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Justin Ginsberg '04 |
Constance Stellas K'72 | Nils Kulleseid '90 | Rebecca Hamm Just '00 | Sally Sedgwick Peabody K'71 | Scott Malouf '92 (left), Steve Weed '92 (right) | Amanda Daflos '00 | Mike Zesk '08 |
Oddly, Sally Sedgwick Peabody never took that junior year in France during her time at Kirkland College. She's been making up for it as the owner and operator of Your Great Days in Paris — providing custom tours, trip planning, coaching and guidance for visitors to the City of Light and other regions. It's a career that gives her up to half a dozen working "vacations" every year in a place she loves. In addition to working directly with tours and itineraries, she's written several books and e-guides, including a recent fourth edition of Take Paris Personally: Your Guide to Discovering Quintessential Paris. "In a sense," the Boston Herald said in a profile of Peabody last year, "she has turned her knowledge of the city into a commodity, which allows her to serve travelers on a wide range of budgets."
Typical trips she leads include week-long culinary tours of Paris in the spring and fall — an intense immersion into the city's food and wine culture — as well as a spring tea-and-chocolate tour, a fall culinary tour of the French Southwest, and — coming in October — a Basque culinary tour. Also new is an "Off the Beaten Path in Paris" tour that explores the emerging quarters the guidebooks often overlook, from the bohemian to the edgy — Batignolles, So-Pi and several more. If these don't cover a client's interests exactly, Peabody provides itinerary coaching to help create (or, often, trim down) a vacation plan that can be followed independently. Her tour groups are small — typically six to eight people — and many clients "have been to Paris more than once, so they see the value of digging a little deeper."
Although she's always had a deep love for and fascination with the city, Sally spent a lot of time on other career tracks before realizing her Paris dream. She holds a master's degree in social work from Fordham and one in public administration from Harvard. She spent several years in New England running a large Meals-on-Wheels program and later a social service agency, among other things, before serving as president of Associated Grant Makers of Massachusetts. She "brought the organization into the tech age," then left after 10 years, thinking, "OK, either I stay for another five years and we look at a whole other phase of growth, or ... we get a new leader in here who might be able to take the organization in some different directions." At the crossroads, she "jumped completely into trying to develop this Paris business, which was this passion that just kept sort of nudging at me."
Peabody credits Kirkland with setting the foundations for her to pursue an unconventional idea like Great Days in Paris. There she learned to take informed risks — "to understand what you wanted to do, and to understand what it was going to take to make that happen." She concedes that it may seem corny, but "Kirkland really encouraged us to be fearless, and to ... try things that mattered deeply."
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| Scott Malouf '92 |
No, they don't run a dating site, and no, they don't peddle canned speeches. But if you have great ideas for your proposal or wedding speech but few clues about how to make it work — or if you just need a kick-start to get the whole marriage thing under way — these guys are your men. Scott Malouf and Steve Weed have created you-woo.com, a Web-based service that employs the writing and creativity skills honed on the Hill to assist fiancés and wedding speakers-to-be in crafting the perfect speech. The ideas still have to be yours; Malouf and Weed won't do your homework for you. Rather, they'll coach you, offer guidance and provide a sounding board as you arrange your thoughts and sentiments into a coherent and poignant soliloquy.
As students at Hamilton, the friends already worked well together, bouncing ideas off each other for speeches and projects. From those experiences, an idea for a business based on such services began to emerge. "After Steve had helped me with my own marriage proposal with my wife," Malouf says, "we both independently came to the same conclusion that, hey, there are a lot of people who may benefit from this type of service." They created You-Woo as a way to bring out the "unique voice" in every client's speech; the aim is to "give people a skill set that they can use to go forward" — to the Big Moment and even beyond.
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| Steve Weed '92 |
Weed and Malouf have found that their different strengths allow them to focus on separate aspects of the Web site, although they tend to collaborate on the creative end. Malouf "was really good at giving speeches" (he won the Clark Prize for Public Speaking his senior year), Weed says, and "his expertise and his background as a lawyer" — Malouf practices in Massachusetts — "mean that he's much better suited to handle the business end of things." Weed, in turn, is a writer and editor, directing community-based writing workshops, doing freelance editing for Prestwick House publishers and writing occasional newspaper columns in Ithaca, N.Y. At Hamilton, Weed "was on the creative side," Malouf says, doing some theatre, writing plays (he won the Wallace Bradley Johnson Prize for playwriting) and working as a DJ. For both, "Hamilton had such an interest in rewriting, in clarity of expression, as well as in speaking," Weed says. "I showed up knowing that I had to be prepared and have my thoughts organized."
