Frances Brown '98
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
 It was freezing for five months straight in Kabul, Afghanistan. Night after night, Frances Brown ’98 lay reading by flashlight in her cold, dark room with no heat or electricity. The last of the smoky sawdust that she had carried in from the back shed was burning in her bukhari stove. She knew she must close her book soon before she was too cold to fall asleep. This nightly routine was a constant reminder that Frances was far from her home in Washington, D.C., immersed in a people and culture that were inspiring and life-changing.
Although it was pure intrigue that led Frances to take up Arabic in the summer of 2000 after her sophomore year at Yale, her time in Lebanon and Afghanistan and the language skills she acquired there proved to be an invaluable asset in her burgeoning career. After receiving several prestigious awards and fellowships at Yale, it was clear Frances was going places. She spent the next summer interning at the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait. After finishing college with a B.A. in history, Frances jumped at the opportunity to head back to that region of the world and landed a job teaching sixth grade social studies and English at an international school in Beirut. Frances notes, “It was a school not unlike Maret….The school community was very politically active, and so my kids gave me a refreshing, candid window into their parents’ dinner tables. Some particularly fascinating debates surrounded the 2004 U.S. Presidential election and the spring 2005 uprising against Syria after the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister. I relished the chance to witness history in the making during the ‘Cedar Revolution,’ as it became known, and published commentary as a freelance journalist.”
While in Beirut, Frances volunteered to teach English at a Palestinian refugee camp on weekends. Her experience there inspired her to take a position teaching ESL in Kabul for the summer in between her two-year commitment to her Beirut school. Frances describes, “I departed Afghanistan deeply moved by the urgency of the post-conflict reconstruction enterprise there—so, after completing the second year of my Beirut job, I took a job at a Kabul-based NGO researching issues of education, governance, and livelihoods. I spent a year there, traveling extensively around Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Frances returned to the U.S. in the fall of 2006 to begin her masters in international relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Although she admits her life stateside is much more “tame,” she is thoroughly enjoying her academic pursuits knowing they will propel her forward in a global career.
Frances expresses her gratitude to Maret for instilling in her a sense of “fearlessness.” She believes that this bestowed quality allowed her to venture down nontraditional avenues with confidence. She explains, “At Maret, you can be a novice soccer player or a novice thespian or amateur French-speaker, and just show up—qualifications notwithstanding—and end up feeling you’ve contributed something.” She continues, “I’ve served as an election monitor for Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections, instructed Palestinian refugee kids in ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,’ ridden a horse across Afghanistan’s central highlands, appeared on al-Jazeera, been smuggled out of Kabul’s NATO base during the ‘cartoon riots’ by some friendly Italian soldiers, traveled the world’s highest highway from Rawalpindi, Pakistan to Kashgar, China by bus…been featured in an award-winning documentary about postwar Lebanon, and been published in the Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor—all, really truly, just because I showed up.”
Not one to be still for a moment, Frances reflects on how her attitude and philosophy towards life was shaped at Maret. She reminisces, “Puckie Thomas’s classes especially resonated with me because they were really about literature illuminating life choices—a topic forever relevant. Ms. Thomas, Tim Emerson, and Leonard King encouraged me to celebrate and experiment with words and ideas. And Kathy Sweeney-Hammond, Bryan Jones, and Liza Knapp, all science teachers extraordinaire, inspired me to persevere at and eventually enjoy a subject I didn’t naturally incline towards.”
After finishing her masters degree in 2008, Frances knows she will continue to work in the international arena, but she is not sure just yet in what capacity. She feels a struggle “between intellectually engaging on issues of post-conflict reconstruction and international affairs on the macro level, and immersing myself in them on the ground.” She is driven to just arrive someplace and see what she can do to help. She mentions that young people “often ask my thoughts on pursuing jobs in the developing world….My advice is once again: just show up. People who have the initiative and resourcefulness to get themselves over to a country, work for free for a time, or simply acquaint themselves with the terrain invariably quickly figure out where they can contribute. Within a matter of weeks or months, they get snapped up by an employer who needs a capable person to start work tomorrow—particularly in the developing world.”
Certainly, those who have “snapped” up Frances in her various locales worldwide have been blessed with an intelligent, committed, and caring individual, who will no doubt continue to make a meaningful impact on our world and its people.
photo by Anthony Ellis
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