See contemporary thoughts on U.S. democracy from people around the world. Click a pin to get started!
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Noah Holtgraves is responsible for the work in this project segment
All interviews were conducted between 2/3/21-2/17/21.
Special thanks to Maki Somosot and Ashley Carter for their help with sourcing!
Credits
Auckland, New Zealand
Singapore
Vadodara, Gujarat, India
Çanakkale, Turkey
Querétaro State, México
Prague, Czech Republic
Kiboga, Uganda
Dominik Dvořák, Ph.D.
Full Disclosure: Dominik Dvořák is Noah Holtgraves’ first cousin, twice removed.
Dominik Dvořák, 56, was a child when the Russian tanks rolled into Prague, Czechoslovakia, in August 1968. Reforms in the Czech government had lead to an increased acceptance of communist doctrine. By that year, the government was struggling to balance communist and conservative ideals. Fearing a rebellion, Soviet leaders invaded Prague, changing Dvořák’s childhood from one under a possible democracy to dark memories of growing up in a communist country. Today, Czechia is a unitary parliamentary constitutional republic, and Dvořák works in educational research at Charles University in Prague. He earned his Ph.D. from the university in education and is passionate about teaching younger generations.
“We have to learn a lot about the human nature and about the society,” Dvořák said. “I think that things like election of President Trump took us unprepared. If you are positive, it’s a challenge because you see so much to be learned about the society, and about human behavior, and about communication and media.”
Domingo Martínez, Ph.D.
Domingo Martínez, 38, was born in Jalisco State and has traveled and lived throughout Mexico. As of the past five years, he resides in Querétaro State and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He works in a branch of behavioral economic theory called neuroeconomics, which combines economic and neuroscience disciplines. When he gets a break from work, he walks his dog in the beautiful state countryside. It’s there where he reflects. As a scientific community member, Martínez takes personal affront to the global backlash against scientific thought, particularly in the U.S.
“During the Trump administration, the global conference and scientific meetings in the U.S. was very strange,” Martínez said. “Because many collaborators from some parts of the world was abandoned the scientific conference and it was kind of strange. And, I think that was the first moment when the situation changed. I didn’t want to renew my visa to travel to the conference in support of the collaborators from other parts of the world, and many scientific people did the same. So, in this period, we want to renew our visa, and we want to travel to the U.S. again with a scientific purpose.”
Shashank Bajpai
Shashank Bajpai, 30, is from Northern India, born to an ancestral family of farmers. He was 4 when his father took a job in the Indian Railways and moved the family to Gujarat. Bajpai currently resides in Vadodara, where he is a business development manager for ActionEdge Research Services LLP.
“My job role is to identify people and prospects that would be willing to outsource the data collection services,” Bajpai explained. “So data collection is a petty job, okay? Big research companies like Forbes do a lot of research. Now, all of this research involves a lot of telephone interviews, telephone surveys, and other kinds of interviews. But, when you're doing 1000 interviews or 2000 surveys talking to individuals from States, it becomes expensive at the same time it's kind of a job that nobody wants to do.”
Bajpai enjoys his peaceful life in Vadodara and remarks on the incredible growth in the city. Expansion in the region is growing exponentially, and he doesn’t think he will recognize the place in five years. Due to working with mostly American clientele and the U.S.’s increasing political turmoil over the past few years, Bajpai admits to paying more attention to U.S. politics than local Gujarat.
Tahlia Sundrum
Tahlia Sundrum, 29, lives in Auckland, New Zealand, and is currently backpacking the country’s longest trail- The Te Araroa, meaning “The Long Path.” Three months into the hike, she is thankful COVID-19 has spared most of the country, allowing her to complete such a long journey.
“Apart from the initial breakout, we've been very lucky to not have any community cases,” Sundrum said. “Just at our quarantine facilities at our international border with flights coming in and stuff. Apart from that, within the community, there hasn't been any cases- so, very, very lucky.”
Before taking on the daunting task of hiking the country’s 1900 mile trail, she worked in freight logistics. She said she did not hate her job and did enjoy going to work most days. On whether she will return to the same occupation upon her trail completion, “my boss has been messaging me this week, but I'm not sure,” Sundrum said. “I don't plan on finishing until mid-March, and even then, I'm sure I'll come back up to Auckland for a month or so. So, I'm kind of really enjoying summer right now.”
