chicken’s feces to fertilize the gardens.

Elli Pearson, a third-year sustainable agriculture and food systems major and resident Domie, however, pointed out that the definition of sustainable living varies from person to person.

“One thing that I can say across the board is that people here are very dedicated to eating non-processed foods. Nothing is a rule, but our dinners are always very healthy and always home-cooked,” Pearson said. “We like to grow as much food as we can, and people are interested in fermentation and baking their own bread. There’s a very distinct food culture here.”

According to Katherine Kerlin, public information representative from the UC Davis News Service, low-impact living is not the only prominent aspect of life in the Tri Co-ops and Domes.

“The Tri Co-ops look for students who will agree to live in a cooperative environment, [this involves] sharing chores for household duties, gardening and sharing meals,” Kerlin said.

Tri Co-op residents create a list of chores every quarter, covering everything from sweeping to raising the chickens and bees to taking care of finances.

“People pick things that they’ve either done before or that they want to learn about,” Knouse said. “That’s one of the really cool things about this community — chores are usually a really cool learning opportunity.”

One chore that every Tri Co-op student handles is cooking. Cooking in each house is handled by two people each night.

“It’s a lot like having a family dinner,” Knouse said. “Every day at 7 p.m., I know there’s going to be dinner.”

Like the family dinners, day-to-day living at the Tri Co-ops is highly social with a lot of people in relatively close quarters.

Knouse said that even with 14 people in the house, it’s easy to just close her door and have some alone time. If she’s feeling social and needs people, however, it’s a simple matter of going downstairs to the kitchen or living room where people are almost always around.

Socializing with each other is a large part of community living, according to Knouse, and one way residents encourage bonding is through house trips.

“Once a quarter we will decide on a trip. Usually it’s an overnight thing, and over the past years I’ve gone camping in different places like Point Reyes and Sonoma County, and stayed in a hostel in San Francisco,” Knouse said.

Like the Tri Co-op residents, the Domies also eat together and throw parties, and many of their day-to-day requirements are alike.

“Similar to the Tri Co-ops, [the Domes] attract students who are interested in living in a cooperative environment,” Kerlin said.

According to Pearson, living in the Domes is a pretty significant time commitment with four main responsibilities.

“One is that you have a cook night once a week. So four nights a week people will cook dinner, and you’re supposed to cook on one of them,” Pearson said.

The other chores include work parties, where all the residents get together and maintain the property, do basic chores like collecting rent or caring for chickens, and lastly attending meetings every other week to discuss things like events and parties.

Pearson said that the community is a very social place as well.

“Dinners are always a social event — friends come over, and also people who are just interested in the community [attend],” Pearson said.

She also said that there’s a lot of skill-sharing between residents, which can be seen through cooking, gardening and building things.

“What we’re most interested in is working in the gardens, growing things and doing creative projects,” Pearson said. “And there’s a lot of room within the chores to take on a project that interests you — if you are really excited about bee-keeping, that could be your chore.”

The main difference between the Tri Co-ops and the Domes seems to be in the property itself, rather than the social and low-impact way of life. While the Tri Co-ops are houses with living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens and approximately eight colorfully decorated bedrooms, the 13 Domes house only two students each.

Inside, the white semi-spherical abodes are surprisingly spacious, with a living area and work space on the first floor and a loft up above. In some, the loft is divided into two bedrooms, while other domes have a first floor bedroom and a single-person loft.

Though they provide different styles of sustainable living, both Knouse and Pearson agree that cooperative living is far more social and interactive than typical apartment lifestyles.

“One of my friends moved in with me after living in an apartment — she felt like she never saw her roommates,” Knouse said.

Pearson also lived in an apartment for a year, and though she was close to her roommates, she said it was still too isolated of an experience.

“I didn’t know the names of the people who lived next to me, above me or below me. There’s no sort of interaction that occurs there,” Pearson said.

Knouse and Pearson also agree that the social aspects are their respective communities’ highest benefits.

“I think that living here, I’ve identified how to cohabitate — how to live alongside other people and get used to all their ticks,” Knouse said. “I’ve learned how to work with other people and not take things too personally.”

Pearson also maintained that living cooperatively teaches communication skills, which are invaluable in and beyond college life.

“I think a majority of problems stem from miscommunication, and living here you learn how to communicate in a really productive, experiential way,” Pearson said.

The Tri Co-ops are currently accepting applications for this coming spring and both locations are accepting applications for next fall.

“The most important thing for [the Tri Co-ops] is that we get to know our applicants,” Knouse said. “There’s a requirement of coming over for two dinners and a garden party. Applicants come by and we see A) do we get along with you and B) is this a community that you’re interested in?”

Knouse stated that this is important, since not everyone is cut out to live with 13 other people and urine in the toilet.

According to Pearson, the Domes are looking for people who can commit to a long-term residence, as a lot of knowledge needs to get passed on when students leave.

For further information on the how to live in the Tri co-ops for the upcoming year, email tricoop@ucdavis.edu or call 530-754-1310.