While they'd be thrilled if the Web business were to grow, they agree that "if we can do this and make it a really fun side project, we'll be happy with that." So far, though, they haven't quite been able to honor one repeated request: "Do you get men to actually propose?"
"If we could figure that out," Malouf says, "we could endow a chair at Hamilton."
Amanda Daflos says Nepal is a very poor country — and a very rich one. She studied there during her time at Hamilton and notes that Nepal remains a "beautiful, untouched part of the world." During her stay, Daflos participated in a language-intensive program that gave her fluency in Nepali as well as an appreciation for the country's exotic cultures and lifestyles.
After graduation, Daflos worked for a nonprofit organization in Colorado that had ties to Nepal. She and her colleague, John Oliva, decided to channel their common interest into an annual tour of Nepal that they launched in 2007. Nepal Trek and Trail takes place in November and includes a tour of Kathmandu, the ancient city lodged in the Himalayan mountains. Tour participants also visit Pokhara, where they tour a Buddhist monastery, among other attractions. The journey through bamboo forests, waterfalls, jungles, valleys and "endless" stone staircases offers many interactions with Nepalese.
The two-week trip also includes a half-marathon that benefits the Himalayan Cataract Project, based at the Tilanganga Eye Care Center. Daflos says that this nonprofit group is particularly important because it provides health care to citizens that live in remote areas.
"We're hoping to help them see how health care is delivered in the Third World," she says. This aspect of the tour is especially revealing given President Obama's current efforts at health care reform: "They're doing it in a really effective and efficient way — and the money really does do what it says it's going to do."
That efficiency, Daflos says, reflects a larger sense of grace she finds in Nepalese life and culture. "It's definitely one of the most impoverished places I've seen, but to most of the people that I've met, it's just kind of the way life is," she says. "I think it's the norm, so maybe it's easier to deal with, or maybe it's just a different way of looking at life. But it's always struck me the way they can find a lot of kindness, in spite of all the challenges they face."
While she and Oliva are unsure of how long they will continue this adventure, Daflos says they will probably run it for three or four more years. Their last trip drew a diverse group of people ranging in age from their early 20s to 60. The fact that she is able to pass on her love for Nepal is something that Daflos finds rewarding.
"Hopefully we'll help them make the same connection that we've made to a place that we both really believe in," she says.
Mike Zesk '08 with some of his students (right), and student contestants (below) on the set of his Magic Tour game show in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. "You'd be surprised what these kids would know and wouldn't know," he says.
Michael Zesk Flipped a coin. Tails was Ethiopia, heads was Mongolia. He was trying to decide where to apply for an international job opportunity. As he sat in the office of the Washington lobbying firm where he worked in 2007, he realized that he was beginning to dread his job.
"I saw Mongolia on goabroad.com and thought, 'That's about as far away as I could ever imagine going from sitting at this desk, doing a job that I don't like,'" he says. The coin came up heads, so Zesk applied for a program that would place him in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, as a teacher of American and English literature. He was offered a position, and allocated much of his time outside the classroom to writing and co-hosting a nationally broadcast Mongolian game show.
The show's contestants were the children at the Hobby School in Ulaanbaatar, where Zesk taught. Magic Tour, the name of the program, covered general trivia, word meanings and spelling. Zesk says the experience influenced his view of education. It also reminded him of some of the lessons he learned at Hamilton.
"I think the thing that was most interesting to me while doing this show was trying to understand where you could draw cultural connections," he says. "I did a lot of that with my religious studies major, [analyzing] groups of people and the way they think." A discipline like religious studies often traces individual behaviors back to social legacies. Zesk was able to apply what he learned from his major to the game show. "You'd be surprised what these kids would know and wouldn't know," he notes. "It was interesting to see what common ground they had based on where they came from."
Zesk says that there are fewer than four million Mongolian speakers in the world, which is why one of the Mongolian government's top priorities is making English the official language. Because English-language television programs are in demand, Zesk found no difficulty in getting his quiz show on the air.
As his visibility increased, strangers sometimes recognized him on street. He recalled that one late night, he was walking home from a club when a man approached him. "It's a dangerous city. So naturally, I thought, 'Am I about to be mugged?' But he came up to me and said, "Michael! Michael! Magic Tour!"
Despite his newfound Mongolian stardom, Zesk returned to the United States in June. He plans on applying to master's programs in international relations and foreign service in both Boston and Washington. But perhaps he will go back to Mongolia for Round Two in the future.
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