Dwiyana
Dwiyana, 41, is a homemaker with three kids, ages 20, 16 and 7. Originally from Indonesia, she lives in Singapore since 1999. Dwiyana’s husband is an American journalist for Reuters in Singapore, but due to the exorbitant cost of living in the city-state, the family will likely move to the U.S. down the road. This prospect scares Dwiyana, who recently realized the racial prejudices held by many in the States. She fears mostly for her 7-year-old daughter.
“My daughter is mixed, so my daughter doesn't really look like American,” Dwiyana said. “You really can tell she's mixed. Like, she doesn't look like Western; she looks Asian. I'm afraid that she gets bullied. Like, especially when that time when there is a Chinese journalist asking Trump about the COVID, and instead he answered questions like, ‘why don't you ask China?’ It's like what? Crazy.”
It’s not all despairing; Dwiyana emphasizes hope in the new Biden Administration. She says she hopes Biden’s peaceful nature and respectful attitude can reverberate throughout the States. “I hope America can be united and then can be like, supporting each other, you know?” Dwiyana continued. “Family, you know? One American family, no matter what- I hope.”
Julius Smith Layn
Julius Smith Layn, 21, was born and raised in Kampala, Uganda. He earned his diploma in interior design through the Nagenda International Academy of Art and Design. He is building his design business from the ground up using word of mouth and networking. Currently, he supports himself by traveling hours away to the town of Kiboga for month-long stints overseeing banana plantation work as a manager in training.
Much of Uganda currently experiences extended internet blackouts after the recent presidential election in an effort by the long-time leader Yoweri Museveni to censor the population. Smith Layn was able to reach us because he is currently in Kiboga, far away from Uganda’s capital, and he says the blackouts tend to occur more in the cities. However, he was in Kampala in November 2020 when opposition protests heightened. He witnessed deadly State force and dozens of political-related killings by Museveni’s men.
“People started fighting, fighting the police,” Smith Layn said. “So, I moved out of the building. I went out; I was going to take a taxi to go back home. But, what I saw on the streets, I had never seen it before. People were fighting; blood was all over the old street. The police was still shooting at people. They are beating tear gas into buildings, you know? People were hiding away from trouble, but the police were still hitting tear gas inside so people can’t go out and run away.”
Ozan Erturk | Turkey
Ozan Erturk, 31, was born and raised in Çanakkale, Turkey, a small coastal town of the Marmara region in the country’s Northwest. He came to the U.S. in 2018 to study computer and electrical engineering and earn his Ph.D. from Purdue University, where he currently resides in West Lafayette, Indiana.
He finds the state an excellent place to work on his Ph.D. but imagines it might be a nightmare to get an undergrad in the Midwest. “It feels isolated,” Erturk explains, “For a 20-year-something, it's like a nothing to do kind of thing.” Erturk’s experience in the state is not of total isolation; he remarks on folks’ friendly nature in the region and the comparatively lower cost of living.
Erturk views the U.S. as relatively capitalistic to Turkey, allowing people in STEM, like him, to access better education, research and personal development.
“As much as it's free to get a good education and start something off, it is also highly related with money,” Eurturk said. “I was lucky to find scholarships, but in Turkey, regardless of your socioeconomic status (or pretty much anywhere in Europe), government universities and research organizations support people from all kinds of backgrounds – they don't care. How much money you have, or what your family owns or their connections – it doesn’t matter or affect anything.”
The capitalist education system in the U.S. and the more social system in Turkey both have their benefits, according to Erturk, and he thinks the two systems can bridge together. Still, it is going to take a lot of government investment.
“In STEM fields, what we do requires a lot of money,” Erturk explains. “That's why cutting-edge science happens here [in the U.S.] because people have enough money to invest millions of dollars. When you invest in those kinds of fields, it's because you want to sell something, and people consume here a lot, and they sell a lot. So, there's a lot of transactions going on. That's why that capitalistic environment is good and bad; it feeds the scientific culture a lot.